Bard of Suburbia

“People who are right are never confident, never well loved, never well liked.”

Writer-director Todd Solondz is smiling as he says this. He is delivering the bad news to a crew member that tonight’s shoot, already late, may run even later (it’s now past midnight). It’s a weirdly penetrating remark, but then, on the face of it, Solondz is a weird guy.

Standing on the set of his new movie, “Storytelling,” which is being shot in a former church/ porn studio/school in Yonkers, he’s wearing pale blue slacks, a short-sleeved pink-striped shirt, yellow Keds and oversized green glasses. On the ground next to his director’s chair is the plastic bag he carries in lieu of a briefcase or knapsack. What could be in it? A comb? A book? He will use the bag until it falls apart.

The 41-year-old Solondz’s idiosyncrasies, trivial in themselves, assume a sort of outsized significance because his movies, more than most others’, excite interest in who made them. Solondz is the bard of suburban embarrassment. He specializes in those moments, sometimes innocuous, sometimes not, that we’d all rather forget, involving the kind of rejection that confirms our worst fears about ourselves: that we are unattractive, dysfunctional and generally unlovable.

“You look so sad,” Solondz says, gently teasing one of his actors. And why not? He’s playing a Solondz character.

Solondz’s first film was the little-seen “Fear, Anxiety and Depression” (1990). His second was “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” (1996) which made a far bigger splash. An excruciating examination of adolescent alienation, it introduced a character whose name has become synonymous with nerdiness and neediness: Dawn Wiener.”

His third film, “Happiness” (1998), was so scandalous that the studio that financed it, October Films, dropped it (it was ultimately distributed by Good Machine). The movie featured, among other attractions, a father-son talk from hell in which Dad, rather than explaining the facts of life, admits that he’s a pedophile and that he’d find his own boy a turn-on.

“Storytelling,” which will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival, which began last week, does not have quite so many fireworks, which is not to say it isn’t audacious. It may be more so than his earlier films because it’s actually two films that are linked thematically but in no other way. The first part, called “Fiction,” is about the sexual relations involving Vi (Selma Blair), fellow writing student Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick) and teacher Gary Scott (Robert Wisdom). Marcus has cerebral palsy and Gary is black, so the story is loaded with issues of exploitation and racial stereotyping. These are then refracted through the stories Vi and Marcus write about each other (and Gary) for their class.

The second part, “Non-Fiction,” is about a would-be documentary filmmaker, Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), who is shooting a film about a slacker teenager, Scooby (Mark Webber), his upper-middle-class family (John Goodman, Julie Hagerty, Noah Fleiss, Jonathan Osser)--and, not so incidentally, their long-suffering maid, Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros). Oxman worms his way into the family’s confidence and then proceeds, whether intentionally or not, to ridicule their materialism and Scooby’s aimlessness.

“Storytelling” bristles with issues of exploitation, condescension and manipulation. Does this sound familiar? It does to Solondz’s critics, and it certainly does to Solondz, because he has often been accused of being deliberately provocative and taking easy shots at the suburbs and suburbanites. (European critics of America have embraced him for the same reasons.)

Rather than ignore these criticisms or make another movie, Solondz has responded by addressing his critics head-on. In some ways, “Storytelling” is a Solondz movie about a Solondz movie.

“Certain scenes function in the film on their own narrative level but also have some bearing on the responses that my films have elicited,” Solondz says. “Is the film moral or immoral or amoral? Is the film cynical, misanthropic? Is the film condescending toward its characters or is there a level of integrity that it accords them? They are legitimate questions, but I think that my work can be looked at a little reductively and oftentimes misread or misinterpreted because the signposts aren’t really there about what to think and what to feel. And so people sometimes have a hard time getting their bearings.”

Solondz describes the film’s commentary on his critics as “playful,” and certainly in at least one instance it is. There’s a scene in which Oxman films strikingly unbeautiful street signs and stoplights, and rhapsodizes in a voice-over about how breathtakingly lovely the suburbs are--a parody of a similar scene in Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty.”

“I’ve always been very respectful of my peers,” Solondz says. “I always feel it incumbent upon me to never disparage them, but a few years ago a journalist was telling me how Sam Mendes was criticizing my film ‘Happiness’ for being condescending to its characters, so I felt carte blanche to make my own homage, so to speak, to Mr. Mendes’ work. So there you have it. It’s a little thing.”

Naturally, this being a Solondz movie, there is a lot that is not so playful or little. The most explosive element is surely what might be described as the Dylan Baker character (after the actor who played the sympathetic pedophile in “Happiness.”) Here that role is played by Wisdom, who is merciless with his writing students and keeps a stack of photographs depicting naked white female students in bondage. His sexual encounter with Vi traffics in all of the old stereotypes about the threat black men pose to white women.

Needless to say, Wisdom had some trepidations about the part but felt that Solondz was “not just some guy taking on something for shock’s sake.” “Basically he was sticking dynamite in all kinds of places, and I trusted him. A trust that I wouldn’t have the NAACP coming down on me.”

Solondz says it was important that the sex scene between Gary and Vi, which has been described by some of the crew as a rape, not be an actual rape “because then you would succumb to certain ugly stereotypes.” It was also important that the sex between the two be uncompromising. To get an R rating, however, which he was contractually bound to do, he would have to shoot around it.

Solondz resolved this conflict by having written into his contract with New Line the option to impose a box over the offending material. (He also contracted to bleep out offending words rather than insert such timeworn substitutes as “Forget you!,” but this turned out to be unnecessary.) What he really wanted was to place the word “censored” over the sex scene, but he discovered that the MPAA is “very fearful of being perceived as censors, and so they censor ‘censored,’” he says.

He was even worried that the MPAA wouldn’t allow the box--which says “censored” just as clearly as the word does--but the only resistance he met was from New Line, which, he says, agreed to the clause thinking he wouldn’t actually exercise it. After all, why would a director risk taking the viewer out of an important scene by grafting a box over part of it?

“I think he expected us to get in a fight about it, and we didn’t,” says Marian Koltai-Levine, executive vice-president of marketing for Fine Line, which is distributing the film. “The biggest conversation was whether it was going to be black or red.”

“I think the audience should know what it’s not allowed to see,” Solondz says. “This is a film for adults, and I think it becomes something of a statement obviously when you have that red box there. When you have the Kubrick movie [‘Eyes Wide Shut’] coming out with everything very elegantly digitally removed, no one knows what they never saw. There’s something offensive and depressing about the notion of the audience never knowing or seeing what the director intended. So this way it is somewhat comical, I suppose, but there you have it.”

The movie represents what Solondz intended, although that’s not to say it represents what he originally intended--what Solondz, who refuses to discuss the matter, calls “the not movie.”

The “not movie” originally featured “Dawson’s Creek’s” James Van Der Beek in the “Fiction” segment as an unappetizing Lothario. He’s now on the cutting-room floor, which in itself is not that unusual, except that he was one of the few recognizable faces in the film. According to producer Ted Hope, who also produced “Dollhouse” and “Happiness,” that’s the way Solondz works. He finds the film in the editing room.

“Todd is someone who is driven by his story and his characters,” Hope says. “We broke our backs--[co-producer] Christine [Vachon], Todd and I all reinvested the majority of our salary back into the movie. I would have liked nothing more than to have been able to have the foresight to say that these scenes had to come out of the film. If we’d saved that money upfront, I wouldn’t have lost my salary. He certainly knows some things that will definitely push people’s buttons, but it’s the film first, and if that means cutting your biggest star, that’s what it means.”

Hope says that though this film does more button-pushing, it’s not just about that. It represents a step forward for Solondz. “It’s more thought-provoking, yet it doesn’t have the immediate resonance, kind of hot-button thing, which I think a lot of people would say is a good thing,” he says, citing the Dylan Baker character in “Happiness” as a “hot-button thing.” “It’s missing the immediate topicality in exchange for trying to delve a little bit deeper.”

Tell that to the people who see this film, or to Solondz himself. He’s like the guy who can’t avert his eyes when confronted with a car wreck. He has to slow down and take a long look. Solondz has his own metaphor for what he feels compelled to do.

“Like a moth, you’re drawn to these quote-unquote taboo things not for the sake of shocking anyone, but to examine why it is that we have such a strong response to X, Y and Z,” Solondz says, smiling. “What is it that makes us bristle, what is it that makes us cringe or wince, that moves us in such deep ways when this is mentioned or that is said. To question why do we feel these things and what meaning is to be found in this.”

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John Clark is a regular contributor to Calendar.