Director Todd Solondz loves to pick on his native New Jersey when snaking in and out of the cinephile’s subconscious every couple years with his pitch-black comments on the Garden State. The Tisch grad has gained wide acclaim for more than a decade from the overtly cynical breed of moviegoer that embraces the most morose tableaux for sheer shits and giggles.
Solondz broke onto the scene with a cross-the-board masterpiece, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” starring Heather Matarazzo (“The Princess Diaries”) as a twelve year old loner who is too smart for her own good and suffering from the social ineptness that plagues many of Solondz’s characters.
1998’s “Happiness” pissed a lot of people off with its polemical framing of such juicy issues as masturbation, child molestation and the suburban Jew. It’s a weighty film, both in size and subject matter, but in the opinion of many, it still accomplishes what it set out to do — pushing “Welcome to the Dollhouse” beyond its one-girl, one-story construct.
In Solondz’s latest, “Storytelling,” which garnered luke-warm reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the director keeps the subject mater robust but unsuccessfully widens the scope beyond his previous works. The skinny, 87-minute picture is broken into two segments entitled “Fiction” and “Non-fiction.”
There was actually a third section shot, which starred James Van Der Beek as a closeted high school football star abashedly outed by a recently surfaced videotape that shows the jocko participating in an exposing sex act. The role was rumored to have stretched the WB poster boy 100 yards further than anything in his sugar-sweet filmography. Unfortunately, the scenes were dropped because of “creative differences,” and consequently the audience is left without a homo-erotic “Varsity Blues” sequel.
Nonetheless, “Storytelling” kicks off with a 25- minute “short” that remains as the film’s jewel. “Fiction” gets things rolling in true Solondz fashion with young lovers Vi and Marcus (Selma Blair, “A Guy Thing” and Leo Fitzpatrick, “Kids”) making love in a dorm room at their white-bread state school, a Hofstra-esque campus set in the mid-80s. The scene is awkward, though not exploitative, due to Marcus’ apparent cerebral palsy (Solondz gives Marcus power by having him breakup with Vi soon after).
Both seemingly met in their creative writing class, taught by the Pulitzer Prize winning Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom, “Coastlines”), a washed-up professor whose winning book, “A Sunday Lynching,” is discussed only in passing, but gives the teacher unmatched power. Mr. Scott attacks his student’s drivel, proclaiming Marcus’ tritely autobiographic short story a “banal piece of shit.” Vi defends her ex-boyfriend, but in Solondz’s almost clownish magnification of hypocrisy, the teacher/pupil ultimately settle the dispute between the sheets.
It is during Vi and Mr. Scott’s sex act that Solondz breaks ground. Slapped with an NC-17 rating early last year, the director was forced to oblige his New Line distribution contract (the first major studio deal of Solondz career) with an R-rated version. But in F-the-man fashion, Solondz executed his total creative freedom clause and placed a giant red box over the graphic sex scene.
“Fiction” resolves nothing in the end, but paints a group of characters that should have been allowed, if not a tighty bow, at least some wrapping paper. It really is written and shot like a film-school project and leaves much lingering in question.
“Non-Fiction” returns to present time, taking much of the burden off of Solondz’s shoulders and slapping it on his neophyte filmmaker, Toby (played by an excellent Paul Giamatti, “Big Fat Liar). The socially dufe-like documentarian is set on capturing teen strife in his film “The American Scooby,” a very pointed shot at “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes who openly criticized “Happiness.”
It’s unfortunate that Mendes gains the upper hand in the debate. Although “American Beauty” walked in warn-out shoes (Solondz’s argument throughout this section of the film), “Non-Fiction” again does nothing in tying anything together. There is the documentary subject, the ambiguously gay Scooby (Mark Webber, “Whiteboys”) who leads Toby through his meaningless days set in an affluent New Jersey suburb. John Goodman (“The Big Lebowski”) sneaks into the picture as the gregarious father bent on getting his 1050 SAT son an acceptance to an Ivy League school through the power of the dollar (an intimation by Solondz about the sickening college admissions process).
The biggest problem with “Non-Fiction” and really the entire film is the forced shock-factor. “Happiness,” unlike this film, dishes out the over-the-top snippets on the back of a curve, no the vanilla fastball. The ending of “Non-Fiction” insults the viewer’s intelligence with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge final 30 seconds.
Solondz is better than this. Some of the faults of “Storytelling” can be blamed on the MPAA’s restrictions. But Solondz should have really known what he was getting into when he signed on New Line’s dotted line. So, I’m not going to give him that excuse. This is just a bad story, unfortunately told, rather than kept inside.
GRADE: C
