The lovelorn ghost of Andy (Paul Reubens) continues to court Joy (Shirley Henderson) in Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime. (Francisco Roman/eOne Films)

Life During Wartime, the latest film from director Todd Solondz, nabbed a screenplay prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival and certainly stands on its own. But it’s also a sequel of sorts to Solondz’s 1998 picture Happiness, and some of Life During Wartime’s best moments stem from seeing the strange echoes and resonances that arise when a director revisits his characters 12 years later.

Often accused of misanthropy, director Todd Solondz now displays a lighter touch with his characters – you get the sense he’s laughing with them, not at them.

A refresher for the uninitiated: Happiness revolved around the triumphs and tragedies – in fact, mostly tragedies – of three sisters living in suburban New Jersey. By the film’s close, Trish, Helen and Joy were beleaguered but cautiously optimistic, raising their glasses in a toast, and noting, in one of Happiness’s most ironic moments, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

Life During Wartime picks up a decade later and finds that happiness still eludes these often abrasive characters. Fragile Joy (Shirley Henderson) is watching her marriage to phone-sex addict Allen fall apart. The estranged, self-absorbed Helen (Ally Sheedy) has embarked on a screenwriting career in L.A. And Trish (Allison Janney) now lives in Florida, hoping to shed all memories of her pedophile husband, Bill, who’s about to be sprung from prison. This last development will inevitably pose problems for Trish, who told her youngest children that their father died.

The film’s opener is virtually identical to the hilariously sour restaurant scene that kicked off Happiness. We see Joy and a man – this time, her husband – seated side by side in a banquette, struggling through a dinner that goes from bad to worse. So little has changed in the intervening years that Joy remarks on her own déjà vu.

Yet as Life During Wartime unspools, it begins to feel very different from its predecessor. That’s partly because Solondz is working with an entirely new cast, each of whom brings new shadings to the characters. For example, the snivelling, petty Andy, originally played by Jon Lovitz, resurfaces as Paul Reubens, while Philip Seymour Hoffman’s schlubby Allen changes race and returns as Michael K. Williams, the actor who played Omar on The Wire.

This type of casting experiment didn’t entirely work in Solondz’s Palindromes (2003), but it pays off here, especially as the milquetoast Bill, as played by Dylan Baker in Happiness, leaves prison with the harder, more anguished face of Ciarán Hinds. Allison Janney is a standout as Trish, bringing a warmth to the role that was missing in its first incarnation, played by Cynthia Stevenson. The character is still deluded and self-righteous, but there’s tenderness, too. When her son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) finally learns the truth about his father’s crimes, Trish is the first to point out that the pedophile is “also a man and a father.”

Often accused of misanthropy, Solondz now displays a lighter touch with his characters – you get the sense he’s laughing with them, not at them. Make no mistake, his squirmy humour is still there — like in the moment where Trish shares too much information about her sex life with young Timmy. But for every jokey scene, there’s a horrifying, boundary-pushing dramatic moment. When ex-con Bill meets a bitter widow (Charlotte Rampling) in a hotel bar, for example, the two exchange frank confessions that you’ll probably be chewing on for weeks after. What are we to make of Rampling’s character, who admits to being an utter monster?

Life During Wartime is a tough, often lumpy film. It doesn’t have the benefit of Happiness’s tight structure, where each discomfiting vignette bled neatly into the next. Life During Wartime keeps bringing up uncomfortable subjects, then lets them dangle in mid-air.

Ciaran Hinds is ex-convict Bill in Life During Wartime. (Francisco Roman/eOne Films)

Its ambitious themes start to come into view as Timmy begins preparing for his bar mitzvah. One day, he arrives home with complicated questions about the story of Joseph. Should you forgive someone even if you don’t feel like it? And what about terrorists who blow up office buildings? Should we extract an eye for an eye? Maybe these dilemmas are moot, as one character suggests: “In the end, China will take over and none of this will matter.”

Placing his characters in the post-9/11 landscape only serves to make them more alienated and anxious than they were in 1998. While Solondz doesn’t answer the questions he raises about the world at large, he does create an affecting portrait of the wars being waged closer to home. Each of the three sisters grapples with the notion of forgiveness. Both Trish and Helen would rather forget than try to make peace, while the hyper-sensitive Joy receives numerous visits from literal ghosts of lovers past and remains conflicted about whether she can truly turn the other cheek.

Cinematographer Ed Lachman finds the perfect way to express all of this visually, bathing the characters in amber Florida light for brief instants, before trapping them once more inside the white, airless interiors where they actually live. There’s a surreal scene — one of the film’s best — in which Joy drifts, barefoot, through a moonlit strip-mall parking lot. It’s a ghostly image and a great metaphor for the film’s haunted characters, who are in perpetual limbo, trying to move forward while dragging the baggage of their past. Bill sums it up best when he muses: “Nothing works. It just goes on forever.”

This is tricky material, and Life During Wartime is the kind of movie you admire more than you actually enjoy. I don’t intend this as a slight, merely a warning: Life During Wartime is a comedy, but one with serious, melancholy undertones, and no quick punchlines or easy answers.

In the midst of one of the film’s broadest, most comedic scenes, the self-indulgent, sobbing Helen cries out, “I’m only human!” She’s horrible, but she’s also got a point, and Solondz’s achievement lies in how his film always straddles those two interpretations and dares the audience to accept that both could be equally true.

Life During Wartime opens Aug. 27.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.