The strange film career of writer-director Todd Solondz, responsible for "Welcome to the Dollhouse" (1995), a heartbreaking yet hilarious chronicle of junior high school life, has provided some quirky twists to the standard Hollywood success story. Born in Newark and raised in suburban Irvington, New Jersey, the eight-year-old future filmmaker wanted to become a rabbi. This desire propelled him through a succession of religious, public and private schools. Having decided against the ecclesiastical life, Solondz eventually landed among the decidedly humanistic literary set, studying English at Yale College.
Though he was unhappy academically, Solondz received an invaluable education through myriad campus screenings that exposed him to the glories of cinema's past. Inspired, Solondz headed west to Los Angeles where he worked as a messenger at the Writers Guild while writing screenplays. He acquired an agent on the strength of his first script but the agent disliked his second. Tiring of the scene, Solondz returned to NYC where he enrolled in NYU's highly regarded film school. There he made several promising short films, most notably, "Schatt's Last Shot" (1985), a 12-minute comedy. On the strength of this little movie, Solondz won a high-powered agent with International Creative Management Inc. At age 26, he found himself with highly coveted three-picture deals at both Columbia and 20th-Century Fox. Solondz was living the young filmmaker's dream until it soon became a bit of a nightmare.
Solondz found himself with no creative control over his first project, "Fear, Anxiety and Depression" (1989). He wrote, directed and starred in this poorly received, barely released would-be comedy about struggling twentysomethings trying to make it in the trendy "downtown" NYC art scene. As writer Ira Ellis, Solondz plays a character so desperate that he sends his latest play to his idol Samuel Beckett in hopes of a collaboration. The filmmaker found the experience so dispiriting that he decided to leave Hollywood. Solondz returned to NYC where he failed to get accepted by the Peace Corps. Instead, he accepted a job as a teacher of English as a Second Language to newly arrived Russian immigrants, an experience he has described as deeply rewarding.
School lay-offs were looming on the horizon when a lawyer friend of Solondz's announced that she could raise financing for a feature. He remembered the screenplay he had written right after the debacle of "Fear, Anxiety and Depression". That script became "Welcome to the Dollhouse". This story of an 11-year-old bespectacled doormat of a girl who faces abuse at every front won the hearts of reviewers and audiences and introduced a cast of talented newcomers, including Heather Matarazzo, Brendan Sexton III and Eric Mabius. Hailed for its realism, emotional truth and unsentimental humor, the elegantly composed low-budget film won Solondz (who also produced) major prizes at the Berlin and Sundance Film Festivals.
Solondz followed up with the controversial but widely well-received "Happiness" (1998). Both exceptionally funny and wildly disturbing, "Happiness" caused quite a stir following its award-winning Cannes debut, and was subsequently dropped by October Films when Universal Pictures and parent company Seagram's forbade the subsidiary to distribute it, citing moral outrage. An ensemble film focusing on the lives of three sisters and the people with whom they interconnect, "Happiness" included among its characters an obscene phone caller, a murderer and a pedophile, all portrayed in an irreverently sympathetic light, highlighted by the cast's wonderful performances, including the especially memorable Dylan Baker, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Jane Adams. While quite unsettling, most would agree that Solondz's work (finally released by a specially formed distribution annex of the independent production company Good Machine) was more morally exploratory than bankrupt, but the controversy did buy the film and the director a great deal of press, undoubtedly bringing in moviegoers who may not have otherwise seen this remarkable film.
For his next film, “Storytelling” (2002), Solondz delved deeper into the sexual depravity and suburban ennui that occupied his previous work. This time, he heaped scorn upon his critics and fans. The film was told in two halves: the first, “Fiction,” a scant thirty minutes long and considered the better of the two, tells the story of Vi (Selma Blair), a creative writing student at a third-rate college whose relationship with a fellow student (Leo Fitzpatrick) stricken with cerebral palsy falls apart, prompting her to start a lurid affair with her African-American professor (Robert Wisdom) after a chance meeting in a bar. When the professor takes her home, Vi discovers she’s not the first and soon is forced to perform a humiliating sexual act. She later writes about the experience and reads the autobiographical story in class. The professor, however, adds to her shame by encouraging the other students to attack her work.
The second, longer half, “Nonfiction,” depicts a teenaged slacker, Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber), whose life in a typical Jewish family is documented by a filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) and ultimately exploited for laughs. In the film’s most poignant scene, Solondz shows an eavesdropping Scooby at an exclusive premier of his film where a hipster audience howls with laughter at his dream of becoming Conan O’Brien’s sidekick—a direct smack in the face of Solondz’s avant-garde audience, who have been accused of relishing their intellectual superiority. Some critics parroted the typical refrain that “Storytelling” was cruel and mean-spirited, and Solondz too derisive toward his characters. The director accepts such criticism, however, saying that his “movies are not for everyone.”
With “Palindromes” (2005), his most politically charged film to date—it premiered during the 2004 Presidential campaign—Solondz sought to offend and repulse as many people as possible. No one was spared: abortion activists, fundamentalist Christians, pedophiles, disabled children—nothing was sacred. A 13-year-old Jewish girl, Aviva, from suburban New Jersey—Solondz’s usual location—longs to have a baby. She has quick, awkward sex with the son of a family friend and gets what she wanted, but her mother (Ellen Barkin) forces her to have an abortion which ends up going wrong. Aviva runs away and finds a Christian commune of disabled children run by the film’s only sympathetic character, Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), and later gets involved in a plot murder an abortion doctor. Critics complained the film was disjointed and confusing, especially because Aviva was played by eight different actors of varying age, race and gender for no apparent reason. Five girls, one 12 year-old boy, a rather large African-American adult (Sharon Wilkins) and even Jennifer Jason Leigh all played the young runaway searching for love. Even those who have enjoyed his work in the past panned the movie, as Solondz continued to simultaneously irritate audiences and provoke thought.