Bleak Signs of the Times?

Even before the first scene begins, the off-key tinkling of an unseen piano clues us in that things aren’t right. Is that the wedding march? The sound is so screwy we can’t be sure. Two men--the groom and best man--sit side by side in a little room, nervously staring as if into the eyes of death itself.

This is the opening of “Very Bad Things,” a film starring Christian Slater that debuts in November. And true to the opening sour notes, the story of how these men got to this point isn’t pretty: Murder, dismemberment and hard drugs litter the road to the chapel. It is a sign of the kind of movie year this is shaping up to be that “Very Bad Things” is a comedy and that it differs from any number of others released this year in degree rather than in kind.

Pedophilia, murder, thievery and loneliness are among the subjects dealt with in a clutch of gloomy farces making their way to theaters. In plot and tone the works vary widely; what links them is the common thread of morbidity.

When we find ourselves in times of trouble, film comedies tend to light our way.

At least, that’s how it worked during the Depression when literally hundreds of screwball comedies kept America laughing while they espoused the ideal of a classless society.

What, if anything then, are we to make of the current trend of movie humor that is as bleak as those Depression-era films were comforting? Could it be a reaction to today’s moral tone--the anything-goes -as-long-as- you-can-get- away-with-it ethos coming out of Washington but which permeates other walks of life as well? These movies deal with depraved characters and subjects, but the works themselves are highly moralistic. The main target of most of them is hypocrisy, the dirty secrets hidden beneath our ordered, suburban lives and quiet workaday world.

In one upcoming movie (“Happiness”), a central character preys sexually on young boys. In another (“The Alarmist”), a beloved father figure turns out to be crooked and perhaps also a murderer. In another (“Home Fries”), a cunning small-town mother manipulates her sons into committing murder on her behalf while--in the best political tradition--she maintains the option of plausible denial. (One son even looks like a young Bill Clinton circa the time of the famous photograph with John Kennedy.) And then there is the aptly named “Very Bad Things,” in which a crazed yuppie has such a skewed sense of morality that he’ll murder his friends to keep himself out of trouble.

Are we laughing yet?

The sordid fun started this summer with “The Opposite of Sex,” the hit film in which Christina Ricci crawls over a dead body and all notions of decency in her quest to exploit everyone in sight. “Your Friends & Neighbors” picked up the baton in August. Just about everyone in that film is selfish, cruel or just plain pathetic. But they all have sunny dispositions next to the slumps who inhabit “Happiness,” Todd Solondz’s tale of suburban ennui and depravity, which opens in October.

Also reaching theaters next month are “The Alarmist,” which stars Stanley Tucci and David Arquette as home security salesmen with starkly different philosophies about their jobs, and “Home Fries,” which stars Drew Barrymore. In this film a conscience-stricken man falls in love with the pregnant fast-food waitress his brother is trying to kill.

“I think probably it was ‘Fargo’ and ‘To Die For’ that showed people that this kind of movie can work,” said Dan Stone, one of the producers of “The Alarmist.”

Trend Traces Back to ‘Fargo,’ ‘To Die For’

“Fargo,” released in 1996, and “To Die For,” from 1995, were quirky movies that wrung humor from the unlikeliest of subjects. Anyone remember the foot sticking out of the wood chipper in “Fargo”?

Without the success of those films, Stone said, he doubts that the other morbid comedies opening this year could’ve been made.

Film historians like to credit economic hard times for the preponderance of comedies during the 1930s; the films assuaged a population hit hard by the Depression, the common wisdom goes. Of course, then as now, commercial dictates set Hollywood trends, but the movies wouldn’t have made money if they hadn’t struck an emotional chord. It’s fitting, then, to ask what the current wave of corrosive comedies may say about our times.

As funny as these movies are, they’re hard to watch. At a recent screening of “Very Bad Things,” audience members cringed through much of it. “A midnight movie for psychotic people,” is how one man leaving the theater described it. But for all of the movie’s excesses and its eagerness to shock, writer-director Peter Berg (Dr. Kronk on “Chicago Hope”) has something serious on his mind, as do the makers of the other movies mentioned here.

In “Very Bad Things,” a group of friends gets involved in an escalating cycle of atrocities in order to cover up wrongs committed during a bachelor party. “Home Fries” covers similar ground: A deranged son tries to goad his brother into committing multiple murders to cover up their involvement in their philandering stepfather’s death. “We were bad,” one guilt-ridden friend confesses to another in “Very Bad Things.” “We were very, very bad.” It’s hard to watch it and not think of President Clinton’s mea culpa and the other allegations swirling around him--not because the specifics are similar, but because of the loose and shifting moral sands on which the characters sway.

Slater as the ringleader urges his pals on to ever more vile crimes with the kind of language and justifications that would not be out of place on the battlefield, in the boardroom, in a motivation seminar or in the Oval Office.

“There are always options,” Slater tells them. “Follow my orders.” When someone starts to panic, he commands: “You will control your conditioned response.”

These men are constantly negotiating the territory between social responsibility and selfishness, between familial loyalty and individual prerogative. At his extravagantly persuasive best, the Slater character melds the two by arguing that covering up their crimes, whatever the cost, is in the best interest of their families and of society at large.

Male Bonding Taken to Emotional Extremes

The movie at times deliberately calls to mind “Diner” and “Deliverance”--two classic male-bonding movies. One of “Very Bad Things’ ” main subjects is the masculine ethos taken to the extreme. When the sensitive character played by Daniel Stern goes bonkers and starts screaming that his brother is a murderer, the brother just as vehemently shoots back that Stern is a loser--in their world the epithets carry the same weight.

Neil LaBute’s movies also are about the nature of maleness, among other things. In “Your Friends & Neighbors” and “In the Company of Men,” his previous movie, the most masculine male presences are the ones who hold women in the greatest contempt. For them, sex is all about conquest and aggression. They bed women, but they love men. Taking this to the extreme, when the most sex-obsessed character in “Your Friends” talks of the best sex he ever had, it is about the time he participated in the rape of a male schoolmate. He turns dreamy at the memory. “It’s never been like that with a woman,” he says, softly. “Never.”

LaBute’s dialogue and the film’s structure are inspired by David Mamet. But in some respects the roundelay in “Your Friends” plays like a Woody Allen relationship comedy stripped of subtlety and of all that is warm and cuddly. LaBute’s characters do some of the mean things that Allen’s characters do in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and, perhaps especially, “Deconstructing Harry” (which can be seen as Allen’s own entry into this nasty brand of comedy). But in Allen’s edgier films the plot generally is set in motion when one character behaves badly. In LaBute’s films, no one is up to any good, and everything is rendered in black-and-white.

Exception: ‘Alarmist’ Tempers Its Cynicism

“The Alarmist” is one of the few of the current spate of bleak comedies that isn’t overrun with cynicism. In one of its most powerful scenes the lovable protagonist kidnaps and pistol-whips his boss with the intent of killing him after another main character is slain. But its producers insist that the film is an ultimately life-affirming commentary on violence and the difficulty of surviving in a world under siege. Nevertheless, nothing about “The Alarmist” invites such a literal interpretation. Everything is slightly off kilter, almost as if the film is a window onto a parallel world.

It is a world that looks very much like our own but where Kate Capshaw can wear pigtails and bangs and loose-fitting floral print dresses and still be an object of desire, or where her man-sized, sexually active son can have all the squirmy awkwardness of a child and yet draw no comment.

The movie daringly mixes quirky humor with violence--with tragedy, really--but, unlike some of the other films mentioned here, the filmmakers seem honestly to like their characters. Even the most detestable figure elicits our sympathy before it all is over; and Arquette, the movie’s emotional center, becomes a magnet for the other characters because of his innocence and sweetness.

Those terms could also be used to describe some of the characters in “Home Fries” and “The Opposite of Sex,” which slathers a thick veneer of hip cynicism on top of what is essentially a bittersweet romance. But in the most extreme of these movies, which include “Very Bad Things” and “Happiness,” cynicism lies at the bone.

Controversy Over Release of ‘Happiness’

“Happiness” is Solondz’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1996 film, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” and it won the International Critics Prize at Cannes. But October Films considered it so controversial that it decided not to release it. The producers formed their own distribution company to release the movie independently.

In its episodic structure and portrayal of characters who lead interlocking lives, “Happiness” seems superficially similar to “Your Friends & Neighbors” but it is even more calculated to shock. It even one-ups “Your Friends’ ” most disturbing scene--the reverie about the rape. In “Happiness,” the correlating scene concerns pedophilia, and perhaps even more shocking than the deeds the confessor commits (thankfully off screen) is his unrepentant yet pained acceptance of who he is.

In the easy schematic of “Happiness,” no one is truly happy, the depressed main character is named “Joy” and everyone keeps insisting that they’re fine even as they sink deeper and deeper into misery. These are pathetic figures, types more than people, really. Yet the film gains a disturbing kind of power once it stops reiterating its one-note theme and delves more deeply into its characters’ sorry lives.

This power comes from our recognition that the film respects no boundaries. At root maybe this is the tie that connects these films. We watch in uneasy fascination, unsure of what lines, if any, the characters--and the filmmakers--dare not cross.