Life During Wartime: To Forgive or Forget?

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2009 / WINNER – BEST SCREENPLAY
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009
TELLURIDE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2009
BOSTON INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL 2010

Directed By Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling, Happiness, Palindromes)

Starring: Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens, Michael Lerner, Chris Marquette, Charlotte Rampling, Dylan Riley Snyder and Michael Kenneth Williams

Extraordinary acting! A brilliant Plot: A mature Todd Solondz brings the theme of Happiness into a fuller, ever more intense film about Sex, Crime and the "ideal" Family Life.

Plot:
Separated from her incarcerated husband Bill (Ciarán Hinds), Trish (Allison Janney) is about to be married again. Bill is a pedophile, so Trish couldn't be more excited to have Harvey (Michael Lerner), a “normal” father figure for her two sons. But when Bill is released from prison and the boys finally meet their future stepdad, the family is forced to decide whether to forgive or to forget.

There is so much happening in this intellectual exploration of our prejudices, our frailties that cloud our preceptions and make our decisions often not in tune with our best interest nor of those we care about. At the heart of the film is that all important question of fatherhood, what does it mean to be a father, what does it mean for a man and for his son.
This identity issue looms large while the crimes that the father commits seems often trivial to the lies that surround and permeate us all. But who is the Father.

There is strong evidence throughout this film that the personal father with whom we immediate associate to "father" also refers to Israel, the Fatherland where the same criminality issue felt and experienced for this country that murders, bulldozes homes and has striped life as we know it from huge number of people in the Middle East is the Father exposed in Life During Wartime with all the complexity of feeling/thought/duplicity/longing for a better person /country to embrace.

Pedophilia is a crime. The crime's of the paroled men are multiple. Crime crime crime but even for a criminal there is a humanity and that is the point...to look at our committed lies politically and personally: Do we forget? Do we forgive? And if we forget, will we ever remember again.

Life During Wartime uses brilliant human interactions to carry it's message and there were many moments when I felt certain this film would be one of my favorites of all times but

As with so much of politics, it lack an emotional device to pull me in or get me involved in a primitive non intellectual way and that unfortunately is the life blood of the film viewing experience.

To forgive or forget: that is the question because you can not forgive what you have forgotten.
Life During Wartime is a film you won't want to forget.

Opens theatrically in NY on 7/23