In May, I joined filmmaker Todd Solondz for lunch at Union Square Café, the upscale bistro in Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1985, the same year Solondz dropped out of the graduate program in film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a short walk from downtown. His final student project was “Shat’s Last Shot,” a short film featuring a lanky twenty-five-year-old Solondz—fluffy hair and jet black, mouth stuffed with staples—as a high school student named Ezra who tries and fails to pass a class in fitness to get into MIT and is going steady with a barely interested cheerleader named Bunny. After Ezra bombs on the basketball court, he listens to Bunny talk about his condition in the locker room. “It’s like everything you’ve ever worked for, everything you’ve ever dreamed of, your entire future, just down the drain,” she tells him.
Many things have changed. The restaurant has moved a few blocks north, for example, and Solondz’s hair is now white and Seuss-like in light locks, his large features framed by bright blue round glasses. After Shatt’s Last Shot, which earned Solondz a three-picture deal with Scott Rudin at Twentieth Century Fox, he made eight films that disturbed and fascinated audiences with their perverse, often brutal looks at upper-middle-class suburban America. (Depending on the critic, he is the patron saint of “pessimism,” “the new theater of cruelty,” or “coats and hats.”) He is best known for “Happiness,” his 1998 ensemble comedy that interweaves stories of sexual depravity and banality in the lives of single New Jersey residents. Although his subordinates have all but ensured that he will never become a household name, he remains a titan to the cinephile class, Ari Astaire, Yorgos Lanthimos and the creators of “PEN15” among them. “He single-mindedly tackles every issue you’re not allowed to joke about — child abuse, rape, abortion,” John Waters, a friend of Solondz’s, told me. “They are not funny questions. And they are not funny in his movies either. But at the same time, it’s amazing how he portrays them.”
When we met, Solondz was a few weeks away from flying to Spain to shoot his next movie, Love Child, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Charles Melton, about a precocious, mischievous eleven-year-old named Junior who wants to to be on Broadway and is obsessively obsessed with his mother. The script came to Solondz faster than those of his previous films and, unlike most of his films, he said he would let his thirteen- and fifteen-year-olds see it. “This is really the first film I’ve written that actually has a plot,” he told me. “It’s a very Hollywood movie.” Not that the movie will appeal to the powers that be in Hollywood, he clarified — it’s still a Todd Solondz film, which makes it “unfashionable,” he said. “I shouldn’t say that!” he added wryly, thinking of potential financiers. “I need to market this like they’re going to read this article and be interested.”
“Love Child” was stuck in development for more than seven years. This was his third cast — Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramírez signed on in 2017, with Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell replacing them in 2021. Every time the film seemed to gain momentum, the finances didn’t add up, and he returned to Purgatory. It didn’t help that almost every Solondz film made less money at the box office than the last. His 1995 breakthrough “Welcome to the Dollhouse” earned nearly five million dollars, while his latest “Wiener-Dog” (2016) made seven hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars. “Happiness,” which is being re-released by the Criterion Collection later this month, has been hard to find on streaming services for years, with the exception of the Effed Up Movies website. In purely financial terms, Solondz did not turn out to be a very good investment.
There is something poetic, however, about Solondz’s slight torture of industry, given his work’s preoccupation with failure. His films are built around yearning characters who follow their urges into oblivion. They are untalented, depressed, or relentlessly rejected, and tend to look hopelessly for love or artistic recognition in empty big-box cities. They are least understood by their own families, if they have any at all, and often inflict the cruelty they feel on others. The comedy comes from the fact that much of this happens in front of the eyes. “For me, any writing in fictional terms is an expression of desire. That’s the engine,” Solondz told me of both his characters’ aspirations and his own. “And I think all my movies are love stories.”
I had spoken to Solondz once before we met, and he told me that if Love Child fell apart, he would never make another film. But as we sat over lemon water and salads — hold the croutons — he seemed to see optimism. “It’s not like there is nothing” he said. (His voice, which actors tend to imitate when telling stories about him, comes out in a high, fried New Jersey accent, as if his vocal cords need to be coaxed into working.) “The producers are still digging in and they seem very determined. So I have to remain hopeful that it will happen,” he continued. Filming was moved from Montana to Spain, where government support for film workers—and less potential for strikes—made filming more affordable, even if the film was set in Texas. “If nothing else, it’s a wonderful lunch,” Solondz said.
We left the restaurant and headed to his apartment in Greenwich Village. Solondz wore Vans slippers with a great Hollywood desert scene — red rocks, saguaros, a cow skull — splashed across the tops he had purchased before production. “They are my good omen,” he said with a goofy smile, a little against his will.
When he was a student, Solondz believed that parts of NYU’s graduate film program were corrupt; as a full 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 as a mediocrity. He grew up in the suburbs near Newark, the son of a businessman in the building trades and a classically trained pianist turned homemaker. He was the only one of his siblings to be sent to prep school, which he hated, and as a teenager he was a prickly mix of unpopular and ambitious. At one point he tried to channel his displeasure 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.”) He eventually found his footing as a pianist and cellist. “I could play the greats, so to speak,” he said. “But you plateau and you get to a point where no matter how much you train, you’re not going to be Rubinstein.”
Growing up, Solondz didn’t watch much more than Disney movies and popular television, but he fell in love with cinema as a student at Yale and began writing screenplays. When he arrived at NYU, his modest, self-deprecating shorts quickly attracted attention. Derrick Tseng, who would go on to produce four of Solondz’s films, is a student in the year below him. “I got the impression he was kind of a classy comedian,” Tseng told me. Solondz, he added, “became something of a superstar.”
Solondz’s early explorations of humiliation were filtered through himself as the main character, and the resemblance to Woody Allen – as a self-sabotaging Jew living in New York – was obvious. But the resemblance only got him so far. In Solondz’s first post-graduation feature, Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989), he stuck to a somewhat predictable neuroticism and signed on as the playwright’s protagonist. He messed up while doing it, and the studio finished the film without him. Most evidence of Solondz’s originality was flattened, and it seemed to critics that he was passively riding the tails of Allen’s sensibilities. The experience so upset Solondz that he decided to leave the business. “I had to go through my fire, you know?” he told me. “I had to grow up. I wasn’t prepared to do anything with any level of maturity.
To fill the days, Solondz began teaching classes to Russian immigrants—a job he loved—at the New York Association for New Americans. Novelist Sigrid Nunez also worked there just before her first book was published, and the two became friends, chatting in the break room and on the trains home. “Todd had a really bad experience and was just looking for something to do instead of staring at the ceiling,” Nunes told me. “I knew he had this early desire to be a director, but he didn’t really want to talk about it.” For six years, Solondz worked on a script that didn’t have a character to play. The story centers on an eleven-year-old girl named Dawn Winner who lives in a New Jersey suburb that resembles her hometown. He raised money from people he knew and slogged through a grueling, demanding production. “It was literally life or death,” he said. “I just couldn’t handle another crash.”
Welcome to the Dollhouse premiered in 1996 at Sundance and won the Grand Jury Prize. “I remember when we got the fax from Toronto,” Solondz said—the film was first accepted at TIFF— “and I really thought it was a joke.” In the film, Dawn, played with excruciating discomfort by Heather Matarazzo, is bullied mercilessly at school, but the real damage is done at home, where her parents spank her while cooing over the younger her, prettier sister. Dawn’s loneliness turns her into a resentful, annoying figure – critic AS Hamra called the film “an emanation from the story of adolescence before I get goosebumps”—and her only friend is the effeminate Ralphie, with whom she forms the Special People Club. Then, looking for some advancement in the social hierarchy, Dawn calls him a pedal, one of the insults she has accepted from her bullies.
“Lesbo” and “rape” are also thrown around clumsily in the film – children are at an age when sexual curiosity first manifests itself as distinguishing insults rather than actions. In one scene, thug Brandon leads Dawn at knifepoint to an empty lot near the school after all day he claims he’s going to rape her. As the camera peers over a chain-link fence, in a long shot of Solondz, Brandon lets his guard down and kisses Dawn restlessly. “Brandon, are you still raping me?” she asks. “No, not enough time,” he says, thwarted by competing impulses to repeat the threat and abandon the action.
White-American suburbia proved a good place for Solondz’s keen perspective; in A Doll’s House, he revels in the vapidity of Dawn’s parents’ backyard anniversary party, complete with dozens of Hawaiian shirts and a terrifying airbrushed portrait cake. It was a landscape to which more and more filmmakers traveled as America’s Reagan-era chauvinism began to crack. David Lynch had already saturated small towns with organized crime and surreal horror in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet; Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides explored adolescent despondency; one of Richard Linklater’s less memorable 1996 films is simply named “SubUrbia.” Although Solondz was at home in isolated, malaise-filled cul-de-sacs, he was less interested in the romantic aesthetic of suburbia than in dwelling on the people whose dreams—professional, sexual, American, or otherwise – they had failed.
