"Storytelling"

There are plenty of satirical possibilities in that scenario: the cutthroat nature of student artists who are in starry-eyed thrall to their instructors. And of course the way racial fears and prejudices and taboos feed our sexual fantasies. Terry Southern might have turned it into explosive, corrosive comedy. Solondz's treatment is gratingly literal and flat and obvious. Those disgusted writing students are the director's stand-ins for the critics and moviegoers who've argued that the subjects of Solondz's movies (child rape, obscene phone calls, kidnapping, murder) and his visuals (the cum shots of "Happiness") are simply shock tactics, and that there's no need to dwell on such unpleasant things. The students are presented as blinkered, sheltered, unable to face reality. And the audience members, those of us hip enough to get it, are invited to laugh at their naiveté (and also to feel superior to Vi, who has minimized her culpability by turning her encounter with Scott into a rape).

Then the movie turns to "Nonfiction," where we meet the real red herring of the film, would-be documentary filmmaker Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti). Toby is a nonachieving nerd, still floundering in his 30s, calling up a girl from his high-school class in a pathetic attempt for a date. He comes up with the idea of making a film about a real high-school student and chooses Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber), a stoner from a prosperous upper-middle-class New Jersey family who's headed for early burnout. Asked what he'd like to do when he grows up, Scooby spins fantasies of becoming Conan O'Brien's sidekick. Toby films Scooby and his family, ignoring the criticisms of his editor (Franka Potente, who seems like the only real person in the movie) that he's playing them for cheap laughs. And that judgment is confirmed when Scooby sneaks into a New York screening of Toby's film and hears the hip, invited audience roaring with laughter at him and his family.

Even more explicitly about how an artist feeds into the reaction of his work, "Nonfiction" offers a seemingly clear stand-in for Solondz in Toby Oxman. And the presence of Mike Schank -- the damaged scratch-ticket devotee in "American Movie" who appears in a bit part here -- would seem to be further evidence of Solondz's critique of how filmmakers use real people as fodder. (Oxman even calls his film "American Scooby.") In an interview in last Sunday's New York Times, Solondz admits to being "unsettled" by "American Movie." "People were laughing, uproariously," he says, "and you have to question what that laughter is about." He goes on: "Obviously the laughter that is most valuable is the laughter of recognition."

But where is the laughter of recognition in Solondz's movies? It's certainly not in the scene in "Welcome to the Dollhouse" where we are invited to laugh at the hysteria and gaucherie of a woman whose little girl has been kidnapped. And it's certainly nowhere to be found in "Storytelling." (The audience I saw it with laughed loudly when Mike Schank appeared -- as if to say, "Can you believe this guy is working?") It's not Toby Oxman, who presents Scooby and his family (headed by John Goodman and Julie Hagerty) as screaming, kitsch-ridden grotesques. (The caricatures of this family, particularly the obnoxious, spoiled little prince of a son played by Jonathan Osser, are anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews as brash, vulgar loudmouths.) And it's not Vi who depicts her handicapped boyfriend as self-pitying and needy, or her writing teacher as Mandingo by way of the Iowa Writers Program.

"Storytelling" doesn't represent any advance in sensibility for Todd Solondz. He's still working in the cinema of hurt feelings, getting his revenge on the people who tormented him in school, the family that didn't understand him, the Jersey suburbs that oppressed him with their stultifying sameness and falsely cheery veneer. (And given the fact that Solondz's cinematic acts of revenge have won him all sorts of acclaim, you'd think he might be grateful to those people -- and to Jersey -- for advancing his career.) But "Storytelling" is a considerable leap forward in terms of sheer duplicitous craftiness. To the list of people who have mocked or misunderstood him, Solondz now adds critics and hipster moviegoers who, he contends, are guilty of seeing contempt in the people he claims to have depicted nonjudgmentally. Forget the college writing student mining her life for material, or the documentary filmmaker using his subjects; the real stand-in for Solondz in "Storytelling" is Scooby's horrid, spoiled little brother Mikey, who hypnotizes his father in order to get his way. Is there any other explanation for why sensible adults would reward Solondz's childish, self-centered whining with praise?

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