Todd Solondz’s Unfulfilled Desires

In May, I joined the director Todd Solondz for lunch at Union Square Café, the swank Manhattan bistro. The restaurant opened in 1985, the same year that Solondz dropped out of the master’s program in film at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts, a short walk downtown. His last student project was “Schatt’s Last Shot,” a short starring a scrawny Solondz at twenty-five—hair fluffy and jet black, mouth stuffed with braces—as a high schooler named Ezra, trying and failing to pass gym class, get into M.I.T., and go steady with a barely interested cheerleader named Bunny. After Ezra bombs on the basketball court, he listens to Bunny narrate his state of affairs in a locker room. “It’s, like, everything you ever worked for, everything you ever dreamed of, your whole future, just—down the drain,” she tells him.

A lot has changed. The restaurant has moved a few blocks north, for one, and Solondz’s hair is now gray and Seussian in light wisps, his large features ornamented by bright-blue circular glasses. Since “Schatt’s Last Shot,” which earned Solondz a three-picture deal with Scott Rudin, at Twentieth Century Fox, he has made eight features that have disturbed and enthralled audiences with their perverse, often brutal looks at upper-middle-class American suburbia. (Depending on the critic, he’s the patron saint of “pessimism,” “the new theater of cruelty,” or “schlubs and schlemiels.”) He is best known for “Happiness,” his 1998 ensemble comedy, which weaves together stories of sexual depravity and banality in the lives of lonely New Jerseyites. Although his subjects have all but guaranteed that he would never become a household name, he remains a titan to a class of film buffs, Ari Aster, Yorgos Lanthimos, and the creators of “PEN15” among them. “He purposefully takes every issue that you’re not allowed to be humorous about—child molestation, rape, abortion,” John Waters, a friend of Solondz’s, told me. “They’re not funny issues. And they’re not funny in his movies, either. But, at the same time, it’s astounding how he depicts them.”

When we met, Solondz was a few weeks from flying to Spain to shoot his next feature, “Love Child,” set to star Elizabeth Olsen and Charles Melton, about a precocious, conniving eleven-year-old named Junior, who wants to be on Broadway and is maniacally obsessed with his mother. The script came more quickly to Solondz than those of his past films, and, unlike the majority of his movies, he said that he would let his thirteen- and fifteen-year-old see it. “It’s really the first feature I’ve written that actually has a plot,” he told me. “It’s a very Hollywood movie.” Not that the film would appeal to the Hollywood powers, he clarified—it was still a Todd Solondz movie, which made it “unfashionable,” in his view. “I shouldn’t say that!” he added drolly, thinking of potential financiers. “I should be advertising this as if they would read this article and care.”

“Love Child” had been stuck in development for more than seven years. This was its third cast—Penélope Cruz and Edgar Ramírez signed on in 2017, and Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell replaced them in 2021. Every time the movie seemed to be gaining steam, the finances wouldn’t come together, and it would return to Purgatory. It didn’t help that almost every one of Solondz’s movies has made less money at the box office than the last. His 1995 breakout, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” earned nearly five million dollars, whereas his latest, “Wiener-Dog” (2016), made seven hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars. “Happiness,” which is being rereleased by the Criterion Collection later this month, has been difficult to find on streaming services for many years, save for the Web site Effed Up Movies. In purely financial terms, Solondz has not turned out to be a particularly good investment.

There’s something poetic, however, about Solondz’s mild torture by the industry, given his œuvre’s preoccupation with failure. His movies are built around yearning characters who follow their urges into oblivion. They are untalented, depressed, or relentlessly rejected, and they tend to hopelessly seek love or artistic recognition in hollowed-out big-box towns. They’re least understood by their own families, if they have them at all, and they often inflict the cruelty they experience onto others. The comedy comes from the fact that much of this occurs in plain sight. “For me, all writing in fictional terms is an expression of desire. That’s the motor,” Solondz told me, of both his characters’ striving and his own. “And I think all my movies are love stories.”

I had spoken with Solondz once before our meeting, and he’d told me that, if “Love Child” collapsed, he would never make another movie. But as we sat over lemon water and salads—hold the croutons—he seemed to be eyeing optimism. “It’s not like there’s nothing,” he said. (His voice, which actors tend to mimic when telling stories about him, comes out in a high, fried New Jersey accent, as if his vocal cords need to be persuaded to work.) “The producers are still scrounging, and they seem very determined. So I have to remain hopeful that this will happen,” he continued. The shooting location had been moved from Montana to Spain, where government support for film workers—and a lower potential for strikes—made filming more affordable, even if the movie was set in Texas.“If nothing else, this is a lovely lunch,” Solondz said.

We left the restaurant and steered toward his apartment, in Greenwich Village. Solondz was wearing Vans slip-ons with a hokey Hollywood desert scene—red cliffs, saguaros, a cow skull—splayed across the tops, which he had purchased in advance of the production. “They’re my good omen,” he said with a dopey smile, a little against his will.

When he was a student, Solondz thought parts of the graduate film program at N.Y.U. were corrupt; as a tenured professor there, he still does. But when he arrived, in 1983, he was relieved to finally discover that he was good at something. At twenty-three, he already felt that he had spent his life being mediocre. He grew up in the suburbs near Newark, the son of a businessman in the building trade and a classically trained pianist turned homemaker. He was the only one of his siblings who was sent to prep school, which he hated, and as an adolescent he was a thorny mix of unpopular and ambitious. At one point, he tried to channel his disaffection into a novel and ended up killing off most of the characters. (“But not heartlessly!” he added. “It was very emotional and painful for me to kill them.”) Eventually, he found his footing as a pianist and cellist. “I could play the greats, so to speak,” he said. “But you plateau, and get to a point where, no matter how much you practice, you ain’t gonna be Rubinstein.”

Growing up, Solondz hadn’t watched much beyond Disney movies and popular TV, but he fell in love with cinema as an undergraduate at Yale, and began writing screenplays. When he got to N.Y.U., his downbeat, self-deprecating shorts quickly gained attention. Derrick Tseng, who would go on to produce four of Solondz’s films, was a student in the year below him. “I had the impression that he was sort of the class comic,” Tseng told me. Solondz, he added, “became a kind of superstar.”

Solondz’s early studies in humiliation were all filtered through himself as the protagonist, and the resemblance to Woody Allen—as a self-sabotaging Jewish man living in New York City—was obvious. But the likeness carried him only so far. In the first feature Solondz made after graduate school, “Fear, Anxiety and Depression” (1989), he stuck to a somewhat predictable neuroticism, and wrote himself in as the wallowing playwright protagonist. He floundered while making it, and the studio finished the movie without him. Most evidence of Solondz’s originality was flattened, and it seemed to critics that he was passively riding the coattails of Allen’s sensibility. The experience so upset Solondz that he resolved to leave the business. “I had to go through my fire, you know?” he told me. “I had to grow up. I was not equipped to do anything with any level of maturity.”

To fill the days, Solondz started teaching classes to Russian immigrants—a job he loved—at the New York Association for New Americans. The novelist Sigrid Nunez also worked there, just prior to the publication of her first book, and the two became friends, chatting in the break room and on trains home. “Todd had had his really bad experience, and he had just been looking for something to do instead of staring at the ceiling,” Nunez told me. “I knew he had had this early desire to be a filmmaker, but he didn’t really want to talk about it.” For six years, Solondz was sitting on a script, one in which there was no character for him to play. The story centered on an eleven-year-old girl named Dawn Wiener, who lived in a New Jersey suburb that resembled his home town. He gathered money from people he knew, and he dragged himself through a gruelling, exacting production. “It was literally life or death,” he said. “I just couldn’t handle another catastrophe.”

“Welcome to the Dollhouse” screened, in 1996, at Sundance and went on to win the Grand Jury Prize. “I remember when we got the fax from Toronto,” Solondz said—the movie had first been accepted at TIFF—“and I really thought it was a prank.” In the film, Dawn, played with excruciating discomfort by Heather Matarazzo, is tormented mercilessly at school, but the real harm is inflicted at home, where her parents lambast her while cooing over her younger, prettier sister. Dawn’s loneliness turns her into a resentful, annoying figure—the critic A. S. Hamrah called the film “an emanation from the history of adolescence before cringe”—and her only friend is the effeminate Ralphy, with whom she forms the Special People Club. Then, searching for any advancement in the social hierarchy, Dawn calls him a faggot, one of the slurs she has picked up from her bullies.

“Lesbo” and “rape” get clumsily thrown around in the film, too—the kids are of the age when sexual curiosity first lashes out as demarcating insults rather than as actions. In one scene, the thuggish bully Brandon leads Dawn by knifepoint to an empty lot near the school, having spent the entire day claiming that he was going to rape her. As the camera peers over a chain-link fence, in a trademark Solondz long shot, Brandon lets down his guard and uneasily kisses Dawn. “Brandon, are you still going to rape me?” she asks. “Nah, there’s not enough time,” he says, thwarted by his competing impulses to re-up the threat and give up the act.

White-American suburbia proved to be a good setting for Solondz’s mordant perspective; in “Dollhouse,” he delights in the tastelessness of Dawn’s parents’ back-yard anniversary party, where there are scores of Hawaiian shirts and a horrifying airbrushed portrait cake. It was a landscape to which more and more directors were travelling as Reagan-era American chauvinism started cracking up. David Lynch had already infused small towns with organized crime and Surrealist horror in “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet”; Richard Kelly’s “Donnie Darko” and Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” studied adolescent dejection; one of Richard Linklater’s less memorable movies, from 1996, is simply called “SubUrbia.” Though Solondz was at home in segregated, malaise-filled cul-de-sacs, he cared less about romancing a suburban aesthetic than lingering on its people, whose dreams—professional, sexual, American, or otherwise—had failed.