‘Storytelling’

Director Todd Solondz produces a ‘Breakfast Club’ for the new millennium.   [R]

By: Bob Brown
   How can one filmmaker sow such belly laughs among the horrors? Humor and life tragedies are uneasy bedfellows in director Todd Solondz’s universe, as evidenced by his previous efforts, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996) and Happiness (1998). Now comes the two-part Storytelling, which proves Solondz has just been warming up.
   What does the first part, "Fiction," have to do with the second, "Non-fiction"? Each can stand on its own as a separate film, but Solondz has claimed they’re connected. I think it’s no accident that the screen titles of both parts are in quotation marks. They’re about creating narratives — the first ostensibly as short stories, the second as a true-life film. But what is fact and what fiction? The difficulty is in finding the truth about ourselves. We need that to create the narratives that will get us through a life which is, in the end, a crap shoot.

Julie Hagerty and John Goodman play concerned parents in Todd Solondz’s Storytelling.

   In "Fiction," the writing instructor from hell, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), presides sullenly at the head of the seminar table, trashing the students’ feeble efforts at writing and self-criticism. By turns, he tears down the aspirations and self-esteem of both Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick) and his girlfiend, Vi (Selma Blair), aided by the piercing criticisms of Catherine (who, as we learn, shares a sadomasochistic secret with Mr. Scott). She’s the only student who speaks fearlessly, regardless of how insensitive or politically shocking it may be. "But you don’t have to pay attention to what I say," she adds ingeniously.
   The class is a microcosm of mid-1980s liberal-thinking hypocrisy, which can make for nervous laughs. "I thought he would be different," Vi wails when breaking up with Marcus, "He had CP." Marcus had written a story that was simply his life dressed up in a hope. His story’s character is a young man who is redeemed by love, so that his cerebral palsy virtually disappears. CP now stands for "Cerebral Person." Cutting through his classmates’ deference to Marcus’ condition, Mr. Scott labels the work a cliché-ridden "piece of s—t."
   In her own confessional story, Vi exposes her willing sexual humiliation at the hands of Mr. Scott, so that having entered college with hope, she leaves knowing she has become "a whore…" Her classmates lash out at the story’s politics and authenticity, but when she says it’s the truth, Mr. Scott dismisses the claim: "When it gets down on paper, it becomes fiction." At least she’s improving, he says. "You’ve got a beginning, a middle and an end." Fade to black.
   "Nonfiction" is longer but far less neat. Toby (Paul Giamatti) is a shoe salesman whose foray into documentary filmmaking could be the flip side of short-story writing. Whereas the students of "Fiction" try to present real life in the guise of fiction, Toby is perhaps unwittingly creating a fiction from the trappings of real experience. He wants to make a great documentary that reveals the truth of high school life through the daily doings of his chanced-upon subject, Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber). Scooby, who might be Toby’s younger self, has similar unrealistic ambitions: to be a talk show host. To do it, "I guess I’ll just have to find connections," he says.
   What ensues is largely a romp through life with Scooby, as seen in part through the lens of Toby and test-screened periodically for effect. "But don’t you think it’s funny?" Toby says worriedly at one point to his film editor (Franke Potente of Run Lola Run.)
   Dad Marty Livingston (a very large John Goodman) presides over the seminar that is the family dining table, where the SATs, college, the Holocaust and hypnotism tumble in for discussion. So fine an actor is Goodman that, merely by staring, he can mentally hit a smart-alecky kid upside the head from five feet away. Mom Fern (ditzily portrayed by Julie Hagerty) and brothers Brady (Noah Fleiss) and Mikey (Jonathan Osser) fill out the family, each with talents and problems that could easily anchor another film. It’s like a sitcom gone bad.
   Pay attention to the family housekeeper, Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros in a fine portrayal), who is, as in sitcoms of yore, constantly in harness serving Twinkies, scrubbing indelible spots, dusting unreachable shelves and wiping up a Niagara of spills.
   There is plenty of humor here, but the earnest liberal righteousness that concerned students from the mid-1980s has given way to one of callousness, to beating the system, to entitlement. It’s like, you goof the SATs and get a 220 in verbal and a 710 in math, and Princeton accepts you. "They thought it was weird," says Scooby, "but good weird." Not to mention connections and alumni giving, as Dad points out.
   Here, the film takes a sobering turn that some may find jarring and not entirely successful. There is a family tragedy that won’t be healed. And Scooby sneaks a look at one of Toby’s test screenings to find that his life is not what test audiences are seeing at all. The words and the events are real, but the effect is one big joke.
   It’s hard to keep a balancing act like this in the air through to the end. Solondz slams the lid hard and it can take your breath away. In fact, each part ends with a pithy one-liner of the kind that used to be the hallmark of films, like, "Tomorrow is another day." In this case, tomorrow is another life.
Rated R. Contains strong sexual content, language and some drug use.