I saw Todd Solondz' Storytelling the other night. No sir, I didn't like it. Solondz wrote one movie that I liked for its honesty (Welcome to the Dollhouse) and one that didn't make a lasting impression on me (Happiness), although I remember that it was really "edgy" in that Philip Seymour Hoffman played a pedophile. Whatever.
Anyway, the thing about Storytelling is that it portrays a bunch of people who are clueless -- graduate writing students, documentarians, stoner teenagers. Meanwhile, it too makes things "edgy" by taking swipes at received stereotypes, the definition of "rape," the banality of the omniscient authorial voice... In short, it's a movie about the concerns of the very belly-gazing po-mo graduate students it mocks. Meanwhile, the movie is deliberately unrealistic in its characterization and situations, so there's no legitimate basis for projecting realistic motivations onto or interpreting behavior from its characters. A classic question that one might ask of the movie is "How did Scooby get a 710 in the math SATs?" And Solondz is probably happy if people conclude "Why, we don't know! The picking and choosing of incidents from the ontological continuum is a social construct!"
It's a movie that tries to accomplish these high-art meta-examinations of our assumptions and so forth, which is all well and good, but such rarefied structures can't be built with the incomplete character sketches that Solondz provides in Storytelling. (yeah, yeah, I haven't built enough of an argument to make that conclusion; I got tired of writing about a movie I didn't like and I just wanted to put something on the Web that has the slightest possibility of turning up in a Google search, because most of the people writing about Solondz on the Web are, you guessed it, naval-gazing po mo grad students. )