10 Times Film Critics Actually Changed Their Mind
4. Matt Zoller Seitz Apologised To Todd Solondz For Dismissing Happiness
Todd Solondz's Happiness is one of the most provocative and talked-about independent films of the 1990s, a savagely dark comedy that dares to cover subjects as bleak as murder, rape, suicide, paedophilia, and depression.
Unsurprisingly such subject matter was tailor-made to polarise critics - enough that the Sundance Film Festival even refused to select it - and though Happiness was still genuinely well-received by the press, many prominent reviewers panned it.
In his review for New York Press, Matt Zoller Seitz called Happiness "adolescent" and expressed a general distaste for what he perceived to be Solondz's "smug" storytelling.
But after being blown away by Solondz's 2009 film Life During Wartime, which was a loose sequel to Happiness, Seitz felt compelled to revisit the original.
A new viewing, 12 years after he trashed it, confirmed to Seitz that his initial estimation was wrong. He said:
"It was funny, sad, sincere, ugly, tough, weird, occasionally horrifying. You could not watch it and feel nothing. I had no idea why I panned it."
It gets better, though: when Seitz moderated a Q&A with Solondz in 2010, Solondz asked him directly about his original review of Happiness.
Seitz told the director that he had an "allergic reaction" to it at the time, first viewing Happiness during one of the happiest periods of his own life, where "on some level it threatened" him.
Critical turnarounds don't get much more complete than that. Seitz even penned a follow-up article taking a deep dive into his relationship with the film, with a headline that straight-up apologised to Solondz for getting it wrong in the first place.