----------------- Shiny happy people The surface of Todd Solondz's new film, Happiness<>, couldn't be shinier. Set in suburban New Jersey, it pulses with the energy of people trying too hard to keep things straight. The streets are clean, the cars waxed, the clothes color-coordinated, the soundtrack bouncing between Manilow's "Mandy'' and Mozart's "Requiem.'' This surface shimmers with feverish yellows and luminous blues, pale turquoises and shrill pinks. After a while, you feel like you're watching a series of overexposures: the camera never looks away, but rather glides slowly and repeatedly over anxious faces and flowered wallpapers, peeps in on kitchens during dinner preparations, restaurants during vicious sister to sister chats, telephone sales cubicles during nervous breakdowns. As burb-survivors know all too well, they can be grim. Even so, Solondz's vision seems hard. His first film, Welcome to the Dollhouse<>, was equally bleak, but its rape and murder fantasies were filtered through the perspectives of alienated twelve-year-olds, in particular Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), tormented by her ballerina sister, oblivious parents, and plastic schoolmates. Here the imagery is less specifically framed, which means that the ugliness is more pervasive, diurnal, banal. It's not so sensational as Frank Booth's existence in Blue Velvet<>: here there's no descent into the bugworld, just desperation masquerading as banality. The film is organized as several stories that are really all the same story. Three sisters form the apparent center. Trish Maplewood (Cynthia Stevenson) repeatedly asserts that she "has it all'' (she uses little finger-quotes to indicate that she knows it's a cliche, but she has it anyway). Trish is married to a shrink named Bill (Dylan Baker), who falls asleep during sessions, eats meatloaf with wife and son Billy (Rufus Read) and harbors a dark secret, that he's a pedophile (who begins preying on Billy's classmates, drugging them first). Trish's sweet, mystified, hippie-throwback sister Joy (Jane Adams) writes and sings plaintive folk songs ("Happiness why do you stay so far from me?'') and works as a telephone salesperson. In an effort to "do good'': she drops her dullsville (and suicidal) boyfriend (Jon Lovitz) and starts teaching ESL, where she meets Vlad (Jared Harris), a Russian thief who seduces her then asks for money. And third sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle, once the dreamy Donna on Twin Peaks<>) is a successful poet, the kind who writes about abuse and appears on talk shows. But she frets that her work confesses nothing ("If only I'd been raped as a child, I would have known authenticity!''), eventually welcoming the abuse offered by a pervie phone caller, who is actually her neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman). (He masturbates during one call, sending his wad slamming into the wall, just one of the scenes that alarmed initial distributor Universal/October Films enough that they pulled out, leaving the way clear for indie company Good Machine to pick up U.S. rights.) Helen comforts herself by offering advice to Joy and Trish, while bemoaning the fact that "everyone'' wants her: it's so very tiresome to be a celebrity. While she's clearly superficial, Helen does seem to be the one of the healthier characters. No thanks to her mother and father (Louise Lasser and Ben Gazarra), who are splitting up and harassing both Helen and Trish with the gory details. The sisters don't have access to quite as much yuck as we have, however. We get to watch mom look for a new apartment with a perfectly manicured real estate salesperson and divorce expert (exquisitely played by Marla Maples) and dad try to reclaim his manly vigor with the lusty Diane (Elizabeth Ashley, smoky-voiced as ever), but he comes to discover that he doesn't "feel anything.'' Not being able to feel is what seems to frighten the characters most. They're so used to assuring everyone and themselves that their surfaces are fine, that their feelings are under control, that their lack of feeling is driving them to acknowledge the alternately vapid and repulsive truths of their experiences. But what is truth, when there's no difference between surface and interior? One truth is fantasy. Helen's other neighbor across the hall (whom she doesn't know) is Kristina (Camryn Manheim, The Practice<>'s Emmy-winner). She wants Allen, or seems to, or thinks she wants him. She pursues him rather relentlessly and he puts her off, desiring (he thinks) Helen's icy, impeccable beauty. But Kristina is incessantly available, ringing Allen's buzzer again and again, trying to solicit his interest in a recent murder victim, their apartment building's doorman. Eventually, upset by Helen's (inevitable) rejection, Allen agrees to go out with Kristina. The secret she lays on him is one of the more bizarre in this most bizarre film, and she discloses it while eating a hot fudge sundae and while Allen cringes and grimaces (gestures which she doesn't notice). It's a horrible scene, almost funny but more to the point, visceral and grotesque in ways that you don't anticipate. And that's what makes this movie seem so true at the same time that it's also so plainly outrageous. When people say what they mean, no one wants to listen, because everyone is so bound up in his or her own version of what's right or wrong, real or fake. Almost every conversation begins as if it means nothing, then bleeds into significance so profound that it's painful. In a couple of instances, Bill explains masturbation to Billy, their language technical and timid. Meanwhile, we're seeing Bill lust after Billy's classmates and suffering for it ("I'm sick!'' he sobs, at one point). Late in the film, Billy asks his dad about the accusations that he's a "serial rapist and pervert'' (the graffiti scrawled across the neat brick front of their house once the truth comes out), wondering if his dad would ever want to fuck him. When Bill says no, he'd probably just jerk off instead, Billy weeps, feeling rejected and confused. Much has been made of this scene already, mostly about the craziness of it, the lack of truth in it (Bill wouldn't be home still, once the cops have found him out). But that's not the truth that's most important here, or anywhere else in the film. The secret that is most often exposed is that there are no secrets. Murder, incest, rape, abuse: these are the truths in everyday life, the surfaces that are ritually covered up but continuously erupting. The other possibilities -- the romance, the success, the fearlessness -- are the fictions.