Todd Solondz makes me cringe. He also makes me laugh, but it is the laughter of discomfort, the laughter that asks, “Did that just happen?” Those who have seen a Todd Solondz film are all too familiar with this feeling. Partly due to this, the three films since his popular debut further reinforce the stereotype of what “A Todd Solondz Film” will be, namely a movie that is controversial, mean-spirited and unsettling.
His indie hit Welcome to the Dollhouse was an uncomfortable tale of adolescent female strife, punctuated by such events as a young tough threatening to rape the 13-year-old protagonist. His follow-up, Happiness, was an even more uncomfortable tale of three sisters and their troubled lives, although much of the film revolved around the story of a psychiatrist father who also happens to be a pedophile. This lovely film is rife with multiple instances of semen shooting onto walls; it really must be seen in order to understand the bodily contortions of discomfort that can occur when watching a film. His latest, Storytelling, does not disappoint. It delivers such Solondz classic scenes as a violent sex scene involving that most heinous of racial epithets as well as a Jewish family and a makeshift gas chamber. One can understand that Solondz has no qualms with alienating his audience?he even takes pleasure in doing so.
Storytelling, true to it title, plays on issues surrounding narrative, subjects and reception. It is cut into two distinct and autonomous sections, one having little to do with the other, aside from thematic preoccupations. They are analogous to two short stories in a collection, both containing separate characters yet addressing the same topics. The first, “Fiction,” tells of a university creative writing seminar led by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Robert Wisdom) and his relationship with a student (Selma Blair). The second and longer part, “Non-Fiction,” finds a down-on-his-luck documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) approaching a New Jersey suburban family in order to record the struggles of their eldest son Scooby’s (Mark Webber) senior year of high school.
Both parts deal with the artists’ portrayal of their subject. Solondz asks such questions as, “What is the appropriate tone for an artist to assume towards his or her subject matter?” and “What responsibility do those who produce fiction and non-fiction narratives have to remain solely within the confines of that category?” All very interesting questions, to be sure. Ultimately, however, Storytelling is nothing but Todd Solondz’s attempt to lash out at his critics.
To be clear, Solondz is a mean filmmaker. His humor is of the blackest kind; his screenplays rarely evince any sympathy for his characters as he toys with the audience’s sense of comfort. His two previous films delighted in viewer frustration, and Storytelling is no different. Often accused of mocking his characters, Solondz has his documentarian/filmmaker counterpart in the film do the same. Yet, in passing judgment on this character, he simultaneously passes judgment on himself. Guilty of the very things that he ridicules in his film, Solondz shows us all what we long suspected?that he does not care a whit about his audience. His three films demonstrate a selfish need to exorcise his demons in methods totally off-putting to any spectator. The only thing that comes close to resembling a redeeming quality in his films are the depictions of just how quietly sinister New Jersey can be.
That he makes movies about the Garden State may have some sort of appeal for the frighteningly large number of Georgetown students who hail from there. A search for anything else remotely stimulating in Solondz’s filmmaking, however, would come up blank. His films, which often draw attention to themselves through the use of upsetting material, work hard to hide his near total lack of cinematic skill. His camera setups are rudimentary, the cinematography simplistic. Overall, these three films show evidence of nothing special, other than a man who likes to deal with taboo subjects. He might as well be writing stories to submit to the back of those cheap detective magazines they sell on supermarket top shelves, because there is no indication that he intends to make use of the fact that he is a filmmaker.
Storytelling is visually boring, which is one of the worst things that a medium dedicated to entertaining the eye can be. For a man who has admittedly stated that he dislikes making movies, his lack of talent suggests that perhaps he should find some other way to deal with his neuroses and stop filling space on art-house screens that could possibly show a film with some measure of respect for its paying and attentive audience.
