I am baffled by Storytelling, über-misanthrope Todd Solondz's third outing. It has everything that made his two previous films (Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness) so damnably galling: intense hatred for humanity, biting dialog, an ability to find the most sensitive topics and drive knives into them, and a more-than-capable touch as a filmmaker, an eye for shot composition and usually great, if horrific and hateful, dialog. With this film, however, he adds something that I don't know how to define. Pre-emptive apologia, perhaps. It's as if the attacks on his earlier films have made him sensitive—not in any empathetic way, just sensitive to what people are going to say about his movies.

The film is actually two films joined by very little, nothing in the way of plot. The first, and much shorter, film is "Fiction," about a young white liberal college student (Selma Blair) who majors in creative writing. She is dating a fellow student (Leo Fitzpatrick) who has cerebal palsy, and she's doing it out of some sort of guilt and the assumption that just because he's suffering, he will be deep. He's not, really, and he knows that she's losing interest: after having sex, he mourns that "the kinkiness has gone. You've become kind." She's interested in her teacher, a sullen black author (Robert Wisdom) who won the Pulitzer Prize and uses his authority as a weapon in his heartless destruction of his students' stories. He's a real bastard, but he knows that his liberal white students will excuse his behavior—he's calling them on their beliefs and their buried prejudices. He meets Blair in a bar, and soon the two are back at his house for a disturbingly violent and degrading, if more or less consensual, tryst in which he forces her to make racial slurs about him. She is devastated, and she writes a story about it, which the other students in her class demolish when she reads it to them. Here's the interesting part, that thing I don't know how to define. The students voice the same criticisms—it's racist, it's callow, it's unrealistic, it's hateful, it's degrading, etc.—that people voice about the films of Todd Solondz, including the one they're inhabiting. One character put it best when she called the story "confessional, yet dishonest... it pretends to be horrified by the sexuality it in fact fetishizes..." These are charges one might level at this movie, and at Solondz.

The second film is "Fact," and it's about a loser shoe salesman/wanna-be documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) who decides to follow around a pothead space case named Scooby (Mark Webber) and make a film about the American Teenager using him as an example. Scooby has an archetypal movie dysfunctional family: his father (John Goodman) rules the coversation with an iron fist, his mother (Julie Hagerty) is a twittering Avon Lady gone bad, his youngest brother (Jonathan Osser) is an unbelievably precocious and opinionated little monster with the face of an angel, and the only reasonable member is the middle kid (Noah Fleiss), who is more or less normal and more or less well-adjusted. Scooby has no plans, except that he doesn't want to go to college, and he wants to be a talk show host, like Conan O'Brian (who has a hilarious cameo). Everyone is completely ridiculous, and it's not surprising that the documentary is headed toward being what some critics called the hilarious yet heartfelt 1999 film American Movie: a freak show for uppity intellectuals to watch and laugh at the unfortunate (I don't agree with this appraisal of American Movie). His film editor (Franka Potente) even argues that same point, while Giamatti insists that he loves his subjects. So here we have that odd theme again, in which the characters voice the same criticisms that audiences have made and will make about Solondz's films: he makes freak shows in which he creates unfortunate people and then demolishes them mercilessly.

There is also the self-conscious casting of such people as Mike Schenk, who was in the aforementioned American Movie, and Leo Fitzpatrick, survivor of two of Larry Clark's exploitation-fests, Kids and Bully. Was putting them in the movie part of that self-consciously apologetic theme that I saw? I really don't know what it was, either. Pre-emptive apologia, as I suggested above? Self-conscious penitence? Some weird postmodern thing, where he's winkingly disarming valid criticisms by saying them first, thus defusing the arguments? It's never less than interesting, that's for sure, but I didn't like it.

So I don't know how to take this movie. It is full of hateful people, as with his other films, and it left a similar bad taste in my mouth. There is only one remotely sympathetic character, and he ends up on life support. I thought that Consuela, Scooby's family's overworked maid (Lupe Ontiveros) from El Salvador, was going to turn out sympathetic, the first one in a Solondz film, but I was mistaken, and I was shocked to the point of open-mouthed wonder at the way in which Solondz chose to destroy my sympathy for her. The writer/director's firm and cruel hand didn't let anyone escape. There's another problem, too, one that plagues many satires: it loses sight of the real people behind the caricatures. The characters are so far gone from reality that they are just satires of movie characters, with little relation to what Solondz sees as the targets of his satire. There's no denying Solondz's technical talent as a filmmaker, but it comes bearing such caustic messages that it's difficult to appreciate.

There was one thing that I definitely appreciated, and I applaud Solondz for the stand he took. There was a somewhat graphic sex scene between the teacher and the student that the MPAA ratings board said he would have to cut in order to avoid the NC-17 rating. Instead of cutting it, he placed a large red box over the figures, leaving the sounds disembodied and even more disturbing. He was, in effect, calling the MPAA on what they were really doing: censoring him. The DVD contains both versions, and I have to admit the one with the red box makes a louder and more important statement than the rest of the film.