Solondz uses Toby as a surrogate to show how storytelling implicates the teller in distortion and moral compromise.
As the subjects of Toby’s film, Scooby, his younger brothers - the jock Brady (Noah Fleiss) and the conniving Mikey (Jonathan Osser) - and their parents also become targets. He does manage to goad his Jewish parents about how their family escaped the Nazis (“Without Hitler, I wouldn’t have been born”), but Mom (Julie Hagerty) and Dad (John Goodman) bluster to no avail. Pothead Scooby cares little for school or sex he indifferently lets a guy pal blow him. He focuses on Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber is a find), a New Jersey high school kid whose idea of a documentary is The Blair Witch Project. A loser in high school, Toby is eager to show teen angst as it really is. “Non-Fiction” concerns Toby Oxman (the reliably excellent Paul Giamatti), a shoe salesman who fancies himself a documentarian. You might say that Gary’s argument defines Storytelling, which Solondz divides into two parts: “Fiction,” the Vi story that runs for barely half an hour, and “Non-Fiction,” the second chapter that runs twice that length and suffers some loss in impact. As Gary says, “Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction.” But the students nail Vi as “a spoiled suburban white girl with a Benetton complex.” Gary lets Vi squirm, dismissing as a callow defense her pleas that what he did to her really happened. Humiliated, Vi writes the story as a rape and reads it in class to get even. The other students offer something worse: smug condescension (“It’s like Faulkner, but East Coast and disabled”).įar more punishing is Vi’s attempt to seduce Gary, leading to an anal-sex scene that plays like a Mandingo joke. His critique of Marcus’ mawkish story is ruthless. The time is 1985, and Gary is slumming in this third-tier New Jersey college. Marcus complains that Vi has become “less kinky, too nice.” He wants to read her the story he did for the writing class they both take with black author Gary Scott (Wisdom is formidably fierce). Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), the boy she’s sitting on, displays jerky movements and speech. Storytelling opens with Vi - Blair ( Legally Blonde) is strikingly good - having sweaty sex. For Solondz, cruel action invariably springs from the placid face of normalcy. In 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, he shared the pain of Dawn Wiener, the seventh-grader whom the in-crowd dissed as “Wienerdog.” In 1998’s Happiness, a pedophile, a phone-sex stalker and a fat-girl killer won more sympathy than the so-called pillars of the community.
Fear, Anxiety and Depression made an apt title for his 1989 debut film. Solondz has always sided with outsiders, such as those from the New Jersey burbs that spawned him. Solondz enlarges the boxes - they’re as big as the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001 - and in so doing makes a wicked joke of censorship. Kubrick inserted little boxes to obscure the bumping of uglies. Toning down the sex so he could avoid an NC-17 rating, Solondz amplified the technique Stanley Kubrick used for the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut. But Solondz wants to flip cliched takes on sexism and racism until we start questioning who’s exploiting whom. Take the scene in which Selma Blair’s Vi, a college student, goes home with her black college prof (Robert Wisdom), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning stud tells her to strip, face the wall and shout, “Nigger, fuck me hard!” That scene is offensive six ways from Sunday.
STORYTELLING SEX SCENE MOVIE
But in Storytelling we have a movie that advances the career of a demonstrably gifted filmmaker, a fearlessly funny movie whose laughs draw blood, a bracingly provocative movie that won’t apologize for its bad temper. in Snow Dogs - that’s what opens in January.
Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember and Cuba Gooding Jr. January is where the major studios dump their mistakes. Todd Solondz’s Storytelling opens on January 25th, and we all know that nothing really good - foreign-language films excepted - opens in January.
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