Solondz was an English major at Yale and in both his interviews and the critique sessions in Storytelling, in which criticism becomes inseparable from spotting offenses against political correctness, the damage is evident. He said to About.com that he follows his "impulses" in developing his stories, but if his scripts derive from impulses that isn't how the finished movies feel. (He told Salon that his actors don't improvise or even rehearse: "[I]t's pretty scripted.") This is perhaps the greatest barrier to his reaching a wide audience as Buñuel so improbably did; having started out as a surrealist seems to have liberated Buñuel permanently from too-programmatic storytelling. If Solondz can't own his penchant for sick-giggly stories enough to make them play onscreen, then he should probably move farther in the direction of his deliberateness and craft more conscious parables to reflect how he thinks he feels about life and art. They might be even less enjoyable, but they would at least be whole.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
Fantastic job on this review, Dale -- expertly put together. It's interesting to witness how hard it is to achieve what someone like Payne achieves... and how difficult it is to pull off.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Eric. Having reread Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, I've become obsessed with idea of irony as a genre rather than merely an attitude. It seems like it's all around us but people just don't know how to talk about it. That may explain why someone as thoroughly given over to irony as Todd Solondz can't quite get it together to make a decently enjoyable picture. It's as if the various parts of his brain weren't communicating with each other. I give him credit for the effort, but prefer Payne, who knows exactly what it's all about.
3 - Eric Berlin
I'm always reminded of an episode of The Simpsons when the topic of irony comes up:
Bully #1: Are you being ironic?
Bully #2: I don't even know anymore.
4 - Alan Dale
The safe answer for almost anybody is, "Yes, of course." Except maybe Sean Penn or Tim Robbins, but thinking about them gives me brain-gas so I won't even mention them.
5 - Eric Berlin
Brain-gas? Is there anything you can take for that?
6 - Alan Dale
No cure, but irony's a pretty sure preventive.