Criterion Collection: Life During Wartime [Blu-ray] | DVD Review

Life During Wartime by Todd Solondz often seems like the cinematic equivalent of a hopelessly tangled piece of rope. A loose progression of vignettes concerning the lives and loves of a group of eccentric Floridians, the thing isn’t very practical in its current form, so one’s natural reaction is to sort and order. But just when audiences unravel the first couple of knots – and congratulate themselves on their cleverness – they realize the gnarled mess at their feet has somehow grown larger, with twisting narrative threads that angrily recoil and wrap around themselves. Religion is jumbled with politics, childhood innocence melds with kinky sexuality and supreme beings cruise singles bars, all while the living freely mingle with the dead. Any effort to find the end of the ongepochkit cord is useless; it’s vanished into a new plane of existence.

Stylistically, the film resembles a sort of grown up Peanuts comic strip for the paranoid, traumatized world of post-millennial America, with someone of a darker sensibility than Charles Schulz assuming the controls. Solondz and veteran cinematographer Ed Lachman create a world awash in the flat, bright colors of Sunday comics. Shot on digital video, Life During Wartime revels in its super sharp electronic-ness, with no effort made to approximate the misty, organic atmospherics of film stock. Dylan Riley Snyder, as 13 year old Timmy – the film’s perpetual victim or savior of humanity, depending on one’s interpretation – has the scratchy vocal timbre of the child actors from the Peanuts TV Specials of the 1960s, and nearly identical line readings to boot. With his bar mitzvah approaching in a few days, Timmy’s sunny world is rocked by the revelation that his supposedly dead father Bill (Ciarán Hinds) was a convicted child molester, and not the sainted war hero he’d been led to believe.

Bill is also not actually dead, at least not in any conventional sense. From the deepest bowels of prison – or some such purgatory– Hinds emerges and in short order he is free to walk to Earth, while Timmy, in full homosexual panic, frets that one day “things will go inside him”. Hinds is terrific as the uber-creepy Bill, proving that he can be equally convincing as a slimy pervert or imperious Julius Caeser – actually there’s not that much difference – and despite his decades of experience one gets the sense that Hinds is just now coming into his own as an actor.

But Bill is not the film’s lone willie-inducing character, for under Solondz’s vision, the highway of life is strewn with dodgy human detritus. Alison Janney, who, as usual, seems miscast at first then ends up being oddly perfect, plays Timmy’s mom, and the distraction of her new love affair with the portly nebbish Harvey (Michael Lerner) leads to a lack of finesse in her parenting skills. Shirley Henderson as Janney’s sister, a dour, confused new age Earth Mother ironically named Joy, grapples with the bizarre telephone perversions of her cringing husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams). While he assures her he is a changed man, evidence of recent trangressions lead her to realize all is not well, and she flees New Jersey to reconnect with her Florida family, while apparitions of a belligerent old beau (Paul Reubens) haunt her dreams.

Solondz’s random bits of comedic yarn eventually weave themselves into a cockeyed bit of narrative macramé, rife with repeated symbols and allusions. Massive telephone directories stand in for The Book of the Dead, while Charlotte Rampling and Ally Sheedy present polar opposite depictions of a singular supreme being, but it’s clear their supremacy is ultimately a fabrication of their followers. Solontz can’t resist utilizing an angel-like Emmy statuette used as a weapon to further this whole cloth analog, and it’s an amusing industry in-joke. In fact, Life During Wartime, by reducing the dark textures of humankind’s worst instincts to quirky, light-drenched set pieces, creates a Sunbelt American Gothic perfect for our age, as dangerous perverts hide behind every bush, terrorists lounge by the pool with cool drinks, and the ghosts of the unforgiven wander without hope. This 2009 Venice winning does what every sequel should do: hold its own and accentuates the brilliance in the previous instalment.

When the RED camera was introduced a few years ago, with its accompanying truckload of breathless hype, grumpy old filmmakers – your loyal reviewer among them – greeted it with a skepticism born of experience. The last 25 years have seen a number of disappointing contraptions promising “electronic cinematography” enter the marketplace with great fanfare, only to end up on rental house scrap heaps. But as Life During Wartime attests, RED seems like the real deal. The film hums with a sunny crispness that simultaneously seems hyper-real yet glaring with a nightmarish gossamer. The 1.78:1 blu-ray transfer captures all the depth and detail of Ed Lachmann’s images with a brittle delicacy that’s marvelous to watch.

The 5.1 track is sparse and unadorned, with the dialogue vigorously punching through. The mix is highly appropriate for the film’s introspective, conceptual nature and the disc sounds just as starkly real as it looks.

Ask Todd, an audio Q&A with director Todd Solondz in which he responds to viewers’ questions
Recorded in March 2011, this audio only 45 minute segment features Solondz answering a selection of questions emailed to him. Solondz discusses the homogenization of American society and his background as a writer and musician. Contrasts and similarities to Happiness, Life During Wartime’s unofficial prequel are examined in detail, along with Solondz’s very sharp observations on the class differences between those who cheerlead the War on Terror and those who actually have to fight it. There’s some slight repetition and overlap in the questions, but overall this supplement will be worthy viewing – er, listening – for fans of Solondz.

Making “Life During Wartime,” a new documentary featuring interviews with actors Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Michael Lerner, Paul Reubens, Ally Sheedy, and Michael Kenneth Williams, as well as on-set footage
Considering Life During Wartime’s convoluted obtuseness, this supplement is a fairly conventional behind-the-scenes offering. Interviews with the actors are interspersed with production footage and selected scenes from the film. Hinds discusses the challenges of creating a full range of emotions within a framework of minimalism. Williams makes some salient observations about Solondz’s ability to “live comfortably in the uncomfortable”; a theme echoed by Henderson as she recites some of the unusual techniques Solondz employed to push her character to ever greater extremes. Some of Solondz’s magical tricks are revealed, such as making actors walk in ill-fitting shoes to create tension, and his habit of rehearsing actors to the brink of exhaustion to better convey his notions of minimalism. An interesting and informative addition, if a bit excessive at 30 minutes.

New interview with Lachman
This piece featuring DP Ed Lachman consists of three segments. In the first, he discusses working with Solondz and the RED – both firsts for him – and the learning curve involved with each endeavor. The second segment consists of commentary on a few selected scenes from the film, and the third deals mainly with Lachman’s professional background, and his affinity for such talents as Vittorio Storaro and Sven Nykvist. There are several interesting tidbits of information along the way, and the inclusion is a must see for techies.

Original theatrical trailer
The trailer is lively and cleverly constructed, and interestingly elevates a number of relatively minor scenes to major importance. It effectively captures the feel of the film, without making Life During Wartime seem overly multiplexy.

PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic David Sterritt
With this attractive and informative booklet, Criterion’s talented print designers have created another winner. Sterritt, chairman of the National Association of Film Critics, gives us some background on the Solondz filmography, and a thorough analysis of the director’s process of synthesizing traditional Jewish culture with current events. In addition, the booklet contains cast and crew credits and notes on the transfer.

Part social commentary, part ghost story, Life During Wartime captures the wobbly zeitgeist of contemporary Americawith a rare and disturbing accuracy. Miraculously, the film manages to entertain with a sharp comedic edge, but never lets us forget we are laughing at a people, and indeed a nation, in the midst of a devastating decline. As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, this disc should rank among the most significant, and certainly the most truthful, commemoratives of that terrible day. For as Life During Wartime clearly shows, Americans, through paranoia, greed and hubris are doing a much better job of destroying their society than any terrorist could ever hope to accomplish.

Reviewed by David Anderson

Movie rating – 4

Disc Rating – 3.5