Happiness

As disturbingly funny as it is audaciously empathetic, auteur of unease Todd Solondz’s portrait of damaged souls reaching out for connection reveals the existential void underneath middle-class suburban “normalcy”. An extraordinary ensemble cast - including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jane Adams, Lara Flynn Boyle, Ben Gazzara, and Dylan Baker - embodies an array of loosely connected New Jersey deviants, depressives, and misfits, among them a frustrated phone-sex pest, an all-American dad concealing his pedophilic urges, and a lonely woman with a grisly secret, all of whom want just one thing: to be loved. One of the most controversial films of the 1990s, the unflinching Happiness unnerves precisely because it dares to see the humanity in those most often denied it. (Criterion)