Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/05/13/solondz_responds_to_critics_in_storytelling.php
Monday, May 13, 2002
Just thinking of Todd Solondz makes me laugh. His films are just so irreverent to many of society's sensibilities that I can't help but to think of the ridiculous knee-jerk reactions they inevitably arouse in so many people. The Moral Majority types wag their fingers at his naughtiness. (For example, he includes camera shots of Phillip Seymour Hoffman ejaculating in his last movie Happiness.) And the people on the other side, the race hucksters, deprecate a depiction in his latest film Storytelling of a black professor playing to the white guilt of a female student so he can sodomize her.
Movie critics, too, have not been so receptive to Solondz. Many consider him arrogant because of what they see as his contempt for the modern-day, middle-class suburbanites who have become the recurring subjects of his works. Others, unappreciative of his somewhat sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile, dismiss him as nothing more than a peddler of shock.
The situation is humorous because while these groups have overlooked one of today's most brilliant filmmakers, they have almost universally praised a truly contemptuous and pretentious director, Sam Mendes of American Beauty fame. Mendes himself has publicly derided Solondz for being 'condescending' to his characters. (I would like to ask Mendes if he would rather Solondz concentrate all his pet political issues into a single homophobic, wife-abusing, staid Republican military man like Mendes does in American Beauty so that he can create more sympathetic, helpless, self-pitying victims.)
In Storytelling Solondz partially rebuts many of his detractors criticisms in his examination of how art is often misunderstood. The film is split up into to parts, 'Fiction' and 'Nonfiction.'
The film begins with 'Fiction.' We see two college kids, an attractive girl named Vi (Selma Blair) and her cerebral palsy ridden boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), struggling to have intercourse. Afterwards Marcus asks Vi if she would like to hear the new short story he wrote for their writing class. Vi has already heard the presumably mediocre story and is still evasive after an unyielding Marcus informs her that he has made changes to it since her last reading. Out of legitimate means of convincing her, he milks his disease to his advantage. 'You're tired of me,' he says. 'You hardly sweat anymore when we have sex. The kinkiness is gone. You've become kind.' We gather that this kind of blackmail is a motif in the relationship and that Vi, despite her intelligence, is easily manipulated.
The next day when Marcus's story is picked to pieces by his classmates and his savage, unfeeling professor (Robert Wisdom), he blames Vi for his humiliation for not warning him about his story's deficiencies. Rejected by Marcus, Vi goes to a bar that night where she runs into the professor and falls for his deviousness and his cool, relaxed demeanor. Later in the night, we see the professor anally intruding a half-heartedly cooperative Vi, while she shouts at his directive, 'Fuck me hard, nigger.'
The short story Vi reads in class the next day accounts in pseudonymous first person and graphic detail her experience from the previous night. When she finishes reading it, the class sits silent. One of the professor's lackeys is the first to venture comment. 'It was confessional, yet dishonest. Jane pretends to be horrified by the sexuality that she in fact fetishizes.'
There is perhaps truth to this criticism. Solondz has made Vi's feelings and motives ambiguous enough to make us question whether she in fact does in some small part enjoy encountering certain societal taboos, racial and otherwise, in her relationships with her male counterparts. But the alternative is just as possible and its satirical possibilities poignantly autobiographical of Solondz.
This becomes clearer as criticisms of Vi's story from her peers come forth in a startling crescendo. 'It's unbelievable,' complains a grimacing student. 'It's clichéd,' exclaims another. 'It's disgusting,' says yet another. The students are substitutes for Solondz's unappreciative critics who see his work as disdainful and sensationalistic and miss the underlying truth, or at least the genuine, non-judgmental effort to capture it. When Vi, flustered by the disparaging barrage, erupts with a room-silencing, 'But it happened!' I can imagine Solondz behind the camera smiling with a feeling of vindication.
In the second half of the film, 'Nonfiction,' we meet Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), an out-of-work documentary filmmaker who, looking to do a film about the American family, finds a subject in Scooby, a high school senior, and his family, the Livingstons. As Oxman films Scooby around his school and his home, we learn that Scooby is not an ideal son. He longs for independence and has ambitions to get into the entertainment industry—he has a fantasy in which as he watches his parents (John Goodman and Julie Hagerty) burning on a stake, out of nowhere Conan O'Brien approaches him and asks him to be his sidekick—but is stultifyingly indolent. Oxman finds good documentary material in Scooby and the Livingstons, but finds himself in a predicament when his film, 'American Scooby' is shown at a test screening for critics. When his editor earlier expressed her disapproval of the film, suggesting that it was 'glib and facile to make fun of these people,' Oxman pleadingly responds, 'But I'm not making fun of them. I love them.' The critics, apparently, do not understand as we hear them cavorting and reveling in their superiority as Scooby blunders on screen.
Solondz has said that his films are not for everybody—'especially those people who like them.' I can also see why the people who do not like him think his films are not for them. Perhaps the critics and high-brow filmgoers misunderstand and mock him because, underneath the veneer of compassion, they cannot help but laugh condescendingly at his characters.