It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest.
...shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons -- race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia.
...circles around the theme of forgiveness, revives Solondz’s notion of childhood as a state of awful grace, and keeps returning to the role various characters’ Jewish identity plays in their lives. But the film remains curiously distant at each moment, and the distance feels less like a stylistic choice than an absence of anything to say.
Not having been a big admirer of Happiness [the movie LDW is a sequel to), I don’t see the vast achievement in bringing that movie up to date, but a few of the performances and sequences resonate.
This movie is not available on DVD/Video