"Happiness" follows the despondent lives of trio of sisters in working class New Jersey: Joy (Jane Adams) works as a telemarketer and, feeling her life lacks meaning, decides to tech English to foreigners in the city, becoming involved with a brutish Russian cab driver (Jared Harris). Her beautiful sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a best-selling author and toast of the family, but finds herself strangely drawn to the weirdo (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who continually directs harassing phone calls towards. Lastly, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson) seems to have an ideal middle class life, yet is utterly clueless as to what kind of a monster (Dylan Baker) she is married to. Todd Solondz's film is an unrelenting exercise in misery and morbidity which, instead of other bleak, downtrodden movies which you feeling cold in empty, causes you to think and has a strange, cathartic effect.
