![]() ![]() What with its arch reverence for the beauty of normality, and a smirking paean of praise to the image of a plastic bag blowing in the breeze, it is a rather too obvious attack on Sam Mendes's American Beauty. But the highlight is the film that results from all this: American Scooby. Again, Solondz arranges some liberal chinaware in close proximity to his habitually bucking, snorting bull: the holocaust is pointedly discussed in a glancing, ironic fashion, and the family turn out to be as cruel as you like to their Salvadorian maid. It is about a would-be documentarist, Paul Giamatta, making a film about a hopelessly dopey high school student, Scooby (Mark Webber), and their uptight, prosperous Jewish family: John Goodman as the massive paterfamilias Julie Hagerty as the quavering, fragile mom. Is Solondz applying this stricture to himself? Or inoculating himself against it, in some way? His second part, "Fact", would seem to suggest he might be. Just because it is based on fact, says Mr Scott, does not exempt the author from the responsibility for having written a work of fiction. But then, because Vi writes a pitiably callow short story about her experience, Solondz is able to engineer a distancing scene: a critical discussion of all that has just happened. The themes of race and sex are raised in the most disquieting way: Solondz rolls a hand-grenade into the politically correct academy. Selma Blair plays Vi, the miserable, mixed-up co-ed with low self-esteem who breaks up with her CP-suffering boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick, from Larry Clark's Kids) and begins a catastrophic flirtation with Mr Scott, played by Robert Wisdom, the black man who teaches their class - a pitilessly frank critic whose ego-trampling assessments of his students' work are delivered with a cold glitter. The first is set in a university creative writing class around the mid-1980s, though it could easily be a present-day setting. Storytelling is divided into two parts, "Fiction" and "Fact". But it still pulls its punches - those killer blows that landed directly on our collective solar plexus in Happiness. It is actually more subtle and indirect than that. Storytelling has been described as suffering from a kind of "third-album" syndrome, a shrill rebuke to his critics. ![]() This is the least satisfying and the least funny Solondz film so far, at least partly because it enters into a fatal dialogue with an assumed gallery of dissenters. But where in his earlier movies he is able to ratchet up the provocation and the appallingly inventive horror further and further, in Storytelling he retreats into self-consciousness and a laboured pre-emptive attack on his critics. Is it in bad taste to show a disabled person having sex? Why? Aren't they allowed to have sex? Would it be OK to show him having sex with a woman who wasn't quite so attractive? And when he is so insensitive to her needs as to whine about his writing project, for all the world as if he has been doing her a favour, should we in fact despise him? Who has victim status here? Who are we laughing at? What are we laughing at?įrom this characteristically unsettling opening, Solondz goes on to make us all a lot more uncomfortable. No one else could up-end our preconceptions and make sport with our timid liberal taboos quite so uncompromisingly. ![]() This brilliant, scabrous scene could only come from Todd Solondz, the director of Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, devastating anatomies of American high-school suburbia. As she rolls off him, it becomes clear that he has cerebral palsy - he does not baulk at using the word "spaz" - and then he whines about wanting to read her a piece of creative writing he's been working on. A young man and woman are coming to the end of an unsatisfactory sex session on his single bed. ![]()
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