An uncomfortably funny movie, “Happiness” follows almost a dozen characters who battle loneliness in their own, sometimes grotesque, ways.Director Todd Solondz, who made his first big splash with 1996’s “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” keeps the audience squirming between laughs with pedophilia, rape and murder as subject matters. But the movie is ultimately uplifting, connecting with the viewer by the Solondz credo- You are not alone.”Happiness” centers on the Jordan family. Mona and Lenny (Ben Gazarra and Louise Lasser) are the parents of three daughters: Joy (Jane Adams), Helen (Laura Flynn Boyle) and Trish (Cynthia Stevenson).Lenny is leaving Mona after more than 40 years of marriage, though he explicitly forbids talk of actually divorcing her. With her parents sorting out their suddenly single lives in Florida, Joy stays in the suburban New Jersey house she’s lived in her whole life.The movie begins with a dinner scene with Joy and Andy (Jon Lovitz). Joy tells Andy she wants to break up, and Andy responds in the ultimate way: Giving her an expensive gift then taking it back, telling her “I’m champagne and you’re sh#t.” Losing him and then quitting her job, Joy becomes a scab teaching immigrants.Helen is a famous writer, and seeking the danger in her real life that she purports to know in her writing, courts a phone stalker. The stalker is actually her lonely, tubby next-door neighbor Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), who is being pursued by another, even lonelier and tubbier neighbor, Kristina (Camryn Manheim).But the source of most of the controversy about the movie surround the seemingly perfect suburban couple of Trish and Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker). Bill is a shrink, and can handle the problems of patients and his son Billy (Rufus Read) better than his own sexual problems.Bill pines over his son’s 12-year-old classmates, and scenes involving his pedophilia stop the humor cold. Also shocking but much easier to laugh at is Billy, whose ongoing struggle is to “come” just like his classmates.”Happiness” keeps the multiple story lines coherent, which are different but have similar messages about isolation and alienation. In a country that ranks the pursuit of happiness right behind life and liberty, Solondz shows that the quest for happiness is, as the filmmaker himself says, “sad, funny and horrific.”