Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Storytelling

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Storytelling illustrates human frailty without offering a reason for living

by Matthew T. Everett

Storytelling, the latest movie from director Todd Solondz, opens with a sex scene. It's not explicit, exactly; the standard major studio release shows more flesh. But it's supposed to be real, and it certainly looks more like real sex between two real people than you'll usually see on a multiplex screen. The trouble is, it's too real, or at least too much a representation of Solondz's idea of real, which means dysfunctional, delusional, self-loathing, and utterly, completely alone. The participants, a liberal and opinionated college student named Vi (Selma Blair) and her boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), who suffers from cerebral palsy, are joyless and perfunctory, and they collapse in relief and regret when it's over.

Sex can certainly be like that. But it's the only way Solondz seems to be able to present it, or anything else. His previous films—Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996) and Happiness (1998)—skewered the hypocrisies of the suburban middle class. Happiness, especially, was deliberately shocking, with a pedophile and an emotionally suffocated telephone stalker as the leading men amid a cast of dependent and helpless women. Both movies were unremittingly bitter. Some critics praised Solondz for his honest appraisal of contemporary life; others complained that he was provocative and little else.

He's clearly a talented director. He has an unwavering sense for weakness and pushes his characters and his audience into dark and dangerous territory. But with Storytelling he may have gone too far with too little to offer in return.

The movie is divided into two parts. The first, "Fiction," centers on Vi and Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), the professor for her creative writing class. Scott, who is black, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist with a taste for white undergraduates. (He tells Vi, who is white, that she has "beautiful skin.") One night, after meeting her at a bar, he takes Vi back to his apartment. She hesitates, but follows through under Scott's intense stare (she's standing in the light and he's shrouded in darkness, of course). The scene explodes when Solondz collides the two great taboos of American culture—sex and race. Their encounter is brutal and demeaning, and Vi delivers a single phrase, over and over, that turns it all into an emotional trainwreck of current events.

The second part of Storytelling, "Non-fiction," follows an amateur filmmaker who's trying to make a vaguely-defined and insipid documentary on the crisis of suburban adolescence. The filmmaker, Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), an obvious stand-in for Solondz, recruits Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber), a confused kid with no hope and no future, as his subject. John Goodman plays Scooby's father, who's pushing Scooby toward Princeton. Julie Hagerty is the addle-brained mother. Noah Fleiss is Brady, Scooby's younger brother, a popular high school football star who fears his brother is gay. When Brady is injured in practice and put in a coma, Toby senses that his film is finally heading somewhere. A colleague who's editing the film suggests the footage from the hospital is just what the movie needs.

At the end, Scooby surreptitiously watches a screening of the documentary and realizes that the whole thing has been a farce; the audience laughs out loud as the film reveals his desperate clutch for meaning and direction. It's the only sympathetic moment in Storytelling, but it's not much more than an acknowledgment by Solondz of the way he treats his characters. To call it a commentary on the critical reaction to his movies is a stretch; there's no comment in it. It's simply a footnote.

And that's the trouble. Solondz is daring, in some small way, but not especially brave. The way he piles race, disability, sex, and campus gender politics into the opening 45 minutes is overwhelming, but it's not real. There are completely symbolic shots, as when Mr. Scott places his large black hand over Vi's small white one, that shatter the sense of realness Solondz seems to be after. And the various afflictions his characters suffer—cerebral palsy, brain damage, post-millennial angst, social phobias—make them seem like parts of an allegory rather than real people. Marcus isn't a character; he's a carrier. Mr. Scott isn't a black man; he's A Black Man.

Solondz isn't nearly as honest a filmmaker as he'd like us to believe. His jaundiced view of the world is only half of it, and the other half, the part that Solondz leaves alone, is the tough part. It's easy to see that people are ugly and selfish and lonely. Edification wouldn't help; a pat moral uplift at the end isn't what's missing. What's missing is a reason for doing this. People do, after all, connect with each other and find, or make, some meaning in their lives. When he dares to tackle that, Solondz may finally make a movie that's as real as he wants Storytelling to be.