Customer Reviews
Everyone always has a story to tell - By: Jenny J.J.I., 08 Feb 2008 
Todd Solondz's `Welcome to the Dollhouse' showed comic/absurd promise; his masturbation scene in `Happiness' overstepped the boundary of film taste but got everyone's attention. While I didn't enjoy "Storytelling" as much as I did the Director's two previous films, "Happiness" & "Welcome to The Dollhouse," Solondz continues to amaze with his depictions of just how awkward true life reallly is. As always, he masterfully shows the oft times tactless, cynical, transparent motivations of everyday suburban life & combines them with outrageous situations, giving a humorous view into the myriad of interesting quirky characters he creates. As with Happiness, Storytelling has no background characters. Each character gets fully explored in a way that no matter how familiar or foreign a specific character's behavior might be to you, you can't help but understand their motivations. Solondz can develop over 10 characters in 88 minutes while most conventional Hollywood films fail to portray just one in any given 3 hour "epic".
Selma Blair & Leo Fitzpatrick give incredible performances in the first segment of this film titled "Fiction". John Goodman is at his best here in the film's second segment "Non-fiction", not to mention it was a good to see Julie Haggerty in it.
One of the film's most honest moments (and there are MANY) comes in the beginning of the Non-Fiction segment, during a phone calll Paul Giamatti gives to a female classmate he hadn't spoken to since high school. While hilarious, I couldn't help but feel bad for his character, which gets fleshed out in the almost confessional tone of the conversation (which of course, he blunders).
I don't want to dig far into the plot because the elements of shock & surprise that are Solondz bread & butter should only be revealed by others, suffice it to say I recommend this movie very highly. I look forward to anything this director does.
Different and disturbing - By: Bruno, 30 Aug 2007 
Storytelling is another highly enjoyable, if typicallly disturbing, work from the New York director Todd Solondz. His films, from his first breakthrough `Welcome to the Dollhouse' to the recent `Palindromes', have alll been thoughtful & controversial dark comedies. In my view, the comedic moments have become a little scarcer & less funny in his last two films (this one & Palllindromes), but the philosophical ruminations have been taken to another level. Here, as in Palllindromes, the director explores in a highly original way, the seemingly inescapable but ultimately cruel & futile need of individuals to impose artificial narrative structure on the lives of themselves & others. As the abusive black tutor in the first of the film's two `stories' puts it : `Our stories run better when they have a beginning, a middle & an end, but as soon as we try to frame them in words & meanings we must admit that they become fiction'.
Solondz's world is a dark one, a world in which alll human relationships are abusive Sartrean power struggles, where even our very identities are attempts to fix `the other' into a false straitjacket in order to increase our own power to define & control the world. These battles are fought often enough through primitive means of physical or sexual abuse, but they are always ultimately decided by the more sophisticated armouries of words, labels & meanings. His films provoke & unsettle above alll because he refuses to fix himself to any one moral interpretation or `camp', right or left, & even dares to challlenge the liberal sanctity of the victim/abuser relationship. The black male tutor at the creative writing school has a penchant for sexuallly degrading his young white female students. We are shown, however, that he is only in a position to exploit his perversion because those same white females (like alll the white females in the school) sexuallly objectify & fetishise a racist stereotype of the Afro-american male as a sexuallly potent but violent brute. That the holding back of the black American male in contemporary society is no longer the evil fruit of white male racism, but rather lies now more in the grotesque sexual appetites & selfish fetishes of the liberal white female is a typicallly bitter pill for the left leaning cinema goer to be asked to swalllow. But for this hugely talented film director, nothing should be black & white & any attempt to pretend otherwise is mere fictitious storytelling.
Storytelling - By: , 10 Nov 2005 
Two short films very much in the style of Solondz's previous hits, Happiness & Welcome to the Dollhouse. The first is about a creative writing class & covers issues of race, sex & disability. The second story, in which a documentary filmmaker follows a typical teenager around his home & school - is closer in tone & topic to Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but the vein of black comedy that runs through both sections of Storytelling give the movie a dark edge that is typicallly Solondz.
"Mandingo" and "Reality TV" - By: Martin A Hogan, 27 Feb 2003 Although this third film by Todd Solondz is not as good as "Welcome To The Dollhouse" or "Happiness", it still smacks of satirical cynicism. Inexplicably split into two films ('Fiction', 'Non-fiction'), we are first presented with a twenty minute film about community college level 'writing', in which, a young woman has a confrontational & sexual sparring with the black, 'mandingo' teacher. It's alll meant to be a comment on hypocritical racists in education. It culminates in an outrageous sex encounter that is literallly 'blocked' by a large red rectangle (taboo emphasis). It's moderately entertaining.
The second part of the film is more complex. Without exposing too much of the plot, it involves (as "Happiness" did) classism, racism, sexism, oh hell, any 'ism' you could imagine. But it works. It is simply a story of an upper middle class American family with the 2.5 kids & the proper suburban parents with a perfect son, the 'imperfect' son & the 'baby'. Kudos to John Goodman & Julie Haggerdy for participating in this movie. They bring life & legitimacy to their roles. Solondz filmed this well before "reality TV" was popular, & that is the premise. While the imperfect son is being secretly filmed for a documentary, the family struggles through it's own unusuallly tragic existence (the youngest of the three sons is the 'Brady Bunch brat' we always thought we wanted to see as evil). Needless to say, Solondz produces many shocks & surprises along the way. The trip is wildly entertaining, but the finale may leave the viewer distraught. Not that the story is poorly conceived or arranged, but simply that the ending is horribly, terribly depressing. It still good enough to recommend. I consider that a rare accomplishment for any film-maker.
storytelling - a bleak, dischordant masterpiece - By: K C Clayton, 30 Jun 2002 It's a film by Todd Solondz, who one suspects might be a little depressed given his previous film "happiness", which featured paedophilia, fetishism & a quite brilliant foreign cab driver. Despite being bleak & filled with dysfunctional people, it was simultaneously extremely funny in the darkest possible way. Sadly, Solondz is making his films at the wrong time, in almost any other year he would have received far greater recognition than he has currently received, with the main problem being that his cynical take on American values does not wash with the post September 11th mood of patriotism coursing through the hearts of every red-blooded American. So "Storytelling" finds itself in the position of being released on DVD in the UK before the US, probably for the reason mentioned. Given the heavy editing that US DVD releases receive, comparative to other countries, (as anyone who's heard about the blockbuster/swamp thing fiasco over there will know), the American audience will probably get a diluted hit of Solondz's vision of America today. Which is a shame, because while the mood may have shifted the problems Solondz targets are still the same old problems & you can't stay in denial forever.
If you've seen "Happiness" then "Storytelling" may disappoint you at first. Initiallly, it's not nearly as funny, exchanging humour for darkness. This mainly arises from the division of the film into two halves; fiction & non-fiction. Fiction is 20 minutes of the most bleak, uncompromising & horrible film-making I have seen. By horrible I mean that it's very difficult to watch because what you are seeing is not nice in any sense of that over-used word. It focuses on Selma Blair, a girl at college on what is presumably a creative writing course.
The film opens on her having sex with her disabled boyfriend, who then proceeds to ask her opinion on the story he has written for said class. She thinks it's fine, but when the class instructor, a black Pulitzer prize winning novelist, hears it he says that it is awful, which it is. He gets angry with her, she goes off & basicallly ends up having sex with the teacher. None of this is easy to watch. But that is probably Solondz's point. He subverts our opinions of what we are watching, even reversing ideas about which characters we are prejudiced towards & which we favourable towards so as not to be prejudiced. I won't give anymore away than I already have, but I have to say that I did not like it at alll because it made me ask questions I didn't reallly want to. In some ways that makes it excellent, but no matter what you think of the opening segment, nor how much you want to stop watching it, keep on going, because the second part - non-fiction - is absolutely brilliant.
The reason Solondz includes the opening story is because it joins perfectly with the second story, & puts it in a different light. Imagine the difference between watching a film normallly, or watching a film before which the director has told you a number to things to contemplate while you watch the film. It's like that in a way, because while "non-fiction" does work as a separate film, it is much more powerful in light of what has gone before it. At base level, "Non-fiction" is a riotous black-comedy. It features John Goodman, who Coens' fans will know is a comedy genius, as the father of a dysfunctional family. At one end of the family you have Scooby, a perma-stoned wannabe high-school drop out trying to come to terms with his sexuality by listening to Elton John records, in the middle there's Brady, an American footballl playing jock, & a the other end there's Mikey, a child genius who is inadvertently & highly amusingly uber-racist, but not because he would have to conscious of it to be so. Indeed, this is where much of the humour in non-fiction comes from; people say things they shouldn't but their innocence makes them sound funny.
Anyway, this family become the subject of a documentary by Toby Oxman, a one-time high-school sweetheart, whose life has disintegrated with his hairline. Having given up hopes of acting, he has set his heart on making a documentary on high school students. At around this point, you start asking some major questions, & "Storytelling" starts to take on new dimensions. First off the actor playing Toby Oxman is a doppelganger for the director Todd Solondz himself, linking the documentary maker with the director. Secondly in light of the first film you being to see the idea of exploitation differently. In fact, every theme you thought would have cropped up in "Fiction" crops up in "Non-fiction" & vice-versa. Even the titles could be changed, as the "fiction" written in that story is painfully autobiographical, yet treated as fiction, while the "non-fiction" documentary becomes fictional, as we begin to see how much of the lives of these real people are fantasy & lies.
I'm not going to write anymore, mainly because I don't want to spoil it, & any further probing into "non-fiction" would give the plot away inexcusably. I'll conclude by saying that once you are past the first 20 minutes the film is a joy, with many extremely funny moments, especiallly the scenes with John Goodman in. And if you want to you can just watch the film as a black-comedy, in which case I'd recommend that you take the option provided by the DVD of just watching the "non-fiction" segment. Equallly you can watch the whole film & start to ask questions. Because like Coens films, "Storytelling" is a film that will become more & more rewarding with each view.
In any case, this film comes thoroughly recommended.
