Storytelling

Just another movie that strives for well, nothing. It seems like the will to actually tell something was replaced by the will to get another award. For me this is just another Robert Altman wannabe at work. But he just can't get the story straight. Deconstructivism sometimes seems, as well as irony, to be used when you are to insecure to tell the whole story. It takes courage to make a straight story (like Lynch), based on really good storytelling. By making the movie a bit arty and confusing you're not putting your ass on the line. You only put the responsibility in the hands of the audience. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. This time didn't work, for me at least.

Furthermore I didn't really see how the two parts interacted in a interesting way. But maybe I've forgotten my Derrida...

At first viewing I though this was the weakest of director Todd Solondz films, however like all of his works, it's impossible to forget once seen. Todd Solondze absorbed criticisms about exploitation, showing misery for misery's sake, and just generally being a "meanie", and turned them into the cinematic equivalent of a "dis song"(rap term for song made specifically as an attack or "beef" with another rapper), with Solondz against critics, carefully trying to explain the notions of "Storytelling". Our first story deals with sex, political correctness, race, and fiction writing, as a young liberal college girl has unpleasant and ironic sexual experience with her Black writing professor. Our second well...with the same subjects just this time with non-fiction in place of fiction. Here Solondz shows us yet another dysfunctional upper middle class Jewish family in chaos, but this time as a "documentary", which shows us the pathetic film maker, the cruel or otherwise ignorant family, and the audience who laughs and scoffs, at it all.

This is a rare film, because it's a film maker addressing his critiques, himself, and his audience all at once. And it has plenty of Solondz trade mark cringe scenes, that veer drastically from comic to dramatic in a matter of breaths. The results are absorbing but like all Solondz it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and makes you honestly question your own moral compass. They say satire is dead if the audience cannot be shocked, but it's also dead if the audience cannot be shamed, in the days where South Park and Family Guy, are on non cable TV any afternoon (l love both shows), shock and shame are concepts so familiar they've lost some of their power. Thankfully just when we've seen it all and were sure that nothing matters and nothing can surprise, startle, or offend us, Todd Solondz will be there to show things can always get worse.

Probably Director Todd Solondz' most mature work to date, Storytelling is split into two parts `Fiction' and `Non-Fiction' - yet similar themes underlie both and pose questions about what we call reality when it comes to prejudice and taboo subjects. Whilst in previous attempts (such as `Happiness') Solondz' work has merely been controversial, in this film he berates political correctness more accurately and more entertainingly. It exposes ridiculous attitudes in the name of political correctness, whether it is the student with an awful essay who almost escapes criticism because he has cerebral palsy, or a black teacher who gets away with being a pervert because his victim doesn't want to entertain thoughts of racism. Nothing is sacred: Jews and the Holocaust also come in for merciless examination. But part of the film involves the story of a `documentary' being made within the main story, by an exploitative screwed up filmmaker who wants to do his own thing in the name of art, so in this sense, Storytelling even turns on itself and questions the validity of using the subject matter that it does. A controversial, worthy, and very entertaining film that stretches your ability to make moral judgements within a convincingly coherent framework.

Another completely original, dark, deeply skewered and audacious commentary on society from Todd S., whom we've come to depend upon for this sort of thing. Not as focused as Dollhouse or as filled-out as Happiness, Storytelling does seem sparse, and that's one of the things I like best about it (I've seen it 4 times now)- how T.S. didn't feel the need to conform to what the majority of film goers (even his OWN crowd!) expect when they enter a theatre.

It's divided into two parts - Fiction, with its heavy sexual, presumably-racist and ironic elements, a searing affair that many people seem to have found offensive without getting the underlying satire, and then there's Non-Fiction; amazing how much spot-on societal jabs T. S. squeezes into this one, and plus it has another great, multi-layered performance from Paul Giamatti, always a major selling point of any film, for me.

The bottom line: I believe T.S. deserves credit for his audacity alone, his unwillingness to compromise his vision, however unacceptable it might be. Or he might be consciously tailoring his vision toward the unacceptable, sort of like Andy Kaufman did - getting off on just making people react, shaking them out of indifference. Or maybe, like some people have suggested, he's run out of ideas (or he peaked with Dollhouse) and he's just rehashing the same stuff, hoping nobody will notice. Or maybe he WANTS us to notice, maybe it's a cry for help, in which case I would recommend a writing class, but NOT one that has Robert Wisdom as the professor.

I was fascinated by Todd Solondz's HAPPINESS, a spell-binding drama every minute of it - sometimes terribly naked. There are such tendencies also in STORYTELLING, but only in the second of the two independent parts.

The first part, called "Fiction", is significantly shorter than part two, "Non-fiction". This is as it should be, but the best would be to exclude it completely. The story about emotional tension between a college girl with ambition to become a writer, her frustrated CP boyfriend and their impressive/monstrous teacher, the successful writer, is just as conventional as the stories the students write in the film. This may be intentional, to cause multiple layers of meta-effects, but it doesn't save this part of the movie from being pretty predictable and boring.

And the story ends before it should. A sort of coitus interruptus (if the term is allowed), which demands some kind of return or closing-up later on in the movie - but there is none. I got the strong impression that this part was only included to make the movie full-time.

The second story, "Non-fiction", is clearly stronger, and told with much more passion from the writer/director. Here, many facets are explored, the characters are complex, the drama intricate - and the tension builds, right below the drab suburban surface. It is impressive how elements common in just about any family life, here add to the suspense and the sense of doom. The thrill of trivial life, but not at all trivially portrayed.

This might be the reason for the title "Non-fiction", since the lives and fates shown in the story feel so real - contrary to what happens in "Fiction".

Still, this story, too, has been told insufficiently, as if abbreviated, or halted at points where it was about to erupt into infernal drama. Pity. Did Solondz retreat from his own vision? Did he censor himself to get more of a general audience?

I hope that it's not the case. His portrayal of human life, although unpleasant indeed, is fascinating and uniquely his. So he must be true to it.