Storytelling is sort of Solondz's third feature (if one mercifully omits his 1989 debut, Fear, Anxiety & Depression), and in many ways, it is his strongest effort to date. As with 1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse (actual working title: Faggots and Retards), he proves himself an expert in the mode of John Hughes gone to hell, and after the projection of adolescent angst that dumbed down the adults of the otherwise impressive Happiness, he seems comfortable here focusing mostly from the point of view of freaked-out kids. There's nothing terribly new or surprising on tap, but Solondz is a master of backing you into a queasy corner and tickling you until you puke, a dubious but noteworthy talent.
To achieve his goal this time, Solondz breaks Storytelling into two chapters: "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction." The first segment is a period piece set in a third-rate community college in 1985, where a Pulitzer Prize-winning African American novelist named Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom) holds court over a class of wildly opinionated creative-writing students. The crux is that the punky blonde, Vi (Selma Blair), has grown weary of the drab sex and painfully mawkish prose of her cerebral-palsied boyfriend, Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), and so approaches her brooding professor for an "exotic" tryst. Naturally for Solondz, incredible unpleasantness ensues (some of it ridiculously censored), and we're invited to flinch or guffaw as we please.
"Non-Fiction," if less successful overall, is much more ambitious, echoing the domestic madness of Dollhouse, but channeling its confusion through the present-day torpor of a teenage dullard named Scooby (Mark Webber). After a restroom encounter with a pathetic documentarian and shoe salesman named Toby (Paul Giamatti), Scooby -- whose only ambition is to become a famous talk-show host -- volunteers himself and his extremely unhappy family (John Goodman, Julie Hagerty, Noah Fleiss, Jonathan Osser) to be the subjects of Toby's meandering exposé on . . . something or other. Again, unpleasantness ensues.
Solondz clearly wants to up the ante of his previous films, with the kidnapping of Dollhouse leading to the pederasty, rape, and murder of Happiness to more rape and murder in Storytelling. What's finally clear, however, is that his characters are all asking for it. His singular game plan is to dangle profoundly obnoxious caricatures before us, then punish them mercilessly for their stupidity.
