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Alexander Brickel as Peter Paul and Sharon Wilkins as Aviva in “Palindromes.” |
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The man who rued too much
Todd Solondz feted as Filmmaker on the Edge
By Howard Karren
Banner Correspondent
“I’m so sorry! I’m so, so sorry!”
This expression of sympathy — or guilt — is uttered by Paul Giamatti, who plays an aspiring filmmaker in the Todd Solondz film “Storytelling” (2001). Giamatti is trying to comfort the subject of the documentary he’s shooting, an alienated New Jersey teenager named Scooby Livingston who has returned home after a night in the city and found members of his family dead.
“Don’t be,” Scooby retorts, with deadpan sarcasm. “The movie’s a hit.”
The Giamatti character in “Storytelling” is the closest Solondz has come to representing his current self — a filmmaker observing and often satirizing suburban despair, in the name of art — within one of his movies, and it’s a telling moment. That’s because Solondz, who will be honored as this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge at the Provincetown International Film Festival (Saturday, June 16 at 7 p.m. at Town Hall), implicitly acknowledges in that brief exchange his own moral fallibility and the fact that the middle-class losers he depicts, however banal and pathetic they appear, can actually be self-aware.
No matter what Scooby says, Solondz’s movies are hardly “hits” in the conventional sense. The writer-director has a hip but small following, but since “Welcome to the Dollhouse” in 1995 his films haven’t done all that well at the box office, and they’ve been attacked by critics almost as much as they’ve been praised. Scooby’s bitterness in “Storytelling” arises out of his just having witnessed an audience watching Giamatti’s documentary and laughing uproariously at the stoner teen and his family. And, likewise, audiences at Solondz’s films, such as “Happiness” (1998) and his most recent effort, “Palindromes” (2004), have certainly been known to laugh — nervously, at times, following moments of shock and embarrassment, but also with abandon. (“Happiness” will screen at the festival on Friday, June 15, at 11:30 a.m.; “Palindromes” on Saturday, June 16, at 11:30 a.m.; both at Whaler’s Wharf.)
“Sometimes people will watch my movie and say, ‘Oh, it’s so funny, it’s hilarious,’ without appreciating that I take it all very seriously,” Solondz told the Toronto Globe and Mail, back when “Storytelling” was released. “I’m not opposed to laughter. They are comedies, after all. They may be terribly sad as comedies, but they are emphatically comedies. I’m not saying ‘Don’t laugh!’ but if [what’s onscreen is] reduced to just a joke, then that’s a problem. It can be equally as troubling as those who just accuse me of being immoral.”
To the uninitiated, Solondz may sound a bit defensive. But to those who have taken in the scenes of raw brutality and excruciating awkwardness in his films (a pedophile explaining to his son why he drugged and raped one of the boy’s prepubescent friends, in “Happiness”; a white creative-writing student parroting racial slurs while submitting to her black professor’s rough sexual aggression, in “Storytelling”; a liberal mom commanding her teenage daughter to get an abortion, in “Palindromes”), Solondz might even be understating the pitfalls of presenting sensational material as entertainment.
If anything, he is the quintessential “filmmaker on the edge.” Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1959, and raised in nearby Livingston, Solondz has a far more impressive resumé than one might expect, considering the downscale milieu of his movies. His dad, a contractor, went to MIT, and his mom attended Juilliard; he himself graduated from Yale, went to film school at NYU, and then struggled for years, shooting shorts and a first feature he hates, “Fear, Anxiety & Depression” (1989). He nearly gave up on the movie industry, even contemplated joining the Peace Corps, before writing and directing his coming-of-age breakout film, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” in which Heather Matarazzo starred, memorably, as the homely young pariah Dawn Wiener (nicknamed “Wienerdog” by her peers), who found her way into the hearts of fans despite many unlikable traits. “You have no idea how many people told me they were Dawn Wiener in junior high,” Solondz told The New York Times. “It began to annoy me when women like Cindy Crawford would say, ‘I was Dawn.’”
Since “Dollhouse,” his work has become more and more confrontational with the audience, as if he were testing their ability to stay engaged. Why else would Solondz have cast the role of Aviva, the abortion-refusing teen at the center of “Palindromes,” with several different actors — white and black, petite and obese, young and old, female and male — switching them from scene to scene? “In most movies you’re asked to identify with the attractive person who does the right thing and who maybe behaves heroically at the end,” he said of “Palindromes” to the Houston Chronicle. “You come out with a wonderful narcissistic high. You’re not going to get it from my movies.”
Perhaps not, but with “Happiness,” a Cannes Film Festival prizewinner, Solondz definitely hit a high, even if it’s not of the feel-good variety. The movie brilliantly captures the rage and ennui and near-hopelessness of middle-class family life over several generations, from grandparents Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser to young Rufus Read, who eventually confronts his pedophile father, a devil of sorts played with sympathy and grace by Dylan Baker. Solondz flirts relentlessly here with the shock of breaking sexual taboos; when the family dog licks up the ejaculate of a masturbating 11-year-old, audiences tend to gasp and shout.
Though “Happiness” depicts its characters harshly, it’s not about judgment. “I’m not interested in showing people as simply virtuous or noble,” Solondz said in a London interview. “It’s people’s flaws that for me are revelatory about human behavior. I find myself incapable of celebrating the wonderfulness of humanity, but it’s not that I’m trying to indict and say that we’re terrible, either. If I can get at certain truths about who we are, that is a goal I have.” And for Wienerdogs everywhere (sorry, Todd), it’s a goal he continues to reach.
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Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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Jun 14th, 2007