London Film Fest 2011 Day 3 - DARK HORSE

Writer-director Todd Solondz is the master of the cinema of discomfort. His movies are set in a darkly tragicomic world that lurks beneath contemporary New Jersey suburbia. His movies are peopled with paedophiles, rapists - the deluded and the disturbed.  WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE and HAPPINESS set the high water mark for movies you can't bear to watch and yet can't look away from.  They are uneasy, disconcerting, disturbing, and yet, yet, at times, unbelievably funny.  DARK HORSE is also set in that Solondzian landscape but it's softer, sweeter in tone.  It still contains moments of deep unease, but it's almost "fluffy" - not an adjective I'd ever thought I'd use in a Solondz review.  To quote long-time Solondz producer Ted Hope, "When I read the script, I was even more surprised: it contained no molestation, no masturbation, no rape, no incest".  The result is a wonderful tragicomic boy-meets-girl romance that is utterly Solondz and yet perhaps his best work since HAPPINESS and his most marketable, commercial film to date. Moreover, it's a movie that features old favourites in quirky new roles - Christopher Walken and Selma Blair - as well as a genuinely exciting break-out role from Jordan Gelber as the protagonist, Abe Wertheimer. 

The movie is about a boy and a girl.  But it's Solondz. So the boy is a deeply frustrated, resentful man called Abe Wertheimer, who still lives with his parents; collects toys; works for his father (Walken); hates his brother (Justin Bartha) and fantasises about his secretary (Donna Murphy).  The girl, Miranda (Blair) is also deeply messed up. She's failed at writing; is depressed after a break-up; and still lives with her parents.  Abe and Miranda meet a wedding. She looks miserable, he stalks her, bizarrely she accepts his marriage proposal, triggering a re-evaluation of his dependence on his parents, and a re-evaluation on her part of how she feels about Abe.  The whole thing goes off into a Lynchian subconscious dream-tangent and then wraps up in a final tableaux that is brilliantly painfully tragic and hilarious. The best movie of the festival, to date.

DARK HORSE played Venice and London 2011. It has no commercial release date but legendary indie producer Ted Hope is in town so we can but hope.

London Film Fest Day 3 - LIFE DURING WARTIME

Todd Solondz is back in the place he loves best: contemporary Jewish-American middle-class suburbia where normal looking people deal with drug addiction, perversion, pedophilia, suicide, neuroses, and anything else you might deem "inappropriate" to talk about in front of the kids. Solondz picks up characters from his previous, brilliantly disturbing films WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE and HAPPINESS and has them deal with events from those flicks. In the case of the family recovering from the father's child rape conviction, the action takes place in sunny Florida rather than the more typical Jersey ("a state of irony") bu the grim humour remains the same. In short, if you like Solondz you'll love this film.

Tech credits are, as ever, polished, with sunny-suburban production design contrasting with the painful subject matter. Casting is superlative. Special praise is due for Allison Janney as the wife of the convicted paedophile, and Shirley Henderson as her sister, who works with convicts and whose lovers have a habit of topping themselves. Ciaran Hinds skulks around as the pederast and achieves something very difficult: he evokes our sympathy. Charlotte Rampling is typically strong in a cameo as frustrated older woman. The glue that binds all these characters together is the idea of forgiveness.

LIFE DURING WARTIME played Telluride, Venice (where it won Best Screenplay), Toronto, New York and London 2009.