Affliction and Happiness
A review of two movies

by Jesse Gale

NEW YORK, 3 March 1999 - Lately, a new breed of art film has evolved: the frozen film. In these movies - usually set in winter - a steely view of human nature functions as the primary effect. While action films strive for loud, bright, hi-tech moments, frozen films strive for whispered, dim, and bare moments. The filmic hiss pressures us to respond not with cheers, as in action films, but with sad murmurs: "ach…no…shit."

The best of this breed is Paul Schrader's (Raging Bull, Taxi Driver) Affliction. A spare story, based on Russell Banks's novel, Affliction describes the events of one deer hunting season in upstate New Hampshire. Events swirl menacingly, but are comprehended by Willem Dafoe's voice-over narration. Wade (Nolte), a town policeman and part-time security guard, loses contact with his daughter (Brigid Tierney), who lives with her mother (Mary Beth Hurt) and step-father down state. Meanwhile, Wade suspects friends of murder. At the same time, Wade returns to his childhood home, after his mother dies, with his resolute girlfriend Marge (Sissy Spacek) and his abrasive father (James Coburn).

The pressures of manhood - needs to be both the law and an embrace - become overwhelming not only for Wade, but for the audience as well. Every aspect of this beautifully wrought film engages our struggle against brutality -- in one scene, in which Wade talks on the phone to his brother Rolphe (Dafoe), a professor of history, the camera and audience find Wade through a pitchy landscape, his skinny ranch house's window glowing fiercely against the chill night.

The women in Wade's life - his scornful wife, whiny daughter and fearful girlfriend, all huddled in the thin shadow thrown by his mutely suffering mother - present Wade with both the necessity and the impossibility of being human. The performances are uniformly brilliant (I do not use the word lightly): Spacek, Hurt, and Nolte are at their considerable bests. James Coburn, in this truly groundbreaking performance, made me want to scream.

Other frozen films, however, have used the effect less impressively. Todd Solondz's Happiness, which has been on more "top ten" reviewers' lists than you can count on your fingers, uses this perspective much less aptly. The script and performances of Happiness are indeed powerful, but the film as a whole merely records pathetic and brutal aspects of human nature without reflecting on them. The ugliness of the film - the boom microphone visible in a number of shots, the agonizingly long and squirmy takes - feels gratuitous. Happiness offers solely a bleak perspective - and that's not enough, just as bright explosions aren't enough in an action film.

In the Company of Men, and its follow-up Your Friends and Neighbors, were more successful in showing us barren humanity without relying on heightened offensiveness to impress audiences. In those two films, the brutality of sexual relationships is explored, and in each, a lack of tenderness between sexual partners leads to brutality in all relationships: friends, neighbors, business partners, etc. Like Affliction, these films discover how coldness spreads.

The brutality that a frozen film shows its audience, in other words, is a special effect, not a reason for being - so a film like Happiness offers little beyond the shock of cold. Coldness can be used to stimulate questions or moral reflection rather than mere uncomfortable shivers. Affliction does that; Your Friends and Neighbors and In the Company of Men do that to some extent; and so did Ang Lee's beautiful Ice Storm of 1997.

Affliction is worth seeing if only to recognize the possibilities of exploring bitter human cruelty in film. A good short story, they say, "shatters the ice within" - Affliction explodes it.