Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)

Solondz crafted Storytelling as a triptych, but, at the eleventh hour, jettisoned the film's third segment. So that makes the film, what, a diptych? That doesn't sound nearly as cool. Too close to "dipstick."

In any case, the first half of the dipstick, titled "Fiction", is a close-to-killer satire of the academic writing workshop. As so many semiautobiographical literary novels have taught me, a writing workshop is when, on a regular schedule, a group of creative writing students sit at a big table presided over by a stern professor (who's possibly a bigshot novelist himself). One student reads a piece of fiction they've written out loud. Then all the other students comment on it, siezing the opportunity for either passive aggression, stealth self-aggrandizement or blatant professorial brown-nosing. Then it's the next student's turn to read.

Initially, Solondz's workshop lineup contains many of the usual suspects: the catty teacher's pet, the P.C. rebel grrl with bad pink dye job, the disabled guy who writes exclusively about his disability, the dismissive instructor whose books have names like A Sunday Lynching. However, since this is a Solondz movie, the brittle, bad-haired iconoclast is having sex with the unsubtle, cerebral palsy-afflicted scribbler. And the bespectacled suck-up is having sex with the professor. And the professor is having sex with, evidently, as many of his students as he can lure, which includes the P.C. rebel, whose primary, all-consuming concern, even as she's drawn inexorably into the (black) teacher's bedroom, is not being racist.

I've talked to friends about how, for all his strengths, Solondz ain't great at satire. More on that in a moment, but as I reflect on this film, it's come to resemble the exception to the rule, at least in many respects. It's hard to watch the main girl return to the writing workshop and read out her not-even-really-veiled-at-all "fictional" account of her assignation with the professor — I won't even spoil for you what the guy makes her say, repeatedly — and not think that the film's effectively keying in to several ridiculous human (and especially academic human) tendencies at once.

Nor is it possible to write that off as a fluke; Solondz showcases satirical perspective nearly as sound in the second segment, "Non-Fiction". The object of this round of satire is a not-particularly-competent documentary filmmaker played, it seems pertinent to note, by Paul Giamatti; imagine if his Sideways character attempted to compensate for his loserhood by becoming a documentarian rather than an oenophile. (His cameraman is, as seen above, American Movie's Mike Schank. References of any kind to American Movie are sure bets to win points from me.) After a truly pathetic phone call to a long-lost high school girlfriend, he launches into a high-flown project meant to examine the Condition of the Modern American Teen: packed extracurricular schedules, college application deadlines, peer pressure closing in, that sort of deal. He walks the halls of the local high school, shooting jittery meanderings down locker-lined hallways. His voiceovers on the footage ruminate, ponderously and emptily, about the high schooler's plight. Sloppy cuts step on already-dead aesthetic choices.

In an age that produces more and thus more poorly thought-out documentaries than any before it — the best of times and the worst of times for a documentary lover like myself — Solondz's satirical charges stick. Fascinatingly, though, he also seems to have imbued the hapless Giamatti character with more than a few of his own qualities. When his editor accuses him of ridiculing his subjects, the filmmaker shouts in his own defense: "I love them! I love them!" If memory serves, Solondz has faced similar charges and marshaled similar rebuttals. Perhaps that's why he's less than masterful as a satirist; he likes the people he would be satirizing a bit too much, no matter how horrible, lame or strident they might be. This keeps his jokes at their expense a bit broad, a bit toothless — even the worst low-rent documentaries on the market don't show quite as much ineptitude as the one within Storytelling — but at the root of the flaw is, I suppose, a virtue.