Storytelling
dir. Todd Solondz
Opens Fri Feb 8 at Broadway Market.

So, let's sum up what we've learned about human nature from the films of Todd Solondz: (1) All people are either guileless turds, ruthless hypocrites, or hapless fools. (2) There is humor in the weakness and misery of others. (3) All humor comes at someone's expense. (4) Nothing about you is remotely attractive or redeeming. (5) Even your dreams are pathetic.

Here endeth the lesson, and yes, there will be a test. The test is called Storytelling, an 83-minute "fuck you" of a film that represents Solondz's first major disappointment.

Solondz is the laureate of humiliation. His last two films, Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, comprised a doctoral dissertation on moral bleakness, in which a parade of social outcasts visit dehumanizing cruelty upon one another in increasingly dismal scenarios. Sometimes the cruelty is malicious, sometimes it's inadvertent; but it always comes, and it's always brutal. It's also painfully funny, which is why the controversial director enjoys a following.

Solondz films have a chilling familiarity-- the worst of humanity doing its worst to humanity--that mines cruelty for laughter. And though he piles the woes upon the unlucky citizens of Solondzville (a suburb on the outskirts of the seventh circle of hell, just off the New Jersey Turnpike), the laughter isn't just sadism; it's got a little masochism in it, too.

There's no mistaking the director's fondness for poor Dawn Wiener in Dollhouse, or his proxy identification with child molester Bill Maplewood in Happiness--these make his authorial punishment of the characters ring with, if not empathy, then at least satirical purpose. Within their abjection, there lurks a kind of gallows humanism. The films argue that the worst of us is really no worse than the rest of us. Despite the protests of his detractors, I've always noted at least a grain of hope within Solondz's films, because they understand the fundamental connection between laughter and misery.

In Storytelling, that hope, along with the understanding, and most of the laughter, is cast aside while the nakedness and abjection remain. The painful accuracy of Dollhouse and Happiness is replaced by a retinue of broad, maudlin types and a litany of adolescent finger-pointing. Every character is a self-indicting fraud or a total moron, and often both, and never more. They hurt, manipulate, and embarrass each other. Roll credits. Fuck you.

Part one, "Fiction," tells the story of Vi (Selma Blair), a hopelessly naive white college student who wears her will for diversity on her literal and figurative sleeve. She wears "USA For Africa" and "Biko Lives" T-shirts and has a cerebral-palsy-suffering boyfriend (Leo Fitzpatrick). After she fails to stick up for his cloying, awful short story in a writing seminar, the boyfriend dumps Vi, who responds by getting tarted up and heading to a bar to "I don't know, get laid, whatever." At the bar, she bumps into her writing professor (Robert Wisdom), an imposing black author seething with disdain for his mostly white students. He takes her home, tells her to strip, and makes her shout, "Nigger, fuck me hard!" while he does just that, violently, from behind. When she writes a story about it, in which the encounter is described as rape, class and teacher tear it to shreds.

In part two, "Non-Fiction," a schlubby film nerd named Toby (Paul Giamatti) attempts to document the life of a suburban high-school stoner named Scooby Livingston, whose only ambition is to maybe be on TV one day or whatever. In the course of making his film, Toby inadvertently captures the neurotic ugliness of the stupid, hypocritical, affluent Livingstons and the proletarian agony of their indentured maid, Consuelo. Scooby stumbles upon a test screening where an audience howls derisively at his pitifully hollow existence.

Though there are a handful of trademark Solondz cringe-laughs throughout, Storytelling feels like a dishonest contrivance from beginning to end, cynicism in search of a subject. In the absence of a discernible point--beyond some vague abstractions about artistic futility and the nature of truth the film becomes humiliation porn. Solondz sets up a world in which every frailty of each character is summarily horsewhipped by fate. Vi's naiveté is rewarded with sexual and social abasement. Toby's mediocre artistic impulse is revealed as purest exploitation. And so forth. Even the cerebral-palsy guy is made a fool of. The savage caricature argues that within the characters' pointed mediocrity lies a heart of immense darkness, or at least dimness. But caricature cuts both ways.

Before long, you start wondering why you'd want to watch a social satire whose targets are made of paper, and whose arrows are so obvious. Intentional banality is still banality. As Solondz attempts to indict the audience along with the characters--cf. the audience laughing at the documentary--his contempt for them becomes contempt for us. Even the title is condescending. "Storytelling." And fuck you for listening.