The Nearly Perfect Storytelling Represents a Giant Step in Todd Solondz's Artistic Development

Todd Solondz's voice has changed. The pitiless sneer of Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness has acquired booming depth that makes his latest film, Storytelling, as funny as it is deliberately jolting. Storytelling proves at least one young filmmaker's growth out of the adolescent derisiveness that has prevailed in mainstream American movies into a more honest (less cynical but no less scathing) form of expression. Film culture is currently going through fits of self-deception with In the Bedroom, Monster's Ball, A Beautiful Mind and Black Hawk Down. It's hard to remember when so many disingenuous, corrupt or plain stupid movies have occupied the public imagination or distracted from real-life complexity. Storytelling's rude honesty couldn't be better timed.

Two stories (called "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction") explore truth and naivete?the everyday chaos our senses can't deny, and the world as people would like to see it. (A rumored third story, featuring a gay-sex aggressive James Van der Beek, was cut. It probably made this near-perfect film as unwieldy as Happiness.) From the "Fiction" sketch of foundering college students to the "Non-Fiction" dissection of family dynamics, Solondz parallels his own maturation. But the consistent lonely-youth theme persists: "Where does all their suffering come from?" Solondz seeks the answer in the absurdity of American experience. His 1996 breakthrough feature Welcome to the Dollhouse told the story of an awkward schoolgirl feeling unallied in her suburban world. However, the film's not altogether sympathetic tone appealed to the kind of people who were themselves cruelly mocking assholes in junior high and found justification in Solondz's satire. They had not become compassionate; age simply made them condescending. They enjoyed the characters' cruelty (and masochism), which Solondz, at that point, had not yet worked out for himself. Now Solondz refuses even those jerks a place to smirk (which explains why this leap forward has met critical resistance). Storytelling uncovers American hypocrisy. His back-to-back tales are the most clear-eyed view of American life this side of Altman. With every humiliation bouncing back upon its perpetrator, Solondz forces audiences to reconsider that buzz they get from inhumanity.

There've never before been movie characters like the "Fiction" campus slut Vi (Selma Blair) and her boyfriend, cerebral-palsied student Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick). Introduced mid-fuck, they finish off with mind games: he's brutally self-deprecating and she's brutally self-deceptive. He can't stand the thought of being used; she can't accept the idea that she's a user. Marcus accuses Vi with sad candor ("Pleasure isn't there anymore. The kinkiness is gone. You've become kind"). His terse confession suggests Morrissey with the lyricism burned away. Solondz understands the raw pain of loneliness but is absolutely devoid of sentimentality. Pathetic human exchange escalates when Marcus erupts at Vi's betrayal in class (where his short story about their relationship was unkindly received). He bluntly challenges Vi's white-girl grade-grubbing before their black creative-writing instructor: "You just want to fuck him like every other white cunt on campus."

Immediately, Solondz goes from personal crisis to social crisis. Storytelling tackles racism as a form of dishonesty?exposing an ideology of class, sex, race deceptions?and here's where Solondz's audacity becomes special. The brutish Neil LaBute merely panders to social fears, but Solondz actually uses the audience's dread expectations to scrutinize suppressed insecurities. Marcus, Vi and the prof, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), belong to a culture that layers its hypocrisies with additional (literary, political) evasions. The classroom comments?a maze of resentful theories and p.c. non-think?mask a variety of self-protective notions people normally never question. But Solondz does, moving right in, under the skin. During an assignation with Mr. Scott, Vi discovers his cache of porn snapshots (white girls in bondage), but her first response is, "Don't be a racist," rather than, "Don't be a sexist." Not just funny, Vi's reflex reveals her utter confusion. Solondz demands a complicated response to the mess this girl has stepped in. Better than Dollhouse's scapegoating-and-victimization, Storytelling discloses the various guises of egotism?the stories a girl tells herself about her desperation, that a handicapped boy uses to feel equal to others, that an author tells himself about the students he competes with.

In his second story, "Non-Fiction," Solondz reveals the current fallacy of media truth as it is pursued by aspiring documentary filmmaker Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti). Like those creative-writing students, Toby has the temerity to reinterpret the world around him. (His best friend is played by Mike Schank from the mockumentary American Movie.) Toby focuses on Scooby (played by Mark Webber), a high school student as desolate as himself, and exploits the teen's alienation from his suburban Jewish family. This somewhat reflects Solondz's own confrontational approach (and the underlying desire for success and acceptance), but there's a very taut dramatic line and a tightrope-walk between humor and pathos. Yes, "Non-Fiction" is stranger, possibly even richer, than "Fiction." Good screenwriting makes Toby's plain desperation a touching contrast to Scooby's disaffection. Each character's problems illuminate another's?even Scooby's Punch-and-Judy parents (John Goodman and Julie Hagerty) and especially his little brother Mikey's (Jonathan Osser) debate with the family's Central American maid Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros).

A lot of critics wanted the large-scaled Happiness to be a great film, but Solondz hadn't clarified his conflict with suburbia or his distaste for the urban anomie we all share. Now he has. Storytelling wins no higher compliment than saying its range of characters and frustrations suggests a compacted Short Cuts. Solondz mixes a humanist's attention to the commonplace with a surrealist's instinct for what unnerves folks. It's done by spoofing the modern processes of fiction and nonfiction?everyone's (not just professionals') means of asserting control by fabricating meaning in their lives. "I'm not an idiot, man. I watch tv," Scooby says?even while disengaging from a friend's shyly professed adoration. And when Toby declares, "I'm a documentary filmmaker," Scooby's response?"You mean like Blair Witch Project?"?perfectly expresses today's degraded concept of art. These aren't easy potshots but genuine after-effects of postmodern tv culture, just as race relations in James Toback's Black and White were a hiphop after-effect. Webber's glum, faraway look?his willingness to sacrifice himself to popularity?is authentic and sobering. He evokes the dissatisfaction of contemporary lost youth the way Jean-Pierre Leaud's unsuspecting stare did at the end of The 400 Blows.

All Solondz's actors achieve wrenching expressions of cluelessness or hopelessness. If it isn't quite empathetic it's better than misanthropy, and the difference proves Solondz's artistic development. (Osser and Ontiveros share an unforgettable face-off; they dispel all pieties about spoiled brats and noble peasants.) Storytelling satirizes the way people absolve themselves from blame, but it also sensitizes our awareness of this. The crucial title song by Scottish cult band Belle and Sebastian advises, "When you're a storyteller you think that you're above/Responsibility." Solondz isn't only questioning his own filmmaking motives, but, like Belle and Sebastian, he affects childhood neutrality, owning up to the ambivalence?the meanness?lurking within "innocence." (Belle and Sebastian is the most deceptive and unsettling of recent pop groups because their fey sound is actually calculating and shrewd.) Solondz takes "responsibility" seriously as an easily forgotten part of relationships and artmaking.

?It's ironic that Storytelling's boldest challenge was forced upon Solondz. During "Fiction"'s interracial sex scene, Vi and Mr. Scott's buggery is hidden?censored?by an opaque red block. We hear Mr. Scott encourage Vi to repeat fetishized obscenities, but the block hides the sight of their humping. Solondz reportedly resorted to this blatant device in response to distributor pressure, but the shocking and hilarious effect is greater than he could have planned. The red censorship block connects, subliminally, to Vi's first view of Mr. Scott at a corner table in a bar: ominous, doused in red light, a demonic racial stereotype. Solondz teases a cultural taboo (exactly what Monster's Ball does not do). The red block so perfectly ridicules society's hidden prejudices that only prudes (or those dangerously in denial) would resent Solondz's audacity or disregard what it reveals. By inserting a closeup of the couple's faces, then cutting back to red?to "protect"?Solondz makes viewers question the difference between imagining or seeing a transgressive act. Ignoring or acknowledging it. Moviegoers frequently implicated in filmmakers' subliminal biases rarely think about it. They get to enjoy being morally obtuse (as with In the Bedroom, Monster's Ball, etc.). That's hypocrisy's payoff. In Storytelling Solondz has found the voice?and the means?to deconstruct any and all excuses.