Two for the price of one. Part 1: girl publishes lovemaking with teacher as a literary story. Part 2: failed actor makes a documentary about a failed family. Black humour by the maker of Happiness.
The theme of Storytelling is not just telling stories, but also the different ways in which a story can be told. The film is made up of two parts, Fiction and NonFiction, each with a story and protagonists of its own. Both parts are characterised by the precise, sobering style of Solondz and his pitchblack humour.The first, shorter part Fiction, is set on a university campus in the mid Eighties. Vi (Selma Blair) and her spastic boyfriend Marcus are attending a lecture in creative writing from the black, prizewinning journalist and writer Scott. Vi falls for the dark master and incorporates her raw sexual encounter with him in a hyperrealistic story. In NonFiction, the failed actor Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti) wants to prove himself as a documentary filmmaker. He wants to make a portrait about the anxieties and expectations of teenagers in the outer suburbs and, to do so, he returns to his old high school in New Jersey. He persuades the failed teenager Scooby Livingston and his strange family to play themselves in his cruel and voyeuristic film 'American Scooby' (a sneer at American Beauty). But even more than an ironic commentary on the film by Sam Mendes, the second part is a reflection by Solondz on himself.