You can’t get enough Happiness — or so Todd Solondz must have thought when he spun off this sour sequel to his 1998 misanthropic ode to suburban perversion.
Shot mostly in a rancid yellow tint, the new film picks up on the lives of some of the misbegotten characters — pedophiles, sexual predators, passive-aggressive suicides, and the people who love them — of the previous one, with different actors (Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, Michael Kenneth Williams, et al.), but relying on the same predictable black-comic twists to each entangled episode.
The theme this time is, no surprise, “sadness.†Oh, and also “forgiveness,†which rivals “Fuck you, you cunt!†for frequency. Shining in this dismal array is a scene between Charlotte Rampling and Ciáran Hinds, who radiate a misery and malignancy unmitigated by irony.
