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Fueling the Flames
Labor and greens must join forces to stop Bush’s assault on the planet.
More African-Americans are running for governor than ever before.
Rigged elections are widespread throughout Africa, and not just in Zimbabwe.
A New Detente?
The Bush administration cozies up to China.
Disinformation follies.
Marriage proposal.
No evidence, but a Missouri inmate is facing execution.
Britain passes measures to elect more women.
Seeds of Destruction
Genetic contamination raises stakes on GMOs.
Bad Math
Pennsylvania debates are calculated to exclude Greens.
HMOs aim to stop even modest reform in its tracks.
BOOKS: Israel, the occupation and "apartheid."
Disasters in Waiting
BOOKS: Ahmed Rashid on more impending Jihad.
Play It Again, Sam
MUSIC: How multiple reissues keep record labels flush.
FILM: The moral dilemmas of Storytelling.
An interview with ®™mark's Frank Guerrero.
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March 1, 2002
Unreliable Narrators
The moral dilemmas of Storytelling.
His latest film, Storytelling (The New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris concluded
his review by proclaiming, “I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.”), again
raises the questions that continue to polarize viewers: Is Solondz a fearless
satirist whose attacks on good taste constitute a needed breath of fresh air?
Or is he an inveterate misanthrope who sneers at his caricatured protagonists
with a marked lack of empathy? Storytelling, which is most intriguing for its
merciless self-scrutiny, demonstrates that there is more than a certain amount
of truth to both assertions. A two-part variation on Solondz’s usual themes of adolescent angst and
suburban squalor, the film opens with an episode coyly titled “Fiction.”
Scorn is heaped on both the masochistic rituals of creative writing seminars
and guilty white liberalism—and the cleverness of this assault on political
correctness resides in our gradual realization that these disparate forms of
self-delusion are in fact intertwined. The focus is on Vi (Selma Blair), a student
at a college where the manicured lawns and antiseptic buildings are indistinguishable
from the landscape of an industrial park. The seeming blandness of Solondz’s settings and characters enables him
to up the ante as a provocateur. If there is something a little cruel about
the fate he designs for the attractive and well-intentioned Vi, her creator
proves ultimately more rueful than contemptuous. The hapless heroine feels like
a good citizen when she dates a fellow student stricken with cerebral palsy,
proudly dons a Steve Biko T-shirt in class, and admires the social realist novels
written by Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), her dour African-American creative-writing
instructor. While it would be easy to dismiss this scenario as a conservative indictment
of campus altruism, Vi is not being condemned for her left-liberal agenda but
for her shallowness and hypocrisy—traits that implicitly extend to the
critics who condemn films like Storytelling for their lack of “positive”
characters. Mr. Scott, certainly no paragon of virtue himself, cavalierly trashes an earnest
but sentimental story by Vi’s disabled paramour as a “piece of shit”
and seduces his female students with impunity. But as Vi prepares for a tryst
with Mr. Scott in his bathroom and peruses nude photos of other co-eds, she
mutters under her breath, “Don’t be racist, don’t be racist.”
Her self-rebuke might be viewed as an admonition to the audience as they ponder
a black protagonist who is neither a cardboard villain nor an idealized hero
in the mold of the characters once played by Sidney Poitier. What follows has become Storytelling’s most notorious scene—Mr. Scott
exercises his power by having passionless anal sex with Vi and ordering her
to abuse him with racist epithets. Capitulating to the demands of the film’s
distributor, which imposed a contractual obligation on Solondz to deliver an
“R” rating, the scene is digitally obscured by what he has termed
a “Stalinist red box.” Yet the bowdlerized sex scene allows us to
envision a coupling that is undoubtedly much smuttier and graphic than what
was included in the original cut. Vi, rather predictably, bases her next writing exercise on this decidedly unerotic
encounter with Mr. Scott. Equally unsurprising is the savaging she receives
from her fellow students—accusations of misogyny, racism and affectation
are volunteered with the hollow proviso that it’s all a matter of opinion.
Vi’s protest that “it happened” inspires her unflappable instructor
to utter what might be Solondz’s credo—“once you start writing
it all becomes fiction.”
The self-regard of documentarians who simultaneously “love” their
subjects and cash in on their foibles certainly offers rich material for satire.
(As far back as 1979, Albert Brooks’ Real Life offered a gentler, although
in certain respects more devastating, look at the same milieu.) Unfortunately,
while the impact of “Fiction” is comparable to a concise blackout
sketch, “Nonfiction” misfires by tackling a much larger canvas with
a similarly minimalist approach that proves more sterile than enlightening.
The more diffuse focus of the second half almost confirms the accusations lobbed
by Solondz’s most severe critics—the characters are buffoons that
make us feel perilously smug. This tendency becomes especially glaring with the arrival on the scene of Scooby
(Mark Webber), the vapid teen-age “star” of Toby’s movie. An
affectless young man whose only ambition is to become famous like his television
idols, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman, he merely appears to prove the
tautological proposition that an intellectually impoverished environment, besotted
with pop culture, produces apolitical, numbed kids. Scooby’s unsavory family, moreover, provides many strained opportunities
for glib humor. His blowhard father (played by the always convincing John Goodman)
comes off as a more prosperous version of Ralph Kramden. His mother (Julie Hagerty),
obsessed with Israel’s survival but oblivious to her Hispanic maid’s
privations, is little more than a ninny. The plight of the maid, Consuelo (Lupe
Ontiveros), could easily be mined for more than a few cheap shots. In the final
analysis, however, she is, like her employers, another expendable gargoyle. These shenanigans are enlivened with occasional barbed humor. Solondz has great
fun mocking the hand-held camera work and artistic pretensions of the largely
clueless Toby. The mock-documentary’s futile attempt at lyricism allows
him to wreak revenge on director Sam Mendes (who told an interviewer of his
disgust after seeing Happiness) and insert an enjoyably gratuitous put-down
of his American Beauty. A school psychologist’s claim that the “youth
of Bosnia” experienced “less stress” during the siege of Sarajevo
“than what American high school students go through when applying to college”
captures our culture of narcissism with deadpan accuracy. Nevertheless, as Storytelling
lurches towards a preordained bleak conclusion, it seems less like an astringent
critique of American conformism than a filmmaker’s attempt to round up
the usual boorish suspects. Richard Porton is a member of Cineaste’s editorial board and the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination. |
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In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
eplying to critics who damned The Picture of Dorian Gray as “immoral,”
Oscar Wilde maintained that his supposedly decadent novel was in fact “too
moral.” Todd Solondz finds himself in a similar quandary. Despite making
films that have been condemned as “nihilistic” and “amoral,”
he is, in many respects, an unrepentant, albeit misunderstood, moralist. In
any case, after skewering suburbia in Welcome to the Dollhouse and insisting
in Happiness that pedophilia can be more banal than evil, it’s become clear
that he possesses an unerring talent for making critics and audiences both squeamish
and irate.
n a similar vein, the film’s longer, more ambitious segment, “Nonfiction,”
takes as its departure point the premise that documentary can be as slippery
and opaque as fiction. Toby (Paul Giamatti), an aspiring filmmaker whose pale
visage and enormous glasses makes him Solondz’s unflattering alter ago,
clings to his dream of achieving fame and fortune with a documentary on the
pressures experienced by college-bound suburban high school students. (While
Solondz comes off in interviews as one tough—and articulate—nerd,
Toby is merely a talentless wimp.)