Life During Wartime movie review (2010)

Well, they aged at different rates. They turned into different people, played by different actors, while keeping the same names. Allen, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the first film, morphed into a black man (Michael Kenneth Williams), although Hoffman and Williams are still two of the only three actors in either film with three names. The genders of the various characters are the same, although the gender behavior is far from conventional. These people are stuck in their minds and can't bring happiness to themselves or others. Only the children can be happy, and in the Solondz world, their innocence is a time bomb.

I could supply here a listing of the major characters in the 1998 film and the actors who played them. Can you remember the names of movie characters for 12 years? I can't, not unless they're named Marge Gunderson or Anton Chigurh. But in this film, Joy (Shirley Henderson) talks like a middle-age little girl, and once again finds herself stuck in restaurants in mutual misery with a man. This time it's Allen (Williams), who has moved on from dirty phone calls and wankery to gang-banging and despair.

The man with whom Joy had her agonizing date in the first film now has become the dead Andy (Paul Reubens) whose ghost torments her (again in a restaurant booth) with piteous pleas. Later, Allen also appears to her as a ghost, urging her to kill herself. Her men have a way of not getting everything done in one lifetime.

Trish (Allison Janney) has moved to Florida to help her children escape the reputation of their pedophile father. They think he's dead. But Bill (Ciaran Hinds) is on parole and unwisely wants to meet his older boy at college. Trish is dating Harvey (Michael Lerner), so devastated by a divorce he fears he's forgotten how to perform sex. To the degree that he remembers, he's sure that he can't. Trish's younger son, Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder, in a performance that evokes great sympathy), is preparing for his bar mitzvah when he discovers his father was a pedophile — not good news on the day he is to become a man.