It's only words

Todd Solondz's has its way with language.

By Susan Gerhard

Storytelling

TODD SOLONDZ'S 1998 movie by the name of Happiness gave his audience a look into murderous, suicidally depressive states of mind. One of the primary characters in the comedy was named Joy, and she couldn't find any. His new film has two chapters, "Fiction" and "Non-fiction." "Fiction," as you might expect, deals with truth – a college fiction-writing class's stories, which are, for the most part, literal translations of what's happening in the students' lives. "Non-fiction" is, of course, riddled with lies – sliding itself down a slippery slope of reality-"shaping" in documentary filmmaking. Like Happiness, the movie has a one-word title, an umbrella to hang over its disparate characters as irony rains down upon them. This one's called Storytelling, and yes, Todd Solondz is a director who chooses his word carefully.

So studied are Solondz's words that each and every one seems to carry its own matching set of quotation marks. But as Storytelling self-consciously opens, no words are actually spoken; a woman and a man lie naked and panting on a bed, in what appears to be the heat of passion. When the words come, we're made to realize the passion has actually turned lukewarm to cold. Marcus (played by Leo Fitzpatrick), who has cerebral palsy, claims his girlfriend, Vi (played by Selma Blair), has lost interest and issues her the ultimate insult in the Todd Solondz universe: "You've become kind."

Not to worry, Solondz has not. If Happiness had a sympathetic pedophile at its center, do-gooders crossing picket lines in its periphery, and the veneer of a general lack of goodwill toward humankind throughout, Storytelling is a sequel. It returns to those same suburbs and sincerely mistaken helper people and turns its ire toward those who tell the stories and those who receive them. You are one of the above, so this time you may feel it too.

But misanthropy is the least of Solondz's talents. His primary gift is the curating of phrases. He collects the most awful overused clichés as if they were found art and uses a thumbtack to paste them to our foreheads. In Happiness he went even further, mercilessly spinning his two-dimensional characters around on their worst utterings like pigs on a spit. Yet he's not simply repeating himself: each film discovers a new dialect within the language of banality. With Welcome to the Dollhouse it was the playground patois – where boy telling girl, "I'm going to rape you," translates to "I have a crush on you." With Happiness it was the language of well-mannered adulthood, where duplicity is coded into every kind word and kindness is coded into cruel ones. Storytelling, a defensive strike against those who've never really dug the Solondz oeuvre, takes on the vocabulary of the critic and slays itself in the process.

Everyone's a critic, or trying to be, in "Fiction," Storytelling's part one, and the saga first dissected in Creative Writing 101 is by a seemingly self-realized Marcus, who finds redemption through love: "From now on," he reads aloud, "C.P. stood for 'cerebral person.' " The class reacts with its own set of worn phrases – "it's really good," "moving" and "emotional." Says one, in over-the-top Solondz mockery, "It reminded me of Faulkner, but East Coast and disabled." To which the professor (Robert Wisdom) responds with his own kit of hackneyed critiques, that its adjectives were "flat-footed" and "redundant."

Solondz, who reinvented the "rude" in Welcome to the Dollhouse and exposed the "nice" in Happiness, toys with the "correct" here. Spurned by her boyfriend, Vi calls him not "cerebral person" but "fucking cripple." Vi and Marcus's writing professor is an African American with a fetish for S-M; using cinematography the same way he uses words – to campily frame our culture's worst conventions – Solondz surrounds him with either sexy red light or scary no-light to breathe stereotype into the persona. When Vi has a one-night stand with the guy and finds his pictures of other members of her almost all white-girl class tied up in apparent sexually submissive pleasure, she immediately censors her first impulse: "Don't be a racist," she repeats three times, hoping to get back to Kansas. Instead she finds herself underneath the film's own red censor's box, having sex with him. Vi wears a series of T-shirts announcing her politics, from "USA for Africa" to the era-marking "Biko" shirt, but – as her main critic points out in class – she can't escape her upbringing when it counts: she crafts the episode into a rape for one of her stories.

Solondz doesn't resist the urge to pry open the topic of rape for examination; rape is just one of those subjects sticky enough to retain Solondz's attention over the course of three feature films. At this point you could say it's his favorite metaphor. And part two, "Non-fiction," gives Solondz the chance to finally break it down. The exploited maid of an upper-class family, Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros), who's been seen scrubbing floors till her back breaks, explains it to the youngest brat child of her bosses. He's just asked her why she's crying, and she explains that her own grandson has just been executed for rape and murder. After obnoxiously telling her that he thinks her grandson probably deserved it, the boy asks the maid what rape is, and Consuelo lays it out for him. "Rape is when you love someone and they don't love you – and you do something about it." Will she?

But even her exploiters are being exploited. A glib documentary filmmaker who says he wants to turn them into "An American Family for the new millennium" in his "sociological study in the aftermath of Columbine" is about to turn them into comedy along the lines of American Movie. His project is titled American Scooby, after the disaffected high schooler he's following, and its cinematographer is the butt of American Movie's big joke: scratch-offs addict Mike Schank.

Fiction may turn victimhood into bad art, but Schank's presence here reminds us that nonfiction turns its very subjects into victims in the process. Which exploiters are worse? Solondz has chosen sides. But he's built a film with so many layers, positions, retellings, and substories that it's impossible to unravel their purposes on first viewing. Only one thing is clear: his anger feels just as two-dimensional as the characters in each of his gorgeously antisocial films.

'Storytelling' opens Fri/8 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, page 102, for show times.