Todd Solondz has described this as a “quasi-sequel” to Happiness, a helpful description inasmuch as a dozen years have passed since the quasi-predecessor, and inasmuch as the moviegoer’s memory receives no help whatsoever from the recasting of the principal roles with different players: Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, and Ally Sheedy for Dylan Baker, Cynthia Stevenson, Jane Adams, and Lara Flynn Boyle. (Charlotte Rampling, formidable as a truculent man-trap in a hotel bar, has no previous equivalent.) The character of the middle-class suburban pedophile, even without a prompt from the filmmaker, would assuredly have rung a faint bell, as would those of the three weird sisters — weird in the colloquial sense, not the Shakespearean — but if ever a sequel could be said to stand on its own without necessity of seeing the predecessor, this would be it. Solondz does a painstaking job of feathering nests, comfortably affluent and antiseptically attractive surroundings, and smothering these with a golden patina, thereby locating the source of all troubles exclusively inside the people. External factors, even the ongoing war in the title, afford no excuses. The themes of happiness and normality, or the illusions thereof, from the earlier film are compounded here, after everything that happened there, by themes of guilt and forgiveness, but Solondz mercilessly exposes the meaninglessness of language (can the wartime buzzword “terrorist” be extended to cover a pedophile?), and the nearest approximation his characters can come to happiness or forgiveness or what-you-will is to pretend. Those are no small accomplishments for a filmmaker: to pinpoint the source of human discontent, to gauge the emptiness of words, to rip the mask off self-knowledge. And not simply to proclaim these, but to portray them in lucid, vivid, striking images. Michael Lerner, Paul Reubens, Dylan Riley Snyder. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.