What British critics make of Todd Solondz's film Happiness, we'll know soon enough; chances are it will rub a few sensibilities up the wrong way, especially at the conservative end of the scale. In the US, however, much of the adverse response has been in direct reaction to the extravagant praise that has generally greeted the film. In the magazine Film Comment, Andrew Lewis Conn attacked it as an example of the "tyranny of the critic-proof movie", surrounded by "such an aura of dark hipness that critics may have been afraid to puncture it". American critic Charles Taylor, writing in the British Sight and Sound, says: "The joke is on the audiences and critics who've fallen for it. They think they're embracing an alternative to Hollywood. They're really just applauding Revenge of the Nerds."
What is it about Happiness that gets people's goat? Partly it's Solondz's stance, which in the US independent film sphere resembles the geek- outsider pose once adopted in pop by Talking Heads. He walks and talks the part of the embittered nerd made good, the kid who got sand kicked in his face until he hit the beach at Cannes. That attitude is reflected in his films. Welcome to the Dollhouse told the story of a schoolgirl mocked and tormented by her peers and parents alike. The film seemed gratuitously sadistic towards her, until you realised that the hapless Dawn might be Solondz's self-portrait - at which point it began to look rather more masochistic.
Happiness, at first glance, seems sadistic all around, with a wider range of targets. Its cast includes three New Jersey sisters, their parents, spouses and ill-chosen partners. The Dawn figure here is Joy, single and 30, equally inept socially, romantically and as a folk singer. Other characters include a lonely, overweight masturbator and the lady down the hall with a murderous secret.
One character arrests us most of all, so much so that Happiness is generally regarded as being specifically about his "case". Played by Dylan Baker with a chillingly bland mask of suburban placidity, Bill is a psychiatrist, a loving husband and father - and a paedophile who lusts after his son's 11-year-old pals. Bear in mind that the overall tone of the film is that of a flip, urbane comedy - a flavour of Woody Allen, with atmospherics closer to David Lynch - and you can see why Happiness is so risky. Surely, we begin to protest, it's quite inappropriate to treat paedophilia comically. Surely, if it's to be handled at all, it should be with the social-worker earnestness of a TV movie-of-the-week.
Solondz certainly tests our prejudices about comic decorum, hitting a note of black farce from the outset: at one point, Bill's attempts to drug a boy are diffused into an absurd routine with spiked tuna sandwiches. The film's strategy here is brilliantly devious. It nudges us away from speculation about the deep psychology of Bill's passion, and instead demonstrates what a perversion might entail in terms of banal daily admin. It's only later, in the film's most devastating sequence - at once understated and forensically direct - that Solondz finally takes us under Bill's skin, as his bewildered son asks him to explain himself.
This scene gives the lie to accusations that Happiness lacks compassion. But the film's outlook is tragic: its broadest comic stroke, the come-shot that provides its punchline, marks another poor sucker's entry into the realm of adult sexuality, of "happiness" - or rather, its opposite. Sex has never had such bad press in American cinema: desire here oppresses people just as brutally as Solondz's decor and lighting.
Happiness isn't the only recent American film to present masturbation as the defining human characteristic. There's Something about Mary used gobbets of spunk both as a set-up for a hair-gel gag and to define its hero as a chronic but lovable schmuck. Neil Labute's altogether more sombre Your Friends and Neighbors featured men who were happier with their fists than with their partners. The Labute and Solondz films have been erroneously lumped in with Mary and with the inanely brutal sex-and-death farce Very Bad Things as representing a new cinema of shock, of gross-out tactics in which the stakes have to be constantly raised. These films may all pursue extremes of subject matter, but that's the only similarity. While Mary shoehorns even the most outrageous material into an innocent romantic comedy, Labute and Solondz propose serious dissections of the modern human condition. Labute, an acolyte of Edward Bond, takes a detached, theatrical approach, while Solondz seems more directly invested in his film, and wants us to be invested, too.
No one who's seen Dollhouse can help suspecting that Happiness also contains an element of self-portraiture, or that Solondz is presenting a distorting mirror to his audience. He wants us to understand and identify with his ordinary and extreme cases alike, even if that entails accepting the parts of human desire (and its absence) that we'd rather ignore. If its characters are all fucked up, Happiness implies, it's because we all are, in whatever closely guarded ways of our own. Whether you like or despise Solondz's film, everyone will surely be impelled to reject it on some level - hence the unusually combative flavour of the critical opposition. Happiness gets under our skins in ways that no one could conceivably find comfortable. It may be the most genuinely psychoanalytical fiction that American cinema has yet produced.
"Happiness" (18) opens 16 April at selected London cinemas and nationwide from 7 May
