Todd Solondz has turned his audience's divisiveness into a calling card with his often hilariously upsetting films, so it's a surprise that his new movie is fairly tame. Abe (Jordan Gelber) lives with his parents, works a job at his dad's (a subdued Christopher Walken), has every good season of The Simpsons on DVD, and frames pictures of all the Doctors from Doctor Who. Only problem: he's in his late 30s. Now he's out to marry the unstable Miranda (Selma Blair). The suffocating darkness of much of Solondz's work has diminished here, but so has the humor, and it never reaches the massive catharsis of a film like Happiness. Perhaps Solondz is trying to warp the cliché of the "underdog movie," but everyone comes off as part of an uneasy experiment rather than as his usual complex character studies. Still, it offers some surreal fun. He's trying new things, like the wonderfully glitzy pop music soundtrack, which make Dark Horse shine.
