Make-Believe ‘Storytelling' Ponders the Cruelty of Art

You know you're watching a strange movie when the first thing you see is a naked, pink-haired college student having sex with a guy with cerebral palsy. You know you're in a Todd Solondz movie when the guy with cerebral palsy disappointedly turns to the girl after love-making and complains that she no longer treats him as a curious sex oddity. "The kinkiness is gone. You've become kind." Then he breaks up with her.

Thus begins the first chapter of "Storytelling." The couple, played by Selma Blair and Leo Fitzpatrick, are classmates in a college writing class under an African-American Pulitzer-winner (Robert Wisdom) who intimidates his aspiring writers in class and coerces them to pose naked and have sex with him in his apartment. Their in-class discussions are a battle zone, a power struggle between dazed grade-whores and their overpowering sexual and intellectual master who gives such constructive criticisms as "This is a piece of shit."

Less than an hour into the film, Solondz drops the story altogether and takes us to chapter two. The film is interestingly divided into two independent segments, the first called "Fiction," and the second, "Non-fiction," which follows a struggling documentary filmmaker who dares delve into Solondz's notorious New Jersey suburbs to record the tribulations of Scooby Livingston, a slacker trying to get into college.

By splitting the film into "Fiction" and "Non-fiction," Solondz questions the validity of "reality" in storytelling. After Vi, the Blair character, becomes the professor's latest sex toy, she decides to write a candid story about the encounter and present it in class. The females, many of whom are clearly also rape victims, don't appreciate the honesty. They call it contrived. They call it hollow. They slash at her, asking "Why do people have to be so ugly?" Solondz is clearly satirizing his own critics, many of whom condemned his harrowing portrayals of child molestation, kidnapping, and incest in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness."

But it's more complicated than that. In "Happiness," Lara Flynn Boyle played a successful writer of books like "Rape at 11," but secretly tells her sister that she has never been raped and that she hasn't a clue how to write about it. In "Storytelling," Vi writes about an actual rape, and nobody believes her.

To Solondz, the world isn't cruel because of the biological desires of stalkers and rapists, but because of the social structures which prohibit such desires to be addressed. It's as if he thinks of what we usually consider vile (Vi finding pictures of naked students in her teacher's bathroom), and inverting it so it's even colder than it seems (upon seeing the pictures, all she can tell herself is "Don't be racist").

The brutality of non-fiction and the conventions of fiction don't mesh to reflect his vision of seedy suburbia, so he's forced to interpret his vision of seedy suburbia through this two-part structure.

The struggle to create truth through fiction is further explored in "Non-fiction," where the documentary filmmaker's efforts to accurately report the problems of contemporary youth is altering the course events simply by being there. It's not as original or interesting as the outstanding first segment, but is as emotionally compelling as anything Solondz has ever done.

Whereas the first segment had a bold, gritty fluidity that reminded me of "The Decalogue," the second segment is interrupted by moments of emptiness and awkward silences, especially in a scene where the filmmaker nervously calls up an old high school friend. It's a strange scene because it isn't disturbing for its subject matter but for its unpolished texture. Does this make it more realistic, to reflect the "Non-fiction" of its title? If so, how do you explain the ironic TV music or the baffling psychedelia of Scooby's drug-induced hallucinations? Does reality feel like a sitcom? Like a drug? Reality is a dream, and storytelling is hypnotism.

As in all of his films, "Storytelling" is ultimately about human cruelty. The most compassionate character in the film, Scooby's 5th grade brother Brady, is also the most ruthless. He's precocious ("I looked through Scooby's SAT books and took one of the practice tests"), and talks with a middle-school vocabulary and a grown-up attitude. Not surprisingly, his inquisitive cuteness will lead him to do something towards the end that reminded me of Damien in "The Omen" with Satan replaced by New Jersey. It's exactly because Brady is adorable and amazingly intelligent that makes his twisted transformation seem inevitably rooted in our foolish suburban dreams.

This is Todd Solondz's best film to date. His previous two were impressive to say the least, but here his ability as a comic director blooms to unprecedented heights. Much has been said about the bleak humor in his films, but look at the raw pain he's able to conjure in "Fiction" when the enormous teacher peers down a female student who stands naked in a shadow, nervously clutching her hands and shamefully staring at the floor. She can no longer hide behind her bleached hair and dark makeup as her shivering body is engulfed by the powerful presence of her predator.

"Happiness" is clearly Solondz's boldest film, but I'm more impressed by what Solondz has done in "Storytelling," a compelling piece of self-criticism that constantly interrupts itself to question the integrity of his previous works. "Happiness" was slapped with an NC-17 rating, and Solondz parodies this during a vulgar rape scene in the "Fiction" segment, covering the dirty bits with a mysterious red rectangle as if telling the MPAA that he can in fact censor himself, but that would be "fiction."

I admired the crude intelligence of "Welcome to the Dollhouse" but was put-off by the sensational grotesqueness of "Happiness," which I consider the most revolting American film this side of John Waters. But I have to admit, "Storytelling" taught me to understand his previous films. The film is in direct dialogue with the others, pointing to the compassion amidst the filth. I can't wait for whatever he has next, excited that it'll pick the Solondz scab even deeper.

Tags: