In preparation for the film, I read the novel by H.G. Wells. It’s just over 70 pages, so it’s a quick read. In the famous novel, the main character – known only as “The Time Traveller” – takes his time machine 800,000 years in the future, where he encounters two species: the small, peaceful but rather stupid Eloi and the violent, cannibalistic Morlocks, who prey upon the Eloi. The novel deals with both Marxism and Darwinist evolutionary theory and is surprisingly relevant to our modern day and age. The new movie deals with Guy Pearce and the “7-Up Guy,” and lots of special effects.
The movie begins with the Time Traveller (Pearce), now known as Professor Alexander Hartdgen, taking time off from his scientifical work (which involves lots of numbers and letters scribbled on chalkboards) to propose to his so-perfect-she’s-doomed girlfriend. One gunshot later and our hero has his idee fixe: to build a time machine and change the past.
Alex builds the machine, but finds to his shock that he can’t change the past. So, assuming that his descendants will be much smarter, he heads into the future to find out why. After a brief stop in the twenty-first century to talk to a holographic museum guide (played by Orlando Jones of “Make 7-Up yours!” fame) and witness the destruction of the moon, Alex accidentally leaps 800,000 years into the future.
In the novel, after 800K years the human race had split into two classes, the aristocrats and the workers, who eventually evolved into two species. The Eloi are little more than domesticated cattle for the Morlocks’ dining pleasure. In the movie, the Eloi are noble and intelligent Native Americans who run like cowards when the Morlocks come to eat them. Alex decides to take things into his own hands and show these monster-movie rejects who’s boss. Along the way he meets the bizarre, brilliant leader of the Morlocks, played by Jeremy Irons and referred to as the “ ber-Morlock” in the film’s credits.
The addition of the Irons character is probably the biggest departure from the novel; it’s also the most confusing, and serves to eliminate most of the Marxist and evolutionary questions that were in the novel. Irons is game for the hammy role, as he was for the evil sorcerer he played in the awful Dungeons and Dragons, and even in this brief cameo he outshines Pearce, who is all grimaces and pain. For what amounts to little more than a goofy sci-fi film, it’s a shame Pearce takes it so seriously (he’s capable of more; witness his passive-aggressive, effeminate portrayal of the villain in The Count of Monte Cristo). Samantha Mumba, as the Eloi love interest Mara, has one of the most pleasant, comforting screen presences I’ve ever seen, but she doesn’t get to do much else.
While I haven’t seen it, the 1960 George Pal version of The Time Machine incorporated a nuclear war into its plot, using that to account for the degeneracy and mutation of the Morlocks. This one makes a cursory attempt to keep the class issues intact, but it’s mostly concerned with giving us a lot of cool special effects. This, at least, is one place where the film delivers: the effects showing the passage of time are impressive, and the damaged moon, with chunks orbiting its remaining form, is one of the more terribly beautiful images I’ve seen in film.
I suppose it really goes without saying that a big-budget film like this wouldn’t exactly force its viewers to really think. It’s happy to play with the possibilities of time travel and throw up lots of fancy images. And that’s okay; I didn’t begrudge the filmmakers that hour and a half of my life when it was over. The scenes with Orlando Jones are amusing enough to warrant seeing the film.
—03/09/02
Todd Solondz is the director behind the art-house hits Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. I regret to say that I have yet to see these films, so I saw Storytelling without the greater context of Solondz’s canon. Whether this is a positive or negative thing seems to be a hotly debated issue; I have friends who swear that Dollhouse is the worst film they have ever seen, while others cannot stop singing the praises of Happiness. The only common thread I picked up in reading articles on Solondz is that he is “ungenerous” to his characters – a claim that is certainly supported by Storytelling.
The film is split into two separate stories. The first, subtitled “Fiction,” centers around Vi (the always game Selma Blair), a college student taking a creative writing course. We meet Vi in the throes of passion with her boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), who has cerebral palsy. It’s clear Marcus is trading sex for Vi’s assessment of his stories. Later, in a brutal (but accurate) scene, Marcus’s story is torn to shreds by his writing workshop.
Brutal as it was, I enjoyed this scene. Solondz has clearly attended a writing workshop or two. The tentative attempts to find good things in the story, then the one criticism that opens the floodgates. The only wrong note is the creative writing teacher himself, who’s a bit more severe than any CW teacher I’ve ever met.
Following a break-up with Marcus, an upset Vi finds herself in a one-night stand with the writing teacher, a large, intimidating black man. Solondz is playing with dynamite here as about three or four cultural taboos (past and present, conscious and unconscious) take center stage. It’s difficult to describe the feelings the scene elicits. The professor practically (definitely?) rapes Vi while ordering her to scream racist obscenities at him. (Incidentally, the actual copulating figures are obscured by a red rectangle; the MPAA wouldn’t give Solondz an R rating with the scene as it was, so this is his way of underlining the censorship.) Yet, like Vi, any modern American viewer, raised in an era of tepid political correctness and smoldering undercurrents of racial conflict, will probably have a difficult time sorting out their assessment of the scene. My conclusion is that it was a rape. The difficulty was keeping race out of it.
The second story, entitled “Nonfiction,” focuses on an amateur filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) looking to make a documentary on the modern high school student. He settles on Scooby (Mark Webber), a slacker senior with no ambition other than to maybe get on television one day. Scooby is trapped in a suffocating upper-middle-class family (headed by a stern John Goodman, whose talent for displaying barely-concealed rage is put to good use). Even more interesting than Scooby is his kid brother, Mikey (Jonathan Osser), who torments the family’s El Salvadoran maid with seemingly innocent questions that shred the illusions of American class equality. The rage seething in this respectable, well-off Jewish family is fearsome.
I’ve never seen a filmmaker treat his characters with such near-contempt. He seems to have sympathy for no one – except, perhaps, the glumly passive Scooby. The Giamatti character (”Toby”) is, I would guess, intended as an avatar of Solondz himself. None of these characters are well-fleshed out, though some are creepy (particularly Mikey). I found it amusing that when Vi presents her rape as a story in class, one of the students asks the same question I was at the time – was it a rape? After all, Vi did what the professor asked. Of course, she was being intimidated – or was she? I think she was, but I suppose it’s open for interpretation.
Storytelling is not a film to move its viewers. Its mission is to shock, surprise, maybe even elicit a few nervous, guilty titters. How many directors would dare make a film that makes fun of people with cerebral palsy, has a black man rape a white girl, has a kid who mercilessly and innocuously torments his foreign au pair, and brutally exposes the raging undercurrent of middle class America? The film speaks the unspoken and dares us to face up to it. I only wish there were at least some spark of goodness to counter the cynicism.
—03/09/02