Todd Solondz' latest film Palindromes confirms his place as one of the sharpest and most audacious American writer/directors working in America Todday. His films offer up a potent mix of bizarre poignancy and black humour, in which characters trudge the well worn tracks of life, following seemingly predetermined itineraries towards happy or tragic dead ends. As a result of his singular refusal to imbue his characters with a clear cut responsibility for their actions, Solondz creates an extraordinarily empathetic portrait of American society; and because of this he also succeeds in negating much of the contention that automatically surrounds his chosen subject matter, frequently tackling key social issues and taboos.
Solondz was born in New Jersey and went to the NYU Film School where his short films got him attention from the outside world. He was offered picture deals by Hollywood studios, but after his first film, Fear, Anxiety and Depression , in 1989 failed to incite much appreciation Solondz dropped out of the business and went to teach English to immigrants. He spent several years doing this, before a friend agreed to help finance a low budget feature, and once again Solondz took the helm.
Solondz first achieved renown with Welcome to the Dollhouse , his explicitly cruel portrait of a young girl whose experience of all factions of the world around her is terrible; who can find no solution or way out of the course of life that seems to stretch interminably ahead. Heather Matarrazzo played Dawn Weiner, the misfortunate scapegoat for the various social ills that surround her: Dawn is an unbeautiful thirteen-year-old who must deal with the blatant favouritism expressed by her parents for her cute younger sister, with the bullying and taunting of her classmates who call her 'Weiner-dog', with her unrequited passion for the star of a high-school band - and with what ultimately amounts to the unbearable apathy of other people. But most chillingly, Dawn must deal with these aspects of her existence simply because she has no other option. At one stage, to highlight his heroine's romantic and completely impossible dreams, Solondz has Dawn imagine every character telling her, in the form of speaking to the camera, that they love her: the truth never seemed more cruel. Yet despite its heart-breakingly frank depiction of American apathy, Welcome to the Dollhouse is an incredibly funny film, and won Solondz much respect for refusing to compromise on his vision of how people operate. "The title I wanted was Faggots and Retards," Toddd Solondz has said; "Grown ups know which things really matter, but when you're a kid everything is a matter of life and death". Interestingly the film is also perhaps the most biased of Solondz' works: our identification with Dawn leads to a virulent hatred of those around her, unlike the later mass identification he skilfully imposes with his later films. Tragically (and perhaps because Solondz was unable to persuade Matarrazzo to reprise her role), the later film Palindromes opens with Dawn's funeral. In classic droll Solondz-style, we are informed by Ellen Barkin's mother that Dawn grew fat, depressed, got date raped and then killed herself.
In 1998 Happiness was released, regarded by many as one of the definitive films of the decade. This troubled masterpiece offers an acerbic take on a group of people who are coming at life from very different angles - with their individual dreams and desires- all chugging away to obtain something clearly indicated by the film as unobtainable. Ultimately the Happiness portrays the normal everyday American as a kind of meta-factotum forever at the mercy of life's relentless whims. Depressing and brutal it might be - but it was also extremely, and blackly, funny, and this marriage of depressing insight and caustic humour made Happiness immensely popular with the critics - it won the international Critics award at Cannes Film Festival, along with a host of other prestigious awards world wide. " It's hard to separate what I find funny from what I'm moved by," Solondz says, "These are the two currents at work in me: There's a humour in some things that, at the same time, are disturbing and sadden us.... These characters are interesting not because they're 'dysfunctional', but because they have real problems, crushing hardships, moral dilemmas, and so forth, and yet they somehow still manage to get up in the morning". Certainly Happiness achieved particular notoriety because of its character Bill Maplewood (played to perfection by Dylan Baker), a married man and also a paedophile, who at one stage of the film has to explain to his own son how he arranged the drugging and raping of his best friend.
Strangely Storytelling, Solondz' follow up to Happiness , was not so successful at the box office. Split into two parts, respectively titled Fiction and Non-fiction, this film intelligently tackles issues of drive and the thirst for the truth behind matters. In the story one the film student Vi (Selma Blair) is taken back to the apartment of her black Pulitzer-prize winning professor Mr Scott (Robert Wisdom) for sex. She goes into the bathroom and whimpers into the mirror "Don't be a racist" over and over again. But what she is seeking to be - or rather not to be - is ultimately exposed to be the result of the very institutionalisation she yearns to break away from. In the second story eleven-year-old Mickey (Jonathon Ossler) treats his family's maid Consuelo (Lupe Ontiveros) with computer-like curiosity; while on the one hand he is the only one who takes an interest in her, he is unable to empathise with her circumstances and causes her to be fired, thus prompting an act of revenge with tragic consequences for all. The truth is that neither character is inherently bad; their circumstances are merely the cause of their operations, much like an extended algebraic equation. Fabulously, when American censors refused to pass the scene where Vi has anal sex with Mr Scott, Solondz inserted a red box over the image - as he puts it: "I feel the audience is entitled to know what they're not allowed to see".
Ultimately what makes Solondz' career so exciting is that he is clearly willing to take his style - a sort of hybrid of John Waters and Hal Hartley with added emotional seasoning - in new directions, as is undoubtedly proven by Palindromes . In his latest film all the elements that have marked out his work so far are present - characters both tragic and hilarious in the unalterable course of their lives - but Solondz makes one particularly daring decision: to change the actor playing the main character within each segment of the narrative. Thus the story of Aviva, a thirteen-year-old girl who dreams of having a baby and runs away from home to pursue that dream, is made even more complex and layered, since the audience's process of identification is challenged by the constant physical change in their protagonist - at one point Aviva is played by a large black woman, at another by a little boy, at another by Jennifer Jason Leigh (etc). This not only pushes the boundaries set by traditional narrative cinema, but also - and more importantly - to the extent to which issues of class, race, gender and sexuality effect their ability to relate to their protagonist. This is not to say that Palindromes shies away from its subject matter though, which includes Mama Sunshine's devoutly religious community who take in and raise disabled kids and who are also part of an anti abortion sect - which involves murdering abortionists. "I guess I don't feel comfortable with it being described as an issue movie because it tends to imply that it's a kind of dogmatic statement - pro-choice, or pro-life for that matter," Solondz says of Palindromes , "I don't have any interest in that. It's rather about examining the moral dimensions and moral consequences regardless of which position you adhere to."
Solondz also once said "I don't think I was cut out to be a director", but if how you judge a decent director is from the material he produces, he was probably wrong. His uniquely crafted films continue to be influential both to budding film-makers and writers, and remain brilliantly reflective of contemporary Western society along all its endearing flaws.
Will Davis
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