“He did vote for Bush and McCain, but only because of Israel,” a housewife (Allison Janney) tells her sister about the man she wants to marry. It turns out that the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man wasn’t Toronto’s only exercise in extreme (and often extremely funny) self-deprecating Jewish humor. And so far, against odds, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime seems to be at least as widely admired.

In Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, Solondz used the bleakest of comic styles to explore his characters’ pain and frustration. Since then, with increasing conceptual disorganization, he seems to have replaced that empathy with a kind of equal-opportunity contempt. It always bugs me when critics chastise filmmakers for not liking their characters—as if misanthropy itself were a problem in art—but with parts of Storytelling and Palindromes, you had to wonder if Solondz had anything else to offer. Solondz champion J. Hoberman has made a convincing case for the director’s films as having an irresolvable, Talmudic quality, and on that score, Life During Wartime—a sequel to Happiness that uses different actors—delivers splendidly. Solondz gives most of the characters entirely new attitudes (notably, Dylan Baker’s slimy pedophile has been replaced by saddened Ciaran Hinds, and Lara Flynn Boyle’s vain careerist has morphed into a more tremulous Ally Sheedy), forcing us to see them in different ways.

The typical Solondz argument runs something like this. (I’m paraphrasing.) Are we agreed that it’s desirable to forgive those who have wronged us? Why, yes, of course we are. Well, could you forgive a pedophile? Um, I guess so. How about someone who falsely accused you of pedophilia, ruining your life? (Zing!)

It’s the same twist of the knife every time, but just because Solondz’s method of posing questions is sophomoric doesn’t mean the questions don’t cut to some essential truths. I have to digest more, but my feeling is that Life During Wartime—which I imagine wouldn’t make much sense without seeing Happiness, despite some claims to the contrary—falls somewhere midfield in his oeuvre. It’s half a return to form, and half a retread of ideas that were slightly curdled to begin with.