In A League Of Their Own

By RICHARD CORLISS

Yes, yes, we've heard it all. Cigars, hair gel, the whole political-entertainment complex of prurience. We're Degeneration X; nothing can shock us. So it's almost salutary that, in a Manhattan screening room last week, a film could provoke audible gasps. Not much happens on screen: just a conversation between a man and his 11-year-old son. But because the chat is about the boy's frustration in trying to achieve his first orgasm, and because the father is a pedophile on the prowl, and because the scene is played with the whispered solemnity of a Father Knows Best tete-a-tete, this scene goes directly to the viewer's guts and lodges there like a twisted thrill. Imagine: in this wicked world there are still taboos, and artists with the nerve and skill to break them.

The film is Todd Solondz's Happiness, winner of the International Critics' Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and already the fall's succes de scandale. "I realize some of the material is shocking," Solondz told TIME, "but it's out there in the media every day. Celebrities are always talking about their own abuse. TV news programs discuss the atrocities of children being killed or raped. It has a freak-show quality; it's titillating. Still, I don't think anybody could use the word titillating about my movie. I hope people see there's a certain...integrity to the proceedings."

He's right. The sick kick of the scenes in Happiness is integral to the pageant of misery and yearning--of the all-American pursuit of happiness, in forms simple or bizarre--that is Solondz's great theme. His intent, to cleanse by shocking, is just as important. In an age of creeping movie sameness, Happiness resounds as a declaration of independence.

And of American independents in the '90s. Think of what U.S. films would be like--no, don't, it's too depressing--without the emergence of off-Hollywood auteurs like Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy), David O. Russell (Flirting with Disaster), Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming), Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou), the brothers Hughes (Dead Presidents) and Wachowski (Bound) and, of course, the dark lord Tarantino. They're here to stay, but not as colleagues or competitors. "Directors like Quentin don't need to top some other director," says indie-film guru John Pierson. "Their fear is how to top themselves."

This has been a top year for indie cinema. Fertile talents have emerged: Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex), Darren Aronofsky ([Pi]) Tommy O'Haver (Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss). Familiar renegades prove they can expand on their obsessions: Hal Hartley in Henry Fool, Neil LaBute in Your Friends and Neighbors. An old timer like James Ivory displays renewed grace with A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. And this fall four filmmakers who made a collective splash in 1995 and '96 are presenting works that offer hope for a better, bolder American moviescape.

Bryan Singer, whose last film was the crisply devious crime thriller The Usual Suspects, has narrowed his focus from that film's gang of five to a two-hander in Apt Pupil, from a Stephen King story. The other three directors have bought a big canvas (at a cut rate) and splashed strange people on it till it's as busy as a Bruegel. Solondz has a dozen major characters trudging through Happiness. Stanley Tucci, the co-writer, co-director and star of everyone's favorite Italian-food film, Big Night, has created a shipful of fools in his farce The Impostors. Todd Haynes, known for his furtive, paranoid parables Poison and Safe, goes wide-screen and handsome to summon the ghosts of glam-rock in Velvet Goldmine.

All these filmmakers are bumping into one another at the crossroads of Independence Highway and Career Boulevard. At this intersection there are many collisions, some artistically fatal. Directors can take the small-and-noble path, which may consign them to the fringe approval of the critics. Or they can take go Hollywood. There they may find readier financing for their off-center dreams; but they may also be on the fast track to hackdom, scrounging for films chosen by studio bosses. They pay your money and they take your choice--your independence.

Indie auteurs, consider this advice from Hollywood's ultimate insider. "Your lean budgets and low risks offer you a gift of a lifetime," says Steven Spielberg, "and if your first few films are very successful, it might be the last time you enjoy those gifts. At first you get to make your movies from the protoplasm of your creativity, intuition and passion. That virgin spring starts to dry up once the offers flood in; now you're adapting the dreams of others and, pretty soon, simply working for hire. It sometimes takes massive success to force yourselves back into your original delivery rooms where you can once again work comfortably from your hearts and guts."

Tucci got those offers, and faced just that decision, in the wake of Big Night's modest box-office take. "It wasn't just food movies," he says, "though there were some of those, and it wasn't just ethnic stuff. I got comedies, dramas, melodramas, tragedies." But Tucci, finally sprung from the saturnine-villain roles (Billy Bathgate, Murder One) that both fed and trapped him, had his eye on a story he had been mulling for years. The idea became The Impostors, an $8.3 million opus (Big Night cost $4 million) that Tucci describes as "a little Heidegger, a little Buster Keaton."

And a lot Laurel and Hardy--think a snappier Saps at Sea--except that the Stan and Ollie here are Tucci and co-star Oliver Platt. Tucci, incapable of a gross moment even in the slapstick, seasick exertions of shipboard burlesque, nicely approximates Laurel's high, piping whine as counterpoint to Platt's unctuous exasperation. They are two actors stowed away on a '40s-ish ocean liner, ever scurrying from a British stage star who wants them arrested, gelded, dead. Also onboard are a deposed queen (Isabella Rossellini), a gay tennis player (Billy Connolly), a Teutonic chief steward (Campbell Scott) and a suicidal, sub-Sinatra crooner (Steve Buscemi, in the film's funniest turn).

The plot takes as many turns as the actors, who fall down way too much. But that too much was perfect for Tucci. To foment zaniness, he created the "Jambon d'Or"--the Golden Ham--an award given daily to the actor "who went the furthest in their shamelessness. The winner got to keep it overnight. The next day you had to give it back. It was an independent film; you had to share the same award."

Tucci dwells blissfully, for now, in Indieville. Singer, who was extravagantly courted by Hollywood (after 25 companies had rejected the $6.6 million-budgeted The Usual Suspects), is ready for Hollywood, on his terms. "My goal," he says, "is to bridge that gap between the independent and the mainstream film." Apt Pupil, a big subject compacted into a wee space and a tidy $15 million budget, may fall between the two. A bright high-schooler (Brad Renfro) learns that an old Nazi (Sir Ian McKellen) is living in his small town. The two strike up a symbiotic suspicion, each playing nastier games than the other knows and revealing more of his disease than he knows himself. If Apt Pupil is never so cagey as its characters, it's smart about displaying the evils of which ordinary men are capable. It surely hasn't slowed Singer's rise to big-budget status; his next film, X-Men, will cost at least $80 million.

There's nothing sinful about a hefty budget. That comes with big stars, special effects, a large crew, gourmet catering. Even on the indie circuit inflation is a fact of life. Haynes' 1991 Poison cost $350,000; the 1995 Safe came in at $1 million; and Velvet Goldmine is about a $9 million production. But what a production! There hasn't been such a smartly gaudy spectacle of musical raunch since Ken Russell's Tommy back in 1975, when the road to excess was carpeted in spangles.

Boldly appropriating both the format of Citizen Kane (inquiring reporter seeks the secrets of a pop star) and the legends of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno and Roxy Music, Haynes fashions a fresco of seductive grotesques--notably the Iggy-esque Curt Wild, whom Ewan McGregor inhabits as a writhing punk- sprite. The Bowie-ish star, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), is consumed by success, whereas the real Bowie always looked in control of his eminence. But, hey, you go to a musical for the numbers, which are brilliantly conceived and played. Does the milieu seem starched, grandiose, fake? Why, sure. "The whole film is faux," Haynes says, "because everything in glam rock came from somebody else." Goldmine is like a cover recording that's better--certainly cannier, maybe more decadent--than the original.

Happiness doesn't easily admit to comparisons; though it carries echoes of Manhattan, Nashville and Hartley's pictures, it has a unique equipoise of soap opera and slasher film. After Solondz's scabrous little preteen angstathon, Welcome to the Dollhouse, earned more than $4 million on a budget of $800,000, October Films sponsored his next, $3 million project. But October was pressured this summer by its corporate parent, Universal Pictures, to dump the film. It will be released, unrated, by its own production company.

Dollhouse exuded a fashionably deadpan contempt for its characters. Happiness shows a deadpan sympathy for its denizens; and since one of them (Dylan Baker) is a child molester, another (Philip Seymour Hoffman) an obscene phonecaller and a third (Camryn Manheim) a lonely woman skilled in the use of kitchen cutlery, this tenderness is challenging. Scary.

A little epic with a big brazen title, Happiness traces the discontents of three sisters--miserable Joy (Jane Adams); pert Trish, the pedophile's wife (Cynthia Stevenson); and best-selling poet Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle)--their beaux and parents (Louise Lasser, Ben Gazzara). The prime setting is New Jersey, which Helen describes as "a state of irony." The whole film could be said to live there--a place where vile acts rub up against a Mantovani rendition of You Light Up My Life.

Maybe this is the ultimate black comedy. Or it could be a loving story about the most unlovely folks. "In a way," says producer Christine Vachon, "it is the ultimate horror movie, where the people next to you at the office are incredibly evil." But the spookiest character, Gazzara's, is the man who feels nothing, is in love with no one, does not pursue happiness. And the sweetest, awfullest moments are in the connection between a normal kid (brave Rufus Read) and his mad, bad dad. "He's not a demon," Solondz says of the father; "he's possessed by a demon. He's a predator--and a tragic figure who loves his son."

Solondz depicts a world in which, as Jean Renoir said, everyone has his reasons. Reasons to love, to hurt, to go on living. Some people--those moviegoers with nerve and a need to see the most potent and upsetting tragicomedy of the year--will have good reason to see Happiness. In doing so, they will celebrate the enduringly ornery spirit of independent cinema.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles