Storytelling

(Todd Solondz, USA, 2001)

There is a veritable catalogue of catastrophic events and bad vibes laid out in Todd Solondz’s Storytelling: emotional exploitation, sexual abuse, class injustice, terrorist murder.

Five minutes after it is over, however, you may in fact find it difficult to remember every terrible thing that it showcases. This is because it is a profoundly witless film – and a sad example of the empty careers bolstered on the contemporary arthouse circuit.

I am far from being a Solondz fan, but at least his previous film, the ambitious Happiness (1998), was meaty enough to fuel some fascinating arguments. Storytelling exaggerates all the worst aspects of Solondz’s work.

Like Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), it traces a Fassbinderish Theatre of Cruelty in which people are amoral schemers or simply dumb animals. Like Happiness, it sets out to experiment with narrative form, here offering a conceptual, dual-level construction. Two unconnected tales (labelled “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction”) are set up for comparison.

Solondz witheringly mocks social stereotypes of race, class and gender, but his own view of the world seems utterly limited to them. In “Fiction”, a student, Vi (Selma Blair), breaks up with her boyfriend, Marcus (Leo Ftizpatrick), who suffers from cerebral palsy. Then she ends up in the gloomy bedroom of her African-American, Pulitzer Prize-winning writing teacher, Scott (Robert Wisdom).

In running time, this functions as a mere prologue to the more elaborate “Non-Fiction” section. (Solondz dropped a third story from the finished film, and this may be a merciful act.) Here, a nerdy documentary filmmaker with delusions of grandeur, Toby (Paul Giamatti), chooses a gormless, forever stoned teenager, Scooby (Mark Webber), as his vehicle for capturing the Truth of Modern Life.

Storytelling mulls over the difference between fiction and non-fiction – or, at least, pretends to. To the extent that there is a coherent thesis offered concerning this difference, it might be formulated in the following way. Fiction is free to ignore its real-life sources and inspirations, but non-fiction must respect its human subjects.

Did we really need an entire feature film to establish such an underwhelming platitude?

Solondz loses even this banal thread when he ventures into the realm of the cinema essay – striving to turn his movie into a pointed commentary on other movies. To this end, the documentary being made in “Non-Fiction” is an unsubtle pastiche of two films of 1999, American Beauty and American Movie, both of which are pilloried. Hence its title, American Scooby – a joke almost worthy of a mediocre parody in Mad magazine. The fact that only one of these references is actually a documentary indicates how muddled Solondz’s ‘essay’ really is.

Those who have followed Solondz’s œuvre to date will quickly notice that what he mocks these other films for – taking easy pot shots at middle-class suburbia and turning ordinary people’s lives into a freak show – is exactly what his own films have been charged with. By including such criticisms, Solondz hopes to outflank a similar attack this time around. But there is no sign of any developing craft or insight in his storytelling ability.

Instead, it’s the same old Solondz carnival of horrors. Everyone listens to kitsch music and sports frightful haircuts. A dysfunctional, domestic dinner scene is staged like a TV sit-com gone wrong. Songs composed by Belle and Sebastian hammer home the obvious ironies. When the characters hit rock bottom, Solondz twists the knife and deprives them of the last vestige of dignity.

Solondz is the most depressing example of a generation of so-called independent American filmmakers (alongside Kevin Smith, Whit Stillman and Quentin Tarantino) more in love with words than images. Indeed, the only slightly amusing aspect of Storytelling is the director’s ear for everyday, uttered banalities and clichés. All other elements of his cinema language are excruciatingly flat, mechanical and drab. If he intends this form to reinforce his content, he is fatally misguided.

Everything Solondz does is calculated to shock. He hopes to provoke the righteous indignation of all uptight, ultra-sensitive people. Unfortunately, we have reached the point in popular culture where militant political incorrectness is as tiresome as dour political correctness.

It is impossible to work up any offense over Storytelling. It generates only indifference – the same degree of indifference with which it was conceived and executed.

© Adrian Martin May 2002