‘Life During Wartime’ and war in our lifetimes

“Imagine a world where nobody pretends,” muses Shirley Henderson as the always positive, but chronically depressed character, Joy, in Life During Wartime.

She isn’t talking about child’s play.

The film is Todd Solondz’s indirect follow-up to his 1998 indie hit, Happiness. Ostensibly, it’s ten years later and we are looking into the lives of the same three sisters and their complicated lives, still injected to the max with pathos of every sort.

The youngest, Joy, lives this way quite willingly, as a wise, but angst-ridden, criminal psychologist aiming to help the floundering resolve their issues and function in the society she herself has trouble with. Trish, an everything’s-going-to-be-fine-type mother of three, wants nothing more than to leave behind her messy past, in which she was married to a pedophile, and start anew. The third sister, star-powered screenwriter Helen, seems to have lost any ability to see the world through non-narcissistic eyes.

The characters are all played by different actors than in Happiness – a bold move that usually hurts the end result – but in this case, the change of faces adds to Solondz’s exploration of who people are, versus who they pretend to be.

Poignant and often uncomfortable, writer/director Solondz is once again confrontational and uber-direct when illustrating how ill equipped humanity is when it comes to dealing with trauma and coming to terms with the truth, specifically in regards to life in post-9/11 America.

This movie takes a darkly funny look at the personal battle each of us faces with empathy and forgiveness and details the lengths we’ll go to in order to pretend and/or forget, when we aren’t able to forgive.

Life During Wartime also explores self-forgiveness in the bleakest of circumstances, showcasing the difficulty in admitting a mistake when its consequences are grave and everlasting. Hello, subconscious realm. Hello, ghosts of the suicidal, begging the living to change the unchangeable past by looking at it differently, emotionally. Hello, post-war thoughts on where we went wrong. Oh, wait – aren’t we still at war? Title.

Every character we meet in the film is in the process of turning a new leaf in one way or another. Trish herself is loving Florida (“It’s the perfect place to start over!”) and the new portly, older guy in her life, whose normality is enough to earn her undying affection. Joy is struggling with her husband Allen’s relapse into drugs and perverted behaviors and heads to Florida to take a break from the marriage (she is our ticket into the other sisters’ lives), Helen is struggling with her overwhelming success as a writer (woe is she).

Central to the theme, however, is the turmoil Trish’s younger son Timmy is experiencing, as he prepares to Bar Mitzvah into manhood while coming to grips with the fact that his father isn’t at all the man he thought he was.

Young Timmy asks a lot of questions – brave ones that the adults are weary of answering, because of the deeper issues that might be dredged up. His mother is stunned and disturbed by Timmy’s inquiries, specifically regarding terrorists – could they be forgiven if they had good reasons? The boy then poses the question:

“What happens when you can forget, but can’t forgive?”

Solondz is hinting that even though, as a nation, we’ll never forgive the terrorists, we seem semi-willing to forget about the attacks of 9/11 and all the darkness of the past decade, if it will help us return to a more carefree lifestyle.

Timmy speaks about freedom and democracy, things he doesn’t comprehend, in a way that screams, “I want something to believe in!”

We all witnessed the narrative morph between September 11 and when we officially went to war in the spring of 2003, redirecting our anger from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein in a way that was insulting to even a child’s intelligence. People self-editing their own lives won’t go down in history, but it’s something deeply human we can all relate to. When wartime spans an entire decade, it inevitably becomes a backdrop (except for those with loved ones in the Middle East, who think about the war every day) and a norm.

Although Gen Y can definitely remember the years between the Gulf and current wars and even pre-Gulf War years, most of our “adult” lives have taken place post-9/11. It’s hard to remember what it’s like to not be on Orange Alert.

Then again, even when the U.S. wasn’t actively in a war, I can remember my dad closely monitoring one on the six ‘o clock news. Is humanity hopelessly addicted to the battlefield, or will we eventually see a generation of people who tackle monumental problems in some other way? What role will technology play?

I wish I believed that there are war-free days ahead, but I don’t think humanity will ever advance to that level as a whole. Regardless, the psychological battles within ourselves, dealing with forgiving, forgetting, honesty and self-preservation, and pretending, will remain omnipresent.

Still, I’m just glad that most of us don’t have to live at the level of dysfunction that Solondz prescribed for his protagonists in Life during Wartime.