Every auteur needs a signature font, don’t they? Woody Allen has Windsor, Wes Anderson claimed Futura. Todd Solondz, a director once hailed as “the New Jersey poet of bleakness and despair,” has a swirly baroque one that I don’t know the name of. But it’s not his only filmic fingerprint. The 56-year-old filmmaker makes strange comedies that examine the sordid underbelly of American suburbia and spotlight the socially inept weirdos who live there. Watching films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness is like entering a town whose drinking water, you suspect, has been spiked with a misery-inducing drug.
Solondz grew up in a sleepy New Jersey suburb and is a bit of an oddball himself, awkwardly deadpanning his way through interviews, looking like the chronically depressed brother of Paul Giamatti in Storytelling. His latest movie, Weiner-Dog, doesn’t deal in the contentious subject matter that’s marked his earlier work — rape, pedophilia, suicide — but the characters are just as peculiar. Not least the titular Weiner-Dog that ties a group of stories together and provides the film’s biggest gross-out lol. You’ll know when it happens; it’s pure, distilled Solondz. As Weiner-Dog screens at Sundance London this week, here are some things you need to know about the disconcertingly hilarious movies of Todd Solondz.
He loves miserable characters
Throw on a Todd Solondz film and you’ll be faced with a parade of glum characters: misanthropic misfits, sad social pariahs, suburban losers. The most epic cast of sad-sacks appear, ironically, in 98’s Happiness. There’s Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sexually frustrated schlub who masturbates over the phone to his neighbor (“I’ll fuck you so hard you’ll cum out of your ears”) but freaks out whenever they meet IRL. There’s Joy, a cripplingly lonely telesales operator who’s exploited by a man she falls for. And there’s the kid who’s depressed because he’s the last one in his class to cum. Likewise in Solondz’s breakthrough feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn Weiner is bullied at school and called names like ‘Weiner-Dog’ and ‘lesbo.’ She asks one girl, “Why do you hate me?” The girl replies, “Because you’re ugly.” The simplicity of school politics in a nutshell.
He has a really, really dark sense of humour
Solondz specialises in a unique brand of comedy: the fucked up kind. Meaning that though his movies touch on suicide (Palindromes), rape (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and child abuse (Happiness), they also bring the lols. This takes balls-out confidence. Who else is happy to make you laugh during a film that portrays a grotesque pedophile who drugs and rapes his 11-year-old son’s friend? Or show that same son crying in his father’s arms because he can’t cum (unsurprisingly the original distributor of Happiness dropped the film.) Solondz continued to crank up the uncomfortable laughs in 2001’s Storytelling, in which an El Salvadoran maid takes revenge on the family who fired her by creeping into their suburban home while they sleep and turning on all the gas. It’s as disconcerting as it is deadpan. For Solondz, the comedy is always located directly next to the sad and, of course, the disturbing.
He has a keen eye for social satire in suburbia
Solondz’s films bulldoze the white picket fences of suburbia. They uproot uncomfortable truths — dysfunctional families, broken marriages, cheating partners, spoiled brats — and face them head-on. Take the pedophile character in Happiness: he dreams of strolling through a park on a sunny day, rifle in hand, casually taking out random suburbanites. It’s twisted and transgressive. It says that something ugly lurks under the niceties, the fakeness, the artifice of suburban life. In Storytelling this is encapsulated by the filmmaker-protagonist when he describes his doc as “a sociological study in the aftermath of Columbine.” Like Blue Velvet-era David Lynch, Solondz is curious about suburbia’s dark underbelly, what it’s really like for middle-class kids ‘imprisoned’ there, and how that darkness can boil to the surface. In showing his characters’ flaws — which they have plenty of — he makes them more human, less Stepford Wives, and reminds you of the reality beyond the sparkling sidewalks.
His films always show awkward interactions between the sexes
Dark Horse opens with a scene that will make you squirm in your seat. A man and woman sit alone at a table during a wedding reception. Strangers to one another, the man attempts to strike up a conversation: “I never dance, it’s not my thing.” The woman glances over and nods, silence falling between them. Then she turns her back and stares into the distance. Ouch. Socially inept characters populate Solondz’s films, and you’d think at some point they’d be a match made in heaven, but no. They all suck at communicating; they’re all doomed to fail. Similarly, the opening scene of Happiness features an awkward exchange at a dinner table, where a woman is dumping a man. If you’ve ever been the dumpee and found it difficult to let the other person down, be thankful you weren’t on the receiving end of this zinger: “You think I’m pathetic? A nerd? A lard-ass fat-so? You think I’m shit? Well, you’re wrong, ’cause I’m champagne, and you’re shit. Until the day you die, you, not me, will always be shit.”
Whiny upper-middle class kids who talk too much appear again and again in his movies
Once you get past all the miserable loners in his films, another recurring character surfaces: the whiny upper-middle class brat who talks too much. There’s the straight-laced kid from a Christian camp in Palindromes, the kid with the bowl-cut who won’t shut up in Life During Wartime, the kid who gets his family’s maid fired in Storytelling, and the younger sister of Dawn Weiner who always wears her ballerina gear in Welcome to the Dollhouse. All of them talk in that same whiny voice: ethereal, cheery, smug. It’s as if Solondz is showing us what suburbia produces at its worst: a whole new generation of self-centered little shits with no sense of reality. Yet still, he makes us want to watch them. It’s an odd compulsion.
5 films to see:
Welcome to the Dollhouse
Happiness
Storytelling
Life During Wartime
Weiner-Dog
Credits
Text Oliver Lunn
Still from Welcome to the Dollhouse