(1998) Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Watch at your own peril. Three adult sisters and their unhappy parents form a horrifically dysfunctional family in writer/director Todd Solondz's perverse, unfunny, black comedy about lonely, miserable people, which nonetheless jars loose an occasional guffaw.

At thirty, still living in her parents' home in New Jersey, Joy Jordan (Jane Adams), whom everyone in her family expected to be miserable and an abject failure in career and love, after breaking up with Andy Kornbluth (a pathetic, fat-ass nerd), quits her job in telephone marketing when she finds out he committed suicide; she then crosses a picket line for a job teaching immigrants English: "I am not a scab; I'm a strikebreaker." After she accepts an offer from her Russian student Vlad (Jared Harris) to drive her home in his taxi and make love to her, she visits his apartment to apologize to his wife (but he's not married to the woman) and retrieve her guitar and CD player, which he'd stolen from her that night of their romance.

Joy's sister Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), the mother of three children and married to Dr William Maplewood (Dylan Baker), believes: "I may have it all." Her psychiatrist husband discusses masturbation with his eleven-year-old son Billy (Rufus Read) without embarrassment, uses children's magazines as jack-off literature, and fantasizes about killing people in a park, which he reveals to his shrink. After Billy informs his parents that his teacher is a junkie, Trish tells him that if he gets addicted to drugs and dies in a hospital, she'll disown him. When Johnny, the preadolescent son of an acquaintance, Joe Grasso, comes over to spend the night with Billy, Dr Maplewood puts sleeping pills into everyone's dessert to take advantage of their unconsciousness during the night.

The third sibling, Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a successful author of a novel and poems about children being raped, feels trapped by the shallow, hollow people who surround her, admiring her fame but unwilling to accept her for what she really is, "another sordid exploitationist" who writes about things she knows nothing about. When she receives a sexually disgusting phone call from her neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), before knowing who he is - a gross, freakish, misogynistic but otherwise fearful pervert (who during a session with Dr Maplewood describes himself as boring) - she craves his company.

Meanwhile, obese Kristina (Camryn Manheim), another of Allen's neighbors, comes to his door to tell him about Pedro, the doorman, bludgeoned to death and then castrated.

Down in Florida the girls' parents, Mona (Louise Lasser) and Lenny (Ben Gazzara), are about to break up and divorce. Married for 40 years, Mona on Valium moans, "Now I'll have to get another fuckin' facelift," while Lenny morosely says, "I just want to be alone." From here there's nowhere to go but down.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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