The last time we saw Todd Solondz, he was promoting his film Palindromes. One of the story threads of the film involved a character who bombed abortion clinics. Word on the street was that members of right to life groups were going to protest Palindromes in theaters because the film depicted them as terrorists. Solondz actually welcomed the protests and the controversy. “Anything to help the movie,” he said.
Five years later, Solondz is back to his old tricks, playing the role of filmmaker and provocateur. While it’s unlikely anybody will be holding a picket sign or shouting into a bullhorn as people enter the theater for Solondz’s Life During Wartime, the film is apt to spark discussion and impassioned debate.
One of the reasons may be because Life During Wartime is, in fact, a sequel to 1998’s Happiness, Solondz’s envelope-pushing survey of the surly side of suburbia as seen by the lives of three sisters, played by Cynthia Stevenson, Lara Flynn Boyle and Jane Adams. The film, which featured extra-marital affairs, masturbation, obscene phone callers, suicide, and pedophilia, went to theaters unrated after it was dropped by its distributor, October Films, at the time.
In Life During Wartime, Solondz weaves a similar thread of unsettling humor into his film, but this time the director uses a different cast to carry out the darkly humorous yet traumatic situations experienced by the three siblings. The three sisters are now played by Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson and Ally Sheedy while Ciaran Hinds, Michael K. Williams, Michael Lerner and Paul Reubens play the men in their lives.
“Certainly when I finished Happiness, I never thought I’d revisit these characters, these stories,” says Solondz, 52. “It proves that my imagination is not so fertile, because ten years later, I did. It is sort of a sequel, but it’s not as calculated and not a commercial move.”
“You write what beckons. I wrote the first scene and I liked it. The casting made it very appealing also. I didn’t have to be so literal about the stuff in it. I could be loose and free.”
While Life During Wartime explores similar sexual and social territory to Happiness, it does offer a broader view of its characters and the world around them. The film references the war in the Middle East, drawing parallels between the combat American troops deal with everyday at war and domestic conflict where people deal with demons everyday on the homefront.
“I think that one way to approach this is that unlike Happiness, it’s a post 9/11 film, so it’s a much more politically overt film,” relates Solondz, wearing aqua-colored Converse sneakers and his trademark horn rim glasses. “I think that it’s very much informed by the writing process itself, by my understanding as to what being in war has meant to Americans and the way we are so insulated from that reality.”
“There was a time after the Twin Towers collapsed when there was this wonderful moment in which people banded together, and there was a swelling of sentiment. They asked: ‘What can I do, how can I help?’ And (Mayor Rudolph) Giuliani responded ‘go shopping.’
“It was really a slap in the face, an obscenity at a unique moment. And of course, when you say go shopping, the subtext is to insulate yourselves. So it (the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan) is not felt the way other wars are felt. We are all morally compromised and complicit to the extent that it doesn’t matter if it’s Bush or Obama or the next president. There seems to be a perpetual state of war.”
Solondz, a Newark, New Jersey native with a Master of Fine Arts from NYU (where he now teaches), has been making waves since he first started making films. While his debut effort, 1989’s Fear, Anxiety & Depression, in which Solondz also plays the Woody Allen-like lead, is pretty much disowned by him now, he created a hubbub with his next film, 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. A wickedly funny look at the travails of a seventh grader (played by Heather Matarazzo), Dollhouse gained kudos for its unflinching look at cruelty and keen observations about coming-of-age situations. Rather than cut sequences out of his 2001 film Storytelling—especially a highly charged scene involving an African-American college professor (Robert Wisdom) and his student (Selma Blair)—Solondz had red graphics inserted over the footage the MPAA objected to. And 2004’s Palindromes, a loose sequel to Welcome to the Dollhouse, featured several performers (including Jennifer Jason Leigh) of varying color, age, sex and stature play the same lead character. The film also deals with such subjects as child molestation, rape, religion and abortion.
Because of the subjects he tackles, Solondz has been called “the most dangerous filmmaker in the world.” His ensemble-based low-budget films attract terrific actors (who work for scale) and quick shooting schedules. Not surprisingly, they also receive strongly divided responses from audiences.
“Certainly at this point, I am not surprised (by the mixed response),” says Solondz, who became a father for the first time 18 months ago. “It’s emblematic of all of my movies at this point. There’s a kind of divide between those who laugh and say it’s hilarious and it’s funny, and there is another half who is angry and says ‘How can you laugh, this is so sorrowful, this is so painful?’
“The comedy and pathos are married to each other. It’s a very tricky line I navigate. It’s also one that can cause trouble.”
Solondz relates an incident that occurred a while ago that puts his work into perspective. “Years ago, when I screened Happiness in Telluride (at the film festival), a young man–a college kid, who I think was a little drunk– came up to me and said, ‘I love your movie—awesome! It was so cool and when the kid got raped…it was hilarious!’
“I knew I was in trouble. I knew that I couldn’t control how people would respond. And that’s when I subsequently said ‘My movies aren’t for everyone, especially people who like them.’
While Life During Wartime and Solondz’s other efforts make audiences squirm, they can also make people laugh. But at different times, for different reasons—out of the level of meanness of his characters, out of irony, out of the disturbing nature of some of the protagonists’ actions—which can be unsettling in itself.
How does Solondz view the reactions of his films’ patrons, especially when they laugh at dark moments?
“As a filmmaker it’s your job to manipulate, and as much you manipulate them in such a way, you do it so an audience doesn’t realize it,” he explains. “Whatever manipulation I employ, I can’t control how an audience responds. The movie is very susceptible to the currents of laughter during a screening. There are different kinds of laughter. You question, ‘What am I laughing at? Do I approve of the laughter at that time? What does this say about them? What does it say about me?’ So it’s not just about the movie, but it’s about the filmmaker, too, because they are engaged in these crosscurrents.”
Certainly, Solondz has proven he’s not afraid to explore subjects that get under peoples’ skin time and time again.
For example, in Life During Wartime, Hinds plays Bill Maplewood, the part Dylan Baker performed in Happiness. He’s the pedophilic psychiatrist who was sent to prison for his horrifying actions directed towards his son’s friend. Now out of jail, he tries to rekindle his relationship with his two children.
But Solondz says the plight of the pedophile showcased in Life During Wartime and Happiness should not be taken on face value.
“Here I have this pedophile, and it’s not the first time a pedophile has appeared (in my films),” he says. “Why the question? I have no serious interest in the subject as pedophilia. But as a symbol for what is most demonized, fear or loathed, it’s hard to beat it. I think most Americans would feel more comfortable having Osama Bin Laden at their breakfast table than a pedophile. And people say, ‘love mankind’ and ‘embrace humanity’ but what do those mean? They are abstractions.
“It’s substantive, and the movies in some sense are kind of a crucible and ask whether we are accepting, embrace, forgive. We are defined by our limitations, and the movie explores that through all that is dramatized here. In the case of Bill Maplewood, people have found him sympathetic, but I felt he’s not sympathetic—I could never sympathize with a person who could commit these crimes. However, I will say he is a tragic figure. He is a great father who loves his son. So when his son says to him, ‘I have no sympathy for you,’ he means that, even though he yearns for and loves his father.”
There is a certain precision to Solondz’s dialogue and the characters’ interactions in his films. This would suggest that the filmmaker would not be a big fan of his actors winging it.
“I don’t say no to improvisation, but the problem is I want my actors to know their lines,” says Solondz. “First know your lines, then we’ll talk improvisation. It’s 50-50 (they’ll remember their lines), I’m always nervous.
“The cast was pretty good this time, I have to say. I had to write cue cards for an actress (on another film). She kept fumbling after a few lines. She said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t get through this speech.’ I said, ‘Maybe because you didn’t memorize it.’ So then you have to write these big cue cards. And in the end, they (the critics) say she’s great.”
It is no surprise that Solondz’s disconcerting efforts are difficult to find financing for. Hence the gap between Palindromes and Life During Wartime was over five years. With Dark Horse, the film he’s preparing to shoot with Hope Davis, Paul Dano and Faye Dunaway, he will likely skirt some of the controversial subjects he’s focused on in the past.
“Financing came together quicker,” says Solondz. “But the project is trickier.”