Storytelling *** (2001, Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom) – Classic Movie Review 1775

Writer-director Todd Solondz’s fourth film is this weird 2001 black comedy chronicling the experiences of two teenagers trying to make sense of their lives through creative projects.

The director of Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Happiness (1998) returns with a characteristically scabrous dissection of the confused motives that can lie behind ‘true-to-life’ writing and documentary film-making.

Solondz offers two separate stories (Fiction and Non-Fiction) that unfold amid the sadly comical terrain of college and high school. In the first, a young female student has a stranger-than-fiction encounter with her creative writing tutor. In the second, a struggling documentarian sets out faithfully to record the life and thoughts of an ordinary American adolsecent, but finds himself irresistibly drawn to the exploitation possibilities of the material.

Selma Blair, Leo Fitzpatrick, Robert Wisdom, Aleksa Palladino, Paul Giamatti, Mike Schank, Xander Berkeley, Mark Webber, John Goodman, Julie Hagerty, Jonathan Osser, Noah Fleiss and Steve Railsback head the cast.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1775

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