Todd Solondz wants you to understand the process of storytelling, so he has made a film about it, called Storytelling. Solondz' motive is not entirely pure. His previous films, Welcome to the Doll House and Happiness, tended to polarize audiences and, in particular, critics, some of whom were viciously opposed to his work. Storytelling is his way of telling his critics to look more closely (or perhaps it's something ruder?).

Storytelling contains two unrelated stories. The first, titled "Fiction," is about a student in an undergraduate writing class who writes a short story based on a sexual experience she had with her professor. The second, inevitably titled "Non-fiction," is about a would-be documentary filmmaker who gets a middle class suburban Jewish family to agree to be his subject.

The filmmaker in the second part is played by Paul Giammati, who, with his sharp features and big round glasses, resembles Solondz. When Giammati's editor, looking at an early cut of his documentary, tells him that it's obvious he feels superior to his subjects, for whom he seems to have no empathy, it's hard not to see this as Solondz' attempt to bring up problems stated by his own critics so he can answer them.

Now, I've never bought the line that Solondz was a misanthrope who hated his characters; the evidence seems to suggest the opposite. Take the scene everybody remembers from Happiness: A father tries to get his young son's friend to eat food laced with sleeping pills so the man can rape him. At first, the man's frustrated efforts come off as humourous; it isn't until the boy accepts the drug-laced food that the audience begins to sense how horrible the man's actions are (and the more enlightened members consider how their laughter makes them complicit in what has happened).

What few people remember is the following scene: In a hospital, a doctor tells the grief-stricken family what he suspects happened. The pain of the aftermath of a sexual attack is rarely portrayed in film; it suggests a highly developed degree of empathy for the suffering of the child and his family.

Solondz has a more complex artistic agenda, however. Later in the film, in a scene that is almost unbearable to watch, the father confesses his lust for little boys to his son. He comes across as a man who is steeped in self-loathing over desires he cannot control. While his crimes are heinous, his suffering is real. Again, this shows Solondz having empathy for a character, but, in this case, I suspect many viewers would have preferred to see him portrayed as an unsympathetic monster. What those who claim that the filmmaker is too hard on his characters actually seem to be saying is that, on this character, he was not hard enough.

In any case, Giammati's character protests this criticism, claiming that he loves his characters. Here again, though, Solondz is subtler than his critics would allow, for Giammati ultimately betrays his subjects by making them look ridiculous in a cut of the documentary screened for an audience after he promised his film would portray them sympathetically.

This can be seen as another instance of Solondz directly responding to his critics; in this case, those who argued that he should not be inviting audiences to laugh at the seriously sordid subject matter of his films. But here is where the Solondz/Giammati comparison breaks down. Giammati asks his audience to laugh at his characters without demanding that it acknowledge their suffering, a form of exploitation which I believe Solondz avoids.

The sex scene in the first part of Storytelling is ugly. The professor, an older black man, tells the student to take off her clothes, then backs her up against a wall, penetrating her as he repeatedly tells her to say "[racial epithet] [intercourse] me hard," which she does with increasing intensity.

(Solondz was told that he had to remove the scene or receive an NC17 rating, which is generally considered death at the box office. Instead, he placed a big red square on the screen over the bodies. I find this strange, given that the language in the scene is far more offensive than the act itself. Even stranger, the scene was shown unchanged in Ontario, which is not known for its progressive attitude toward film--for example, Fat Girl, which can be seen in the USA, cannot be seen here. Odd and wondrous are the ways of the censors.)

When the girl presents a story based on this encounter to her writing class, the other students consider it trite and unbelievable. In some ways, they could be criticizing the encounter as Solondz has written it in the film. The fact that the black professor happens to be in the bar the girl goes to after her boyfriend has broken up with her is a coincidence we usually wouldn't accept in a work of fiction. The professor himself is a cipher who rarely speaks and shows virtually no emotion; he appears to be a poorly
drawn character. As for what he says during the sex scene, it certainly appears to be a trite idea of interracial sexual politics.

"But," the student argues, "it really happened!" You don't like my characters? Solondz seems to be asking. Well, people are like that. While the reality defense would satisfy most filmmakers, Solondz is smarter than that, and allows his professor to have the last word: "Once you write it down, it's all fiction."

Keeping this in mind, one way of interpreting the sexual encounter is that it should not be taken as a literal event, but a dramatization of the short story the student writes. Thus, the triteness of the encounter is not an indication that Solondz is a bad filmmaker, but rather is a series of choices he makes in order to illustrate how bad a writer the student is.

I would justify this by pointing out that the characters in the film outside this sequence are complex and interesting. To use an obvious example: The student's boyfriend has cerebral palsy. In the opening scene of the film, he angrily accuses her of losing interest in having sex with him because the thrill of sex with a handicapped person is no longer transgressive enough for her; later in the film, he accuses her of condescending to him when she tells him she likes a story he wrote which the class obviously thinks, and
convinces him, is terrible.

While there is some truth in his allegations, there is also self-pity and probably some misdirected anger. But that's the point. Unlike most American filmmakers, Solondz does not condescend to his handicapped characters, showing that they can be as just as petty and mean-spirited as the rest of us. (Sean Penn, take note.)

Storytelling is an interesting film about the junction between art and reality. Like all of Solondz' films, it is sometimes difficult to watch, but it rewards attention with a lot of thoughtful observations about human relationships. Critics take note.

Copyright © 2002 Ira Nayman. All Rights Reserved.