The fiction part of the film for which Solondz hasn’t released any visual material, deals with a young woman Vi who’s in a literature course at university. Her boyfriend is fellow student Marcus, Leo Fitzpatrick, who has cerebral palsy and uses his affliction in an assignment which is viciously torn apart by the professor Mr. Scott, Robert Wisdom. Scott is a disillusioned Pulitzer Prize winner who gets his kicks from seducing his white female students and humiliating them. Vi is his next target. No-one wins in this scenario of exploitation. It’s raw, provocative and agonising. And then comes Non-Fiction about a documentary filmmaker played by Paul Giamatti who talks a high school student, Mark Webber and his family, father John Goodman, mother Julie Hagerty, and youngest brother Mikey, Jonathan Osser to become the subjects of his documentary. I’m not sure what Solondz was trying to achieve with this film, various riffs on literary and filmic exploitation perhaps? He certainly has a style, he’s certainly uncompromising but with this film a certain misanthropy is coming to the fore. With Storytelling it’s less directional than Happiness and Dollshouse, so what you’re left with is a bunch of unsympathetic characters who don’t seem to have much resonance beyond their miserable lives. It’s hard to be wildly enthusiastic about Storytelling.
Share
