Life during wartime

None of the following are essential attributes for watching writer-director Todd Solondz's latest bitter-sweet satire, Life During Wartime, but it will surely help to be at least one of them: Jewish-American, family-fixated, gay, paedophile, movie buff, needing forgiveness.

Solondz is from New Jersey, as is the movie's very disturbed Jewish family. Some of them appeared in earlier Solondz blackly-comic brittle studies of middle-class American (especially Jewish-American) mores (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Storytelling, Palindromes).

First in focus is Joy, one of three sisters. She's the medicated wife of a black recidivist pervert she'd met through her work with convicts. Shirley Henderson was obviously asked to reprise her role as Harry Potter's Moaning Myrtle. The Scottish actress (Topsy-Turvy, Bridget Jones) gets to sing the title song and looks miscast, whereas Alison (West Wing regular, Hairspray monster-mother) Janney is almost type-cast as the over-anxious eldest sister whose husband was in prison for pedophilia (raping underage boys).

He'd sired three children, and heavyweight Belfast-born Ciaran (Rome, Eclipse) Hinds portrays him credibly as a self-aware sexual outlaw determined to reassure himself that his two sons have not inherited all his genes. One boy's at college, and straight, the other's preparing for his bar-mitzvah. They think their father's dead, and their mother has found happy new love with a divorced Jewish mensch (Michael Lerner also typecast).

The third sister is an award-winning Hollywood screen-writer, providing an edgy cameo role for a guest actor (Ally Sheedy). Charlotte Rampling glares angrily well as a bitter bitch who picks Hinds up (enabling the audience to see him as a man as well as a sexual monster). Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens has three juicy walk-on scenes as the ghost of the youngest sister's first suicidal lover.

This latest overview of middle-class angst sports more Jewish references than usual for Tolondz, and some seem to be strange pearls cast before an audience of swine. The screenplay is also designed to upset Republicans as well as religious and/or political conservatives. Oddly, because none of them would be seen watching a movie that offers sympathetic studies of pedophilia, child abuse, suicide and characters who end arguments with four-letter words.

The cinematography boasts a richly-hued shadowy quality, and some eye-catching sets (in artfully-lit hallways or ornamented streets) depicting the symbolically fake stylishness of Florida. Musical backgrounds occasionally are too noticeable, and there are bizarre jump cuts. Overall, though, Solondz has created a prime example of the fast-expanding Jewish-American genre, portraying the constricted, conflicted world he shares intellectually with Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and the Coen Brothers' Singular Man.

Not a feast, but a good buffet, for the eyes and brain.