Todd Solondz is largely considered an infamous and controversial filmmaker; during his career, the writer/director has enjoyed pulling back the twitching curtain on the quintessential suburban facade, revealing a gallery of the grotesque hidden behind the pristine picket fences, innocuous bake sales, pleasant PTA meetings and seemingly well-adjusted American families. The director has delved into the darkest of subject matter, reveling in the sinister side of upper-middle-class suburbanites. His cynical worldview is coupled with mordant humor and ghoulish characters that make Robert Mitchum’s murderous miscreant in Night of the Hunter seem like a moral guardian you wouldn’t mind leaving your kids with.
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Just how well do you know your neighbors? It’s a question often posed by Todd Solondz in his movies. In cinema, suburbia has always provided fertile ground for artists wanting to showcase the nightmares and depravity lurking beneath the wholesome veneer of an upwardly mobile community. In David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, an amateur sleuth finds an ear that leads him to shadowy bars, violent gangs, and extreme BDSM, while a group of tough-talking street kids in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs locate gone-feral missing people near their neighborhood. In Ricky Bates Jr.’s Excision, a surgery-obsessed girl angrily corrupts others and engages in extreme sexual practices and her own brand of surgery by the conclusion of the movie. Much like Marylyn Manson’s song “Dogma,” these movies offer an alternative portrait of the American family.
The insightful and confrontational filmmaker (born in 1959) and NYU professor’s motivation for making his films is to satirize elements of suburban life, to turn over the stone on the upstanding white-bread citizens who live in it. Solondz has a particular skill for making his monstrous characters perfectly human and skillfully side-stepping one-note characterizations of villainy, whether it’s Heather Matarazzo’s passive-aggressive loner in Welcome to the Dollhouse, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sex-pest stalker in Happiness, or the confused protagonist of Palindromes played by eight people, Aviva. Even his character Bill, a double child rapist, is depicted as both a loving father and a seedy sexual predator. Take a look at the sad, strange, suburban cinema of Todd Solondz.
Wiener-Dog
Dawn Wiener LIVES! At least, assuming her segment in the anthology film Wiener-Dog takes place before the events of Palindromes. The film follows several potential owners of a wiener dog including the aforementioned Dawn, who now works with animals and hooks up with former wannabe-rapist Brandon for a road trip. The terminally ill Elderly Nana (Ellen Burstyn), who calls the dog Cancer, the lovable Downs-Syndrome married couple April and Tommy, and the academic Schmerz (Danny Devito), who plots to use the dog in a terrorist act.
Happiness
Good Machine Releasing
Solondz got a lot of flack for Happiness. The film boasts an all-star ensemble cast that makes up the dysfunctional ensemble. The film unfolds like an anthology focusing on individual members of a large family. Lara Flynn Boyle’s self-absorbed and ghastly writer befriends her own stalker (the great Philip Seymour Hoffman) and is bitterly disappointed that she isn’t attracted to him.
The willowy, vegan, guitar-playing Joy (Jane Adams) is regularly abused by her students and beaten up when she allows herself to be seduced by a student in her class. Cynthia’s psychiatrist husband Bill (Dylan Baker) is a predatory pedophile who drugs and rapes young boys. If you haven’t guessed, Happiness is not for the faint-hearted.
Palindromes
Celluloid Dreams
Aviva is a 13-year-old girl who is pregnant by her father’s friend. When she is forced by her pro-life mother to terminate the pregnancy, she ends up infertile and runs away. During the film, Aviva is played by different actors across the race, age, and gender spectrum (possibly to get around filming ickier scenes) and much of Palindromes is extremely hard to stomach.
Aviva winds up at a religious cult commune of homicidal Anti-Abortionists, where the family friend who had gotten her pregnant is on their books as a contract killer. Aviva resumes her “relationship” with the inept assassin, and it all goes pear-shaped. The opening scenes of Palindromes take place at Dawn Wiener’s funeral after she died by suicide, furthering the tragedy of this odd cinematic universe.
Life During Wartime
IFC Films
Life During Wartime is a pseudo-sequel to Happiness that revisits the Maplewood family who is now being played by an entirely different cast. Tonally the film is almost identical to Happiness, but the humor isn’t as biting. Joy (Shirley Henderson) is married to the phone pest (from Happiness) and is plagued by visions of an ex-boyfriend who killed himself.
Helen (Ally Sheedy) is still self-absorbed and borderline narcissistic and a successful screenwriter and Trish (Helen Jordan) are dating again and preparing for her young son’s Bar Mitzvah – which coincides with Bill’s release from prison. Charlotte Rampling appears in an extended cameo as a bitter and self-loathing “monster” who seduces Bill.
Welcome to the Dollhouse
Sony Pictures Classics
In Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo) is the Junior High “ugly duckling” – the greasy-haired, bespectacled protagonist in Solondz’s anti-coming-of-age-tale, perhaps the darkest movie about adolescence. School is hell for loner Dawn Wiener, her parents barely acknowledge her existence, instead lavishing attention on her pretty little ballerina sister Missy, she has a single friend in Ralphy, and the only attention she gets is from wannabe rapist Brandon.
Dawn is one of those thoroughly unpleasant kids nobody can quite root for; she’s tragic, but obnoxious. Over the course of the film she befriends Brandon and is responsible for not picking Missy up from ballerina practice, and Missy is subsequently abducted by the local pedophile. Even Dawn’s attempts to find her are dismissed by her parents as attention-seeking. Poor Dawn!
