Todd Solondz’s 1998 movie Happiness was one of the most extraordinary movies of its year: a multi-narrative examination of sexual obsession (including paedophilia), it told its shocking tale(s) with deadpan humour and an unconventional approach to morality, making for extremely disturbing and compelling viewing. Solondz performs that most difficult and necessary artistic procedure of subjecting the assumptions and prejudices of society at large to quizzical, even-handed, and quite fearless dissection.
Consequently, Solondz’s new movie, Storytelling, comes with high expectations — at least for those of us who appreciate the particular vision and style of a highly individualistic writer-director. Unfortunately, it is something of a disappointment.
Storytelling is divided into two sections, “Fiction” and “Nonfiction”. The first and shorter part opens with a superbly strange, unsettling scene, which sets the tone. A young couple (which is to say of college-going age) are having sex. The first surprise is that the male partner is spastic — someone living with cerebral palsy. The second is that barely have they brought their somewhat disengaged romping to a conclusion than he’s asking her to read a story of his, or, more properly, reread a story he has now rewritten. They are in the same creative-writing class; the story, inevitably, is about the sexual and emotional life of a young man suffering from cerebral palsy …
And so we’re into a sharply reflexive take on what it means to make art from life. It gets more complicated, and more blackly (and I mean blackly) humorous, from there: what if the girl from the opening scene should also draw her next fiction-writing assignment from life, and from an encounter with the (black — and very acerbic) creative-writing teacher himself? We are in the mise en abyme, peering into the abyss.
This first part of Storytelling, then, works very well indeed. With masterful brevity, it contains enough provocation to fill most ordinary full-length features, though its very brevity is part of its brilliance. It has great performances from Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick and Robert Wisdom (who is particularly chilling). It sets up a myriad tortuous questions about power, sex, identity, race; about how we narrate, justify, make sense of ourselves, our actions and what happens to us. (It also contains the wonderful, dark, hilarious and touching line, spoken in the opening scene: “You hardly even sweat any more when we have sex.”)
Then we’re into part two, “Nonfiction”. This section focuses on a suburban family, in particular the eldest son, Scooby, who is a high school slacker with very little going on upstairs; or downstairs, for that matter. When a filmmaker barely beyond amateur status asks Scooby and his family to be the subjects of his latest project, they don’t angst for long before accepting. For Scooby, in particular, this would appear to be a sudden injection of meaning into his existence: hitherto his approach to life has been one of bored, passive entitlement — entitlement to fame, fortune, all the rest of the phantasmagoria offered by what used to be called “the American Dream”. That anyone is still dreaming it is remarkable. At any rate, the message of part two is clear: not only is youth wasted on the young, but America is wasted on Americans.
There are great moments in this second part of Storytelling. There is a fabulously wrong-headed discussion of the Holocaust around the dinner table, and the role of the Hispanic domestic worker continues the theme of racism kicked off in part one, while adding the issue of class — and what other American filmmaker tackles that? The fruits of the youngest child’s interest in hypnotism are hilarious as well as, in a combination Solondz has made his own, heart-breakingly sad. There are also good performances from John Goodman, Julie Hagerty, Paul Giamatti, Mark Webber and Jonathan Osser.
Yet somehow part two fails to add up, or to go where it could; it lacks the razor-sharp brevity of the first part, or the meticulous mercilessness of Happiness, and seems to dwindle into predictable conclusions in both the narrative and the moral sense.
In fact, Storytelling feels like a three-part movie in two halves. I have no idea what the third term would be in the “Fiction”, “Nonfiction” series, but Storytelling feels as though it has a masterful first act, an overlong second act and no third act at all. It is exceptionally presumptuous to be making suggestions to a filmmaker of Solondz’s patent genius, but I’d say he should have trimmed “Nonfiction” and given us a concluding third part. I wish I could think, though, what that part could be; perhaps Solondz couldn’t either. What lies beyond the fictions we make of fact and the realities we take for granted? I don’t know.