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Joy (Shirley Henderson) is still no further along in finding any meaning for her life through her work (with convicts) or her art (songwriting) and winds up harangued by not one, but two ex-lovers’ ghosts to do the world a favor and off herself. Trish (Allison Janney) wants to move out of the shadow of the ghost of her past that involves her incarcerated pedophile ex-husband, and in so doing finds sexual and romantic satisfaction (after a fashion) with an unlikely middle-aged suitor. Former poet Helen (Ally Sheedy) has folded in on herself, finding wealth and accolades out west as a screenwriter in Hollywood, but undone by a monstrous ego and massive self-loathing.

The film unfolds in what one could easily imagine as being adapted from a stage production, as a series of mostly dialogues between two characters. The scenes that feature multiple key characters gathered together are rare (Trish’s youngest son Timmy’s bar mitzvah being the key one) and the only extended conversation among a group of people, that I recall, is a brief round-robin among the college friends of Trish’s eldest son about who had the most fucked-up childhood. (Billy politely defers, passing on the chance to snag the crown with tales of his father Bill Maplewood, child rapist).

What is largely missing from Life During Wartime, when juxtaposed with Happiness, is a contrast of the personal and professional travails of its characters. In the first film, the work lives were often as dreary as their personal and romantic lives: Joy’s failings in the cubicle farm and as a “scab” ESOL teacher, Helen’s writer’s block, Trish’s attempts at maintaining the perfect wife and mother façade. Life During Wartime is incredibly insular by comparison and if you cotton to the notion that the divorcé Trish is dating (whose last is Wiener and whose son is named Mark Wiener) is the dad from Welcome to the Dollhouse, then Solondz has created a closed-loop universe. But it never feels like an inside joke for the knowledgeable hip, but fully in keeping with the walking wounded lives that populate the film.

Now’s a good as time as any to admit that, for all their humor (or attempts at), I have never found any of Solondz’s films particularly funny. Shocking yes, capable of producing empathy for painfully embarrassing or humiliating moments, definitely, but they never elicit anything from a guffaw to a nervous chuckle to an outburst of bewildered laughter. And I have never held this against them. I don’t feel like I have failed his button pushing, because that is only one level of his movies, and because, like Woody Allen in Deconstructing Harry mode, Solondz often lobs his critics’ complaints back at himself through his characters and their dialogue. Here, that role is accorded to Helen, who bemoans the fact that everyone always accuses her of condescending towards those she writes about.

Solondz exhibits tremendous chutzpah right from the opening scene, intended as a (distorted) mirror image of the opening scene in Happiness: Joy on a date with a lover that quickly sours and becomes painfully awkward. In this case, she is with her husband, who presents her with an anniversary gift that unintentionally dredges up some awful memories, and later turns out to have had an unfortunate past association with their hostess. It also establishes the recurring motif for the film: the ethical conundrum of whether it is better to forgive and/or forget, and what exactly we can forgive, in ourselves or in others? Some may find this handled in an overly polemical fashion and if the characters were any less realized or the performances less fearless or haunted, then it might simply have been a geeked-up presentation of an undergraduate Ethics lecture and I would concur with that stick figure criticism.

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