Storytelling

Small and imperfectly formed

The first part of Todd Solondz's Storytelling ends with a creative-writing teacher mercilessly slamming into a story by one of his students. Still, he admits grudgingly, her writing has improved since her last effort: "There's now at least a beginning, a middle and an end." That's one thing you can't quite say about Storytelling, which seems all beginning or all middle, but not much end – at least, not much obvious resolution. Solondz's last film, the devastating Happiness, was a sort of moral horror comedy, at once harrowing and funny; it also had a novelistic completeness and an emotional impact quite apart from Solondz's kamikaze taboo-busting.

By comparison, Storytelling feels fragmentary and non-committal. Solondz pares his material down to two separate stories, "Fiction" and "Nonfiction", but the result feels less like a self-enclosed diptych than a portmanteau with a part or two missing. "Fiction" is set among the variously spoiled, vacant and self-righteous students on a writing course. Pink-haired hipster Vi (Selma Blair) dates Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), a boy with cerebral palsy who's also a whining egotist and a truly wretched writer. You can only agree when their professor (Robert Wisdom), a black former Pulitzer winner, lays into Marcus's story; but then he's totally embittered and vindictive, anyway. No one in Solondz's world has firm moral or intellectual ground to stand on: when one student says, "But hey – what do I know?", Solondz is asking what anyone knows, and by what right they open their big mouths. This crumbling of certainties sets us up for Vi's night with the prof – a sequence containing the film's only out-and-out shock content – and then largely as a trap to throw our and Vi's preconceptions into disarray. When she writes a painfully honest account of it, she's barracked as a misogynist, racist no-hoper. In Solondz's world, everybody loses, always.

Not least Solondz himself. In "Nonfiction", Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), a middle-aged would-be documentarist who happens to look uncannily like Solondz, sets out to make a film about high-school kids, and finds his subject in supremely vacant stoner Scooby (Mark Webber). Oxman is well-intentioned but inane: his editor takes one look at his film and complains, "It seems glib and facile to make fun of how idiotic these people are." Solondz, of course, faced the same charges with Happiness. It looks as if he's pre-empting criticism – or is he, rather, sniping at his detractors who see him as a mean-spirited snotty-nosed misanthrope? Because Solondz systematically undermines any position he might appear to take, the film is unusually hard to assess. Some of his insights, admittedly, are chillingly direct: the film's most terrifying character is Mikey (Jonathan Osser), a know-it-all child who behaves with blithely clueless snobbery to his family's Salvadorian maid (Lupe Ontiveros); Toby may be mocked for finding Scooby "emblematic of America today", but Mikey genuinely, excruciatingly, is emblematic of middle America's infantile disregard for the outside world.

Equally, though, "Nonfiction" features some flat, second-hand representations of suburban family life: parents John Goodman and Julie Hagerty have an ugly cartoonishness that Solondz brilliantly transcended in Happiness. But then you find yourself wondering whether they are meant to be two-dimensional, a joke at the expense of those who see Solondz as a mere caricaturist. You wonder what else in Storytelling – Frederick Elmes's sombre, flattened-out photography, the unemotive acting, the ominous buzz of empty rooms – could be Solondz parodying his own predilection for depressive atmospherics.

But how much can all this matter to anyone who doesn't already have an opinion about Todd Solondz? Unlike Happiness, Storytelling does not entirely make sense outside the context of his previous work, or indeed other recent cinema. As well as a deserved swipe at American Beauty, there's an extended allusion to American Movie, the sniggering documentary which persuaded its deluded film-maker subjects to collude in their own pillorying. By getting that film's drug-casualty mascot Mike Schank to play a cameo, is Solondz defending Schank or exploiting him further, making him an in-joke for hipster cinephiles? Solondz is certainly playing a more interesting game than Kevin Smith, whose Jay and Silent Bob (reviewed below) is purely a fanzine in-joke addressed to followers of Miramax house gossip. Solondz is clearly concerned about the way that cinema reflects or fails to reflect the state of the world. In making a film partly about the impossibility of following up Happiness, he has produced an agonised open letter to his admirers and critics, much as Eminem's second album was a pained, baffled riposte to everyone who loved or hated the first. Too bad if this agonised wrangling leaves us with the feeling that Solondz hasn't quite delivered a fully-rounded film of the sort he's uniquely capable of making. But regard Storytelling as an interim statement, and it looks like a rather extraordinary response from a film-maker stuck in a difficult corner.

j.romney@independent.co.uk