Dressed in khakis, a rumpled sweater, canvas sneakers and sporting his trademark thick eyeglass frames — pale lime in color and resembling candy — Todd Solondz looks like a casting director’s dream to play the geek in a John Hughes movie. His iconoclast persona, and his latest controversial film, which opened Friday, seem incongruous with the high octane publicity machine atmosphere at the swank Regency Hotel in Manhattan. Then again, nothing about Solondz or his work has ever been easy to define or package.
Even “edgy” is too mainstream slick for the writer/director of “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Happiness” and, now, “Storytelling.”
“I’ve often said my movies aren’t for everyone, especially people who like them,” says Solondz, 42, whose articulate musings are delivered with precise enunciation. “But I don’t know if my goal is to provoke in any sensationalistic sense. Any filmmaker wants to provoke an emotional or intellectual response from his audience. But if it’s just shock for shock’s sake, I don’t think I would have had the amount of attention I’ve had. I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to make these movies, and that studios have actually financed them.”
Critical acclaim
His auspicious twist on the coming-of-age story “Welcome to the Dollhouse” in 1995 brought the Newark, N.J., native plenty of critical acclaim. Solondz followed up with the ambitious ensemble film “Happiness” (1998), which ended up on more than a few critics’ “best” lists that year. But his tale of lost souls in suburbia included a pedophile who preys on his young son’s friend during a sleepover and a female murderer who stores her victims’ body parts in a freezer. It was enough to earn Solondz the wrath of none other than the Farrelly brothers, of “Dumb and Dumber” and “Shallow Hal” fame. Peter and Bobby Farrelly were so offended by “Happiness” that they declined that year to participate with Solondz in a panel discussion about high and low film art and pushing the boundaries of good taste.
“Storytelling” is actually two short films, both of which explore a chronicler and his or her subject, and themes of exploitation and redemption. The first segment, titled “Fiction,” is about a sexual tryst between a white college writing student, Vi (Selma Blair), and her black, Pulitzer Prize-winning teacher (Robert Wisdom). Solondz raises the thorny question of who exploits whom, who is the victim, and whether Vi wants the experience for raw material for her writing. But he does so in typical in-your-face Solondz fashion: a graphic sex scene that includes the use of an offensive racial epithet. The scene itself offers a biting joke on censorship: In order to avoid an NC-17, Solondz digitally covers the copulating couple with a huge red box, one-upping Stanley Kubrick’s use of strategically placed squares to hide nudity in “Eyes Wide Shut.” (The scene’s dialogue, apparently, did not disturb censors).
“I knew I’d have trouble from beginning, and that’s why I made sure I would be able to put the big red box,” says Solondz with a sly smile. “I want the audience to know what they can’t see. It’s the first studio movie to have a big red box in the middle of it and I am very proud of that. . . . It’s all fraught with ambiguity. I don’t see [the characters] as a villain and an innocent lamb. It’s not quite that simple at all. She’s out to get something from him and he knows that. . . . We see what happens and then we hear her story. And her story, at first, seems like a recapitulation; there’s something Roshamon-ish about it.”
A satire on filmmaking
The second half of “Storytelling” is longer and looser, about a failed filmmaker named Toby (Paul Giamatti, in Solondz-style thick glasses) who wants to make a cinema verite study of a high school slacker, Scooby (Mark Webber). The result, “American Scooby,” is a satire on reality filmmaking and a darkly comic look at suburban family life. Solondz not so subtly skews “American Beauty” — there’s even a shot of a bag blowing in the wind — as pretentious hypocrisy embraced by middlebrow America. It ends with a scene that would appear to be close to Solondz’s heart: a screening room audience tittering nervously, while Scooby, the film’s subject, watches in embarrassment from the rear of the theater. The laughter, says Solondz, is telling and complex; to use one of his favorite phrases, “fraught with ambiguity.”
“There are all kinds of laughter. It can be of recognition; or a giddy response. But it can also be a kind of superiority toward the subject at hand and this is connected very much to the climax, when Scooby endures this humiliation,” he says. “While I don’t condone Toby’s irresponsibility and his exploitation, ultimately, of his subject, I do feel that after Scooby sees the hollowness and emptiness of his dreams and ambitions exposed onscreen, that he will never be the quite the same person again. He cannot go back.”
In the first section of “Storytelling,” there is another revealing moment when a fellow writing student angrily dismisses Vi’s short story because the characters are so unlikable. Is Solondz commenting on a common criticism of his own work?
“People have said, `Why do you make films about such ugly people?’ But, you see, I don’t see them as ugly,” he says. “I’ve been accused of being immoral, or amoral, cynical, misanthropic, condescending to the characters. I can defend my work; there is a moral gravity to what I do. Because I don’t make it explicit, I don’t tell people what to think and how to feel, so it’s a little bit tricky for people to get their bearings.” His movies are not plot-dependent, he stresses, and so they are not about heroes and villains.
“It is the flawed-ness of my characters that compels me — precisely because they are flawed,” he says.
Inroads into suburbia
For “Storytelling,” Solondz again ventures into the sterile suburban world he explored in his other films, a world close to the New Jersey of his own youth. This time, he uses an unconventional framework that he likens to a two-panel painting. “You always want to find fresh ways of attacking things. I’d done a conventional, single-protagonist structure in `Dollhouse’ and a multistory in `Happiness,’ so [`Storytelling’] is an uneven diptych of sorts,” he says. “You always want to get at it from another angle, particularly since geographically I’ve gone to similar places.”
Whether audiences or critics love or hate his work, Solondz remains unapologetic about his bizarre, blackly comic and ironic takes on the human condition.
“My movies are ultimately comedies, all of them,” he says. “Maybe terribly sad, painful, sorrowful comedies, but they are very much comedies. And that’s what troubles so many people.”
Todd Solondz on film
“Schatt’s Last Shot” (1985) (star)(star)1/2
Solondz’s college project: a satire about a high school nerd facing basketball glory or ignominy that, oddly enough, suggests the influence of both Woody Allen (which he kept) and Steven Spielberg (which he lost).
“Fear, Anxiety and Depression” (1989) (star)(star)
Solondz’s first feature, starring himself as an Allen-ish urban nebbish caught in the typical morass of sexual and emotional fiascoes. Allen does it better.
“Welcome to the Dollhouse” (1995) (star)(star)(star)1/2
The awfulness of suburban junior high life conveyed with crawly nightmarish, pinpoint satire: Heather Matarazzo bitingly plays a 7th-grader subjected to family indignities and class torments that are often all too achingly real.
“Happiness” (1998) (star)(star)(star)
A dark portrait of the sexual mores of America’s middle class, centering on a world of obscene phone callers, killers, pedophile rapists, predators and hapless romantics It has a creepy fascination that gets way under your skin.
“Storytelling”(star)(star)1/2
This two-part tale about the ways people tell stories — first in a 1985 college creative writing class and then in a contemporary documentary on family life — is, when it’s cooking, a frontal assault on American malaise and a wicked riposte to the sentimental pieties or voguish satire of other movies.
— Michael Wilmington
