Family Dynamics

What Minotaurs lurk in the polite American mind, hungering within the contortions of liberal conscience? Even the most not-for-profit filmmaker--a documentarian, a socially responsible type--may turn a corner in his soul and discover a beast in the path, gnawing on the bones of an interview subject. The tender lover bumps blindly into a creature that howls for dirty sex; the tolerant democrat gets screwed, or worse, by the bogeyman she pretends she doesn't believe in. These monsters, and more, inhabit the labyrinth--or rather, the clean and well-lit suburbs--of Storytelling, an educational new film by Todd Solondz.

When I say "educational," I mean that both of the tales that Storytelling comprises are concerned with schools. The first, much briefer section of the movie takes place at a university in New Jersey, where Vi (Selma Blair) studies in the writing workshop of a gravely superior author, Mr. Scott (Robert Wisdom). The movie's second part is set mostly in the home of a well-to-do Jewish family, whose eldest son, Scooby (Mark Webber), is about to wash out of high school on a lukewarm tide of inertia. One way to sum up Storytelling might be to say that Vi wants to learn and does, though (like most of us) she finds the lesson she gets isn't the one she'd expected. Scooby does not want to learn. Like most of us, he's taught a good lesson anyway.

But before I elaborate on either of these moral tales, I'd better attempt another definition. Who's "us"?

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