Happiness.

There is an as yet unnamed school of American play-wrighting and moviemaking which I, of course, propose to name. Call it Revenge of the Ex-Geeks. Its members include David Sedaris (a frequent monologuist on National Public Radio as well as a playwright), John Waters (director of Serial More and Pecker), Tony Kushner (his Angels in America shows what happens when a geek has promethean ambition), Todd Haynes (creator of an extraordinary film, Safe), and the currently most visible ex-geek champ, the screenwriter-director, Todd Solondz. Having endured a childhood full of schoolyard taunting and parental beady-eyed suspicion, the geek finally rears up and asks, "Hey, why am I called sick when all of society is sick?" And, "Why should I be labeled a geek when, in their hearts, my jock tormentors and parental accusers are themselves creeps and weirdoes and, unlike me, in denial about it?"

This gives the lad a new lease on life. Geek is Good. He goes on to write books, plays, and movies which prove his suspicions about the world to his own satisfaction and, if the work is funny or probing, to the satisfaction of many others. A possible drawback: no one wears as much emotional armor as the revitalized geek, and no one is so concerned with proving that there are no exceptions - nay, none! - to his take on the world. In a play or film of the Geek Revenge school, the middle class is composed entirely of practicing or potential psychos. Scratch a banker and find a serial killer; enter a suburban home and fall into hell.

In his first film, Welcome to the Doll House, Todd Solondz gave us a relatively restrained and often touching example of the genre. Its junior-high heroine, Dawn "Wienerdog" Wiener, isn't surrounded by absolute monsters but only the usual assortment of Philistines, snobs, and slobs we all grew up with (and, upon occasion, were). She puts herself through a miserable apprenticeship in how the world works by pursuing schemes that she thinks will gain her that world's acceptance. Nothing succeeds, of course. In the concluding shot, our heroine sits on the school bus surrounded by the classmates who still despise her. They sing the school song and she joins in. Is Dawn still aspiring to normalcy? But the camera draws close to her face which we see is stoically set rather than ingratiating, while the soundtrack separates her voice from the others so that she seems to be singing to herself rather than with the others. We sense that she will grow up, probably get slightly prettier and more self-confident, hold down a job, maybe acquire a husband and children, and achieve a generally plausible life. But, in some fundamental way, she will never, never "fit in." The herd has marked her as a pariah, and a pariah she will remain. Her recognition of this is her tragedy and triumph.

In his latest film, the ultra-black comedy Happiness, Solondz goes further by showing us that there is no stable society to fit into and that individuals can only pursue, in lonely desperation, whatever happiness they can, a search that is bound to end in failure since there is no such thing as happiness.

Happiness's nominal protagonists are three sisters: Trish, a housewife; Helen, a popular writer; and Joy, an unsuccessful songwriter. The first two seem to be successes, and Trish often burbles about her perfect life. But she's oblivious to the fact that her husband, Bill, is a homosexual pedophile whose pursuit of happiness is about to entail the rape of two boys. And Helen, regretful that she didn't suffer a childhood rape which would infuse her fiction with authentic angst, becomes momentarily enraptured with an obscene phone caller, who turns out to be her fat loser of a neighbor, Allen. Both of these women, in fact, are such monsters of fatuousness that they can't function as heroines of their own stories because monsters can't evince dramatic growth or deterioration. Instead, in the Trish segments, husband Bill becomes the focus of interest, especially since he is played with such disturbing naturalness by Dylan Baker. Solondz never makes the mistake of too facilely "understanding" Bill, or implying that his sexual aberration is a mere ailment easily correctable through therapy. In fact, Bill is a psychiatrist and this physician certainly hasn't healed himself. Far from it. The scene in which this sad pervert plies his entire family with sleeping pills so that he can have uninterrupted access to an eleven-year-old playmate of his son is sheer skin-crawling horror. (The fact that the director sometimes makes us giggle at Bill's predatory tactics simply adds to the horror. The victim is never mocked.)

Helen, the kinky writer, is soon overshadowed in her episodes by Allen, the telephonic pervert. So well do we come to understand his sodden existence and self-perpetuating hopelessness that we accept his falling into a sexless but affectionate relationship with a certain Christine, who is not only as fat as he is but (gulp) a murderer with body parts stored in her refrigerator. I'm so ashamed, she sobs after confessing to Allen. You must think I'm a monster! But gosh, nobody's perfect and Allen is perfectly content to spend a chastely affectionate night with Christine, though one certainly hopes he won't absentmindedly repair to the kitchen for a midnight snack.

Joy, being not only capable of change but downright desperate for it, is the only one of the sisters who holds the center of her own story. The actress Jane Adams makes Joy easily the most appealing character on the screen (not that there's much competition): compassionate, fairly intelligent, civic-minded, and, above all, ever hopeful in the pursuit of happiness. Precisely because of that last trait, Solondz visits one humiliation after another upon Joy's head because optimism is not taken lightly in Solondz land. And so, if Joy tries to break off with a boyfriend, he humiliates her in a public place; if she receives a phone call from a man she takes to be a more promising lover, he turns out to be the obscene caller; if she, a teacher of English to foreigners, refuses to go out on strike out of concern for her pupils, the students themselves jeer a t her a s a scab; when she seems to have found true love with a Russian emigre, he turns out to be a con man who steals her guitar and stereo - and then borrows money from her!

The unquenchable blackness of this black comedy springs not so much from the catastrophies in it as from the normalcy surrounding the catastrophies. That Bill abuses his son's playmate is sickening enough, but that he has been and continues to be a reasonably good father when he isn't being a pervert, dispensing liberal advice and emotional support, is somehow more disturbing. (Some viewers, to reassure themselves, might kid themselves into thinking that Bill's good behavior is just hypocrisy. It isn't.) When Christine confesses to being a murderer, it's startling, but even more disquieting is the way we can't help seeing her as a big, cuddly bear of a woman, physically and emotionally quite compatible with the lonely Allen, and he sees her that way even after learning of her crime. It's as if Paddy Chayefsky's Marty had been rewritten by the Marquis de Sade.

Solondz is a real artist in that he knows how to make the look and feel of his movie mirror its emotional content. The photography is deliberately kept as bland as a '70s situation comedy. The music is of the "Hi, honey, I'm home" variety, especially when it's the pedophile coming home. The editing is especially canny: Whenever a character is about to react to some painful truth or plea, the camera cuts away, so we are kept within the climate of frustration that all the characters inhabit.

But the Geek Revenge problem abides and somewhat abrades the undeniable brilliance of Happiness. It's just about impossible to make first-rate art featuring characters you are dedicated to unmasking and/or punishing. Because Solondz's feelings for Bill and Joy are ambivalent - a sort of compassionate loathing for him, an exasperated affection for her - the two emerge as the most interesting figures. But, in his determination to mock what he takes to be the factitious normalcy of middle-class life, especially as embodied in Trish, Solondz goes overboard. When Bill tells his wife he's sick, she advises him to take a Tylenol. True, she's half-asleep at that moment, but are we to think she'd be more perceptive if she were awake? I doubt it. And why would Joy's class of immigrants uniformly yell "scab" at her when they're benefiting from her strike breaking, and when surely none of them are union workers or even sympathizers? Why does the father of one of Bill's victims have to be portrayed as a bullet-headed macho-fascist? (Would a nice, liberal father react with less outrage to discovering his son had been raped?) By so insisting upon the crassness of his characters, Solondz often comes across as mean-spirited rather than truly satirical.

But, the abiding emotion Happiness leaves you with is sadness. At one point, Helen tells her sister, "We're not laughing at you, Joy, we're laughing with you." To which Joy replies, "But I'm not laughing." That is Solondz. He often makes us laugh, but he's not laughing.