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The filmmaker's most notable movies have a running theme of human misery and inadequacy set against the hellish backdrop of white suburbia: Welcome To The Dollhouse featured an outcast young girl who hates her family and the bullies who torment her at school; Happiness boasted an obscene phone caller and a pedophile as its long-suffering protagonists.
And now we have Storytelling, which sheds more light on Solondz's troubled world view.
The film is separated into two unrelated parts: Fiction and Nonfiction. The half-hour Fiction is a wickedly sharp attack on political correctness. Vi (Selma Blair) is a college student enrolled in the creative writing class of the imperious Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom), who trashes the corny short story (maudlinly subtitled The Rawness Of Truth) written by Vi's cerebral palsy-afflicted boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick).
Later, Vi meets the teacher at a bar and goes home with him for some rough sex. In this disturbing scene, which Solondz himself censored in the United States with a large red bar blocking the offending body parts, the African-American teacher Scott tells her to use a racial slur.
Afterwards, when Vi writes her own short story about the encounter, her audience savages what they perceive as misogynistic and racist.
Nonfiction, longer and less-focused, features sad-sack loser and would-be documentary filmmaker Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti, who, in his oversized glasses, is a dead ringer for Solondz). He decides to document the life of Scooby (Mark Webber), a disaffected high school youth, and his suburban family, which includes the mouth-breathing patriarch (John Goodman) and nervous mom (Julie Hagerty) who try to persuade Scooby to take his SATs. Scooby, who'd rather be famous and on TV, soon realizes he needs to be careful of what he wishes for.
With Storytelling, Solondz has made another deeply personal film while treading familiar misanthropic ground -- you wonder if he's capable of telling any other kind of story.
He explores his own conflicted feelings about making his unflinching brand of films -- while Solondz/Oxman claims he loves his subjects, he still can't help exploiting their lives for his personal gain. At the same time, Solondz attacks critics who charge that his work is mean-spirited.
If you hated Solondz's previous films, chances are you'll hate Storytelling, too. But it's worth taking a chance on -- if you can endure one unhappy man's take on the rawness of truth.
(This film is rated R)