Synopsis
Life During Wartime (2010) is Todd Solondz's bruising tragicomedy, and you can watch online on iFILM. A loose sequel to his 1998 film Happiness, it revisits the same characters a decade later — only now every role is recast with a different face. Trish is raising two boys and praying her new fiancé will be the father they deserve.
The trouble is their real father, Bill, who is just out of prison, carrying a past the family can neither forget nor quite forgive. Solondz braids together three sisters with three different wounds: one clings to the fiction of a normal life, one drowns her guilt, one keeps hunting for love in all the wrong places. Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney and Ally Sheedy anchor the unease, while Charlotte Rampling and Ciarán Hinds drift through it like ghosts.
This is a film about everything polite people look away from — shame, abuse, the ghosts that pull up a chair at the dinner table. Funny and painful in the same breath, which is exactly Solondz's register, and not for every taste. It played in competition at Venice, where its screenplay took a prize. Stream Life During Wartime (2010) online on iFILM.
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