Today it was announced that there is a God. The other day when I was ranting about the Golden Globes I linked to a blog post by Roger Ebert where he sadly reported that a large number of quality independent films left the Toronto International film Festival without distribution deals and feared for the future of independent films. Read that here.
Among one of those films to leave empty handed was Todd Solondz's fifth feature (if you don't count his forgotten about debut, which he himself doesn't either) Life During Wartime. The news that Life During Wartime left the festival without a deal was truly a disheartening one for no better reason than that Todd Solondz is one of, if not the greatest, of all American independent filmmakers. His resume is comprised of four films, all of them great, all of them original, all of them daring and controversial, and all of them made under the care of a filmmaker who dances only to the beat of his own drum. One of them, Palindromes, made my list of the best films of the decade.
I haven't seen Life During Wartime and I'm not overly familiar with the details of the plot other than that some have said it is a lose sequel to 1998's masterpiece Happiness. However, Solondz is the kind of guy who only makes a film every once in a while because he hates the process of filmmaking so much and therefore only takes on projects that mean something to him, ensuring his work is only of the highest quality.
That's essentially Solondz's approach to art: his films deal with outsiders converging outside the fringes of a society that doesn't accept them. They are essentially a variation of Solondz himself, a small, irritable, impersonal man who has sometimes been labeled as "The Geek Director." He once told an interviewer that it bugged him when a waitress at a diner called him "hun" because it was too personal and invaded his personal space.
This is the worldview that shapes Solondz's films, which are both devastating black comedies (a term he himself, not surprisingly, hates) and intimate character studies. I understand why Solondz hates the term black comedy. Although all of his films are brutally funny in the way they use humour to expose social taboos, to delegate them to one generic function would be to miss the point. Solondz is a terribly impersonal filmmaker. His approach is to lead the audience by the hand into situations we feel uncomfortable being involved in and leave us there unaccompanied to make our own judgements. Solondz's films offer no point of view, which forces the audience to decide on their own what they should be feeling. You laugh during a Solondz film and then turn around and question whether or not you should feel bad about it. There are thus no half measures in a Solondz film: either you love the brilliance of their daring or are disgusted by the depths of their shallowness.
Solondz also has a way of giving his characters exactly what they deserve. Look at Allen, the sex addict played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness. This is not a likable man. He combs the phonebook looking for random women to make lewd phone calls to, masturbates on his wall afterwards and uses the prize to hang postcards from. Yet there is something sweet in the way he finally comes to find a kindred soul who accepts him. She's another resident of his apartment building who killed the doorman and has him bagged in her freezer. There's something truly special grotesque about this whole set up but also something endearing about the way, when they go to bed for the first time, lay down, facing away from each other.
You can apply this logic to each of Solondz's films and it holds be it Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling or Palindromes, which uses many different actors of shapes, sizes, ages, races and genders to play the main character who is struggling with the issues surrounding abortion. Here Solondz is showing all the effects and counter-effects that abortion has on society while, through a truly unique storytelling device, subtly questioning the essence of life and whether or not everyone is the same from front to back no matter the circumstances or whether we can grow and change and become different people who are moulded based on their social experiences.
There is no news yet on a North American release date for Life During Wartime, but make sure to keep an eye out for it. You probably won't regret it.
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