Joy (Jane Adams) lives in the New Jersey home her parents gave up when they retired to Florida. Her life is one long parade of McJobs, unsuitable men and twanging out crap songs on her guitar. One sister, Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), is more than happily married to Bill (Dylan Baker), a button-down shrink. The other, Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), is the ostensibly sophisticated but ultimately shallow author of A Pornographic Childhood.

Todd Solondz's follow-up to his scabrous study of burgeoning adolescent disaffection, the startling Welcome To The Dollhouse, plays out over 140 minutes as a game of very unhappy families. Given the above, however, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for one of Woody Allen's recent, more foul-mouthed efforts; a sort of Hannah and Her Unhappy Sisters, if you will. It isn't.

For one thing, Helen is initially plagued then intrigued by a string of sexually explicit phone calls from her sweaty, self-loathing and overweight neighbour Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman). He, meantime, is enthusiastically pursued by the corpulent Kristina (Camryn Manheim), a young woman whose lonely life is even more screwed-up than his own, and who harbours a secret sHe's desperate to share. Oh, and Bill is a predatory paedophile.

Happiness unfolds like a particularly ugly - and particularly funny - version of Altman's Short Cuts. As with Dollhouse, Solondz is flirting with wholesale misanthropy in these characters, in their seemingly soulless search for that elusive titular quality. That, by the end, only one seems to have found anything like it - the final [shot] - is testament. yes, to its black comedy but not to an inherent soulessness in the picture itself. For, unlike a film that one would at assume as a close cousin, Neil LaBute's repellently misanthropic Your Friends and Neighbours, Happiness is at heart a bleak but essentially compassionate film.

It is certainly a film without villains. Even Bill (a searing, career threatening performance by Baker) is never given up to the mustachio-twirling monster we could reasonably expect. The scenes between him and their ten-year-old, Billy (a remarkable Rufus Reed), are the film's most moving; their last particularly riveting, particularly heartbreaking. Its typical of this knife-edge act between genuine, if uneasy, humour and real poignancy as the film eases to a close. Bill is an honest, responsive man with appetites wildly at odds with his nature. One senses that he is well aware of everything as he jerks-off over teen magazines or drugs the entire family to have his way with his son's 'girlish' stop-over.

The cast are superb throughout, particularly Adams as the so-nice-it-hurts sister, and Stevenson's homemaker, so damn perky perfect any reasonable audience will want to slap seven bells out of her. And after his work here and turns in both The Big Lebowski and especially his gay soundman in Boogie Nights, Hoffman is fast-tracking his way to becoming one of the screen's bright talents.

This then is a giddy blend of Altman forensics, Allen-esque family farce and the kind of borderline bad taste familiar as John Waters territory: it's bookended by that essential modern movie accessory, the shot of cum (as opposed to the cum-shot). Imagine, say, The Opposite of Sex with the heat turned right up. In the era of easy-whip tabloid controversy, Happiness is revealed as verifiably brave, even dangerous cinema that constantly surprises. 'I'm not laughing [at] you,' Helen says towards the end. 'I'm laughing [with] you.' 'But I'm not laughing,' replies a confused Joy. You will, only to feel very [very] guilty later.