RV!: Life During Wartime (2009)

RV!: Life During Wartime (2009) Dir: Todd Solondz Date Released: July 23, 2010 Date Seen: July 25, 2011 Rating: 4.25/5

"Waaa, Todd Solondz's movies are bluuunt, and they're didaaaactiiiic, and I don't like being preached at, waaaaa." O ye gods. Here, a piece for Press Play.

327) Palindromes (2004)

327) Palindromes (2004) Dir: Todd Solondz Date Released: April 2005 Date Seen: October 6, 2009 Rating: 2.75/5

The argument in favor of Todd Solondz's method of storytelling usually goes something like this: though his films are soaked through and through with alienating pessimism that elicits chortles from caricatures of immoral behavior, they do so out of a perverse love for his seriously-screwed-up characters. It's an argument that Solondz himself wants you to take home so badly that he has Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), his stand-in Storytelling (2001) come right out and say it. Oxman is a nebbish documentary filmmaker following the life of Scooby (Mark Webber), an airhead high-school drop-out. No matter how heart-felt and open Oxman thinks he's being to Scooby and his family, when he's eventually confronted by an angry, newly self-aware Scooby, he must face the fact that he's been exploiting his subject for his work. That conclusion is Solondz's way of directly telling his detractors that he understands and agrees with them that his methods of fictive, rhetorical argument, where a character's weaknesses, not flaws, define them, is of course the artist's declaration of frustration with his own limited abilities.

But it's also a statement of intention, one that tells us that his films are not interested in delving into a tactful study of morality. Instead, they attempt to engage instead of exorcise his characters' demons as an open-ended parable might. They are the opposite of Rohmer's "Moral Tales" as they are not interested in the consequences of immoral behavior such much as amoral behavior, or the way that absolute standards fail the protagonists that cling to them in their moments of personal crisis.

Palindromes is in that sense another of Solondz's "Amoral Tales,"* a film that addresses the possibility of whether or not a character in trouble can or even really wants to change. It confronts the viewer with stereotypes not to shock but to allow us to see how characters that have become types--the Christian do-gooder vs. the concerned, pro-life parent--project personal beliefs that are intrinsically at odds with the situation at hand: Aviva, a teenage girl, wants to have a baby. None of her guardians, not her surrogate mother nor her biological one, try to seriously engage with that simple truth but rather assume that what they want is what's best for her, making her personal wishes as irrelevant.

As in his other films, Palindromes' focus on Aviva's struggle to escape the film's putdown of a (a)moral--"People don't change," as the film's Solondz avatar says right before trailing off into nervous fuming--is inherently pointed. But, like Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Solondz's other lesser film which he cites at Palindromes' beginning with a funeral for its main protagonist, it's a little too on the nose and consistently bland. Aviva tries to imagine herself as different people throughout the movie, as exhibited by Solondz's gimmick of having her portrayed by various different actresses of differing body types and ages, in order to become confident in her decisions. The film's events are grounded in her POV as opposed to most of Solondz's other films, where we we at least get some tangential asides into the lives and the blackly comic emotional anguish of the film's bevy of supporting characters. Here, it's all Aviva all the time and she can't change, remember? Some good context as usual but not enough to really make the film worth remembering on its own terms.

*Patent pending, natch.

316) Life During Wartime (2009)

316) Life During Wartime (2009) Dir: Todd Solondz Not Yet Released Date Seen: September 29, 2009 Rating: 4/5

The palpable acrimony Todd Solondz invests in his characters' personalities is dialed down significantly in Life During Wartime, a black comedy that is unjustly being dismissed as more of the same from the morose American agitator. Here his fixation with caricaturing the schnooks he sympathizes with most is more palatable than his previous successes as it's more pointed but no less searing in its impact. His characters' affected voices just barely hide the aching humanity in even the most churlishly funny among them. Solondz's confrontational style is a gimmick to be sure but the urgency of Life During Wartime has effectively channeled his usual blustery dual fascination/frustration with the stereotypical behavior of status quo-upholding psychotics. Thanks once again to another excellent eclectic cast of performers, especially Charlotte Rampling, Ciaran Hinds and Paul Reubens, the moral center of Solondz's latest is dense enough and certainly macabrely humorous enough to pack a devastating punch. Hurts so good.

315) Storytelling (2001)

315) Storytelling (2001) Dir: Todd Solondz Date Released: January 2002 Date Seen: September 28, 2009 Rating: 4/5

Todd Solondz's Storytelling is on a par with Alain Resnais's Wild Grass in its abject refusal to grant its protagonists' closure. Solondz goes one step farther than Resnais and scolds his viewers along with his characters for wanting that a neat resolution. That's probably because, unlike Wild Grass, which is situated at the tail-end of Resnais's substantial filmography, Storytelling is a defense of Solondz's modus operandi after only having made two other films. Storytelling will make you squirm because it actively courts the viewer's immediate temptation to hem-and-haw at every grotesque turn. When confronted as aggressively as we are here, with characters as charming as oozing, days-old garbage left out in 90 degree weather, our first kneejerk reaction is, of course, to recoil. But that according to Solondz is the point of his work. And here, perhaps more so than in his searing Happiness, you can best see how that kind of cynicism masks Solondz's sustaining faith in his characters.

Solondz persists in telling us that he not only understands but in fact respects his characters by refusing to pigeonhole their lives into a neat structure of "Beginning, Middle and End," because that would force them to conform to our expectations. "The truth" in fiction according to Solondz is messy, rude and persistently at odds-with-itself. There's inherently no "meaning...to be found in this" his stand-in, played by Paul Giamatti says in the second of the film's two segments, "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction." The self-indulgent need to sympathize inevitably leads to the exploitation of his characters, showing that everybody, no matter how good-natured, is a little bit culpable.

Solondz's characters are consistently insipid even in trying to ingratiate themselves to each other but they're also trying to accomplish something from pure motives, for themselves, for others. That crucial belief in even the ugliest caricature sinks the viewer into a haze where they aren't allowed to escape until the film's cataclysmic and hilariously mean ending. It's Solondz's way of slapping the viewer for even thinking they could experience a brief moment of moral clarity in this awesome humanist black comedy.