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 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.

Sometimes what Solondz's characters want destroys their lives. After the success of "Welcome to the Dollhouse," Solondz released "Happiness," in 1998, another New Jersey missive, this one revolving around the lives of three adult sisters: Joy (Jane Adams), who lives in her parents' house; Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle), a depressed poet addicted to the obscene threats that an anonymous proto-incel (Philip Seymour Hoffman) leaves on her phone; and Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), a naïve homemaker who is unknowingly married to a pedophile named Bill Maplewood. Played by Dylan Baker, Bill drugs and rapes two of his son's classmates and, by the end of the film, goes to jail. He is also, torturously, a loving father, though we are left to wonder whether he keeps the abuse outside of his family. "I called Todd and said, 'Should I be pursuing talking to someone who's a pedophile?' " Baker told me. "And he said, 'No—if you talk to someone, they'll have to be guilty.' And Bill doesn't think he's guilty. He just thinks it's this private secret of his own that nobody knows about, that it's in his own makeup and in his own psyche." Like all of Solondz's movies, "Happiness" is grounded in surprising empathy and fleeting moments of connection, which sit alongside the characters' immoral acts without straining to fix them.

"Happiness" premièred at Cannes and won the festival's critics' award, but Sundance refused to screen it. Universal's then C.E.O., Ronald Meyer, personally blocked its distribution, deeming it morally objectionable. The debacle drummed up buzz around Solondz, who became the focus of cultish press coverage. "When Universal declined to release the film," Lynn Hirschberg wrote, in a profile of Solondz for the Times Magazine, "distributors lined up to cash in on the controversy, which in many ways seems to be the independent world's answer to the blockbuster: shock sells." (The indie company Good Machine took it up.) "I was just happy," Solondz said. "I made a movie, people seemed to be excited by it, and I was excited by what I had to express." But he had already learned that any semblance of control in the industry was ephemeral. "I was the flavor of the month, and I knew it," he said. "I took advantage of that position."

For Solondz, that meant simply making more movies, no matter how repetitive or repellant the subject matter. He got studio money to make "Storytelling" (2001), which was embraced by critics but is infamous for the large red box that was splashed across the screen in American theatres, to censor a harsh sex scene between a Black professor and his white student and thus avoid an NC-17 rating. (Solondz still relishes the clumsiness of the maneuver: "I feel for the Europeans who never got to see the red box!") After that, he went independent again, to make "Palindromes" (2004), which follows a thirteen-year-old girl named Aviva as she willingly becomes pregnant, flees home after being forced by her parents to terminate the pregnancy, and joins a group home of disabled children who sing 'NSync-like Christian pop songs. She eventually joins the home's patriarch in killing an abortion doctor. The project highlighted Solondz's interest in eternal return, and in subjecting certain figures to relentless suffering: the film begins with the funeral of Dawn from "Dollhouse," who has died by suicide, and casts eight different actors, ranging in age, race, and gender, as Aviva.

"Palindromes" was polarizing even among Solondz's fans, with some seeing the depravity of Aviva's situation as gimmicky, and the director's attraction to third-rail topics as less illuminating than it had once seemed. Was he mining social truths with the pain he inflicted upon his characters or merely engaging in artistic sadism? Throughout his career, Solondz has declined to engage with the kind of sociopolitical analysis that others bring to his work. (The theorist Lauren Berlant once wrote that his films "maintain enthusiasm for those who continue to show up for life given the austerity of their resources.") He instead favors koan-like commentary, saying that he makes "sad comedies" rather than "black" ones and maintaining, simply, that his movies are "not for everyone."

These remarks can feel evasive, and also like attempts to veer away from the urge to decode Solondz's provocations. "Palindromes is not about the issue of abortion or any other issue," he told Nunez, in a conversation published by The Believer. "It's about characters and a story I invented for them." But, whether he intends it or not, Solondz is a talented depicter of how delusions—predicated in whiteness, affluence, and other shaky advantages—get challenged in the real world. The people in his movies often cling to inherited, childlike fantasies. Abe, the uncharismatic man-child protagonist of " Dark Horse ," a parody of a Judd Apatow comedy, spends his days buying action figures and driving around in a bright-yellow Hummer. In "Happiness," Joy has disappointing sex with a Russian cabdriver who steals from her, yet she misunderstands it as a fairy-tale romance; she arrives at work in a daze, music swelling behind her, and mindlessly breaks a picket line while being pelted with vegetables by strikers. Occasionally, nonwhite characters appear to emphasize the depth of white people's foolishness. "But, Consuelo," a kid in "Storytelling" asks his family's live-in housekeeper, "even though you're poor, don't you have any hobbies or interests or anything?"

In the early two-thousands, American indie films drifted away from hedged yards and time-shares and toward the twee apartments of the mumblecore milieu. Solondz, however, remained planted in the suburban realm he knew best. He also dug in his heels while others in his generation adapted to a bloated, conglomerated industry. Linklater's romances and epic optimism found studio support; Todd Haynes got Oscar nominations and Netflix money; Sam Mendes, who directed "American Beauty" (1999), went on to make James Bond films. Solondz, who was briefly considered for larger studio projects, like "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," has a signature Gen X frustration with his industry's conforming drive, as well as a barbed self-consciousness over real and perceived slights. When he was told that Mendes allegedly found "Happiness" to be condescending to its characters, for example, he mocked "American Beauty" 's treacly plastic-bag scene in "Storytelling": a pretentious director played by Paul Giamatti films a straw wrapper and narrates "how fragile the balance of life is."

I asked Nunez about "Solondzian cruelty," a phrase used in reviews that lightly puzzles her. Solondz is hardly cruel, she said, though she sees where the critics are coming from. "He has said that he cringes when people laugh at certain things, because he didn't mean for them to be funny," Nunez told me. "I find that kind of confusing, because it is there. He is drawn to these situations in which people are exposed in the most vulnerable way, with their pants down." For Solondz, the despair he depicts is representative of moral failings that accumulate quietly, both in our individual lives and over the arc of history. "We are so flawed," he said. "And, if we're honest with ourselves and not totally deluded, we never quite live up to who we think we would like ourselves to be."

"The movie died last night," Solondz texted me one morning in June. It was the day before his cinematographer and production designer were supposed to fly out to Spain for "Love Child," and a week before he would follow them. The producers had described the situation to him as a "push": they were not abandoning it, and the actors, especially Elizabeth Olsen, were still committed. But the "complex financing," as one put it to me, made it easy for the production to fall apart. "People perceive the project as having no value," Derrick Tseng, another one of its producers, told me, of the financiers. Solondz felt that, at least for the foreseeable future, this movie was not getting made. "I have to move on," he wrote to me. "Emotionally too difficult otherwise."

Solondz's interest in humiliation stems from his own intense fear of it. He doesn't use the thin plastic bags offered at bodegas, because he hates the idea of a passerby knowing what he purchased. In advance of the "Happiness" rerelease, the Criterion Collection approached him to film a video in the Criterion Closet, a coveted promotional tradition, but he declined. When I asked to meet with him after the "Love Child" plans had collapsed, he didn't want me over to his apartment, and he swatted away my suggestion to walk through N.Y.U., perhaps wanting to avoid the campus until the useless sabbatical he had taken for production was over. Eventually, we decided to meet at a hotel restaurant near Washington Square Park, which was fancy enough, as he seems to like, and empty save for a trio of Australian tourists.

"At this point, I know what I'm not, and I don't waste my time dreaming about things that are not going to happen," Solondz told me, squeezing lemon into his water. He was more subdued than our first meeting, slouching farther into the booth, though not exactly sad. "I don't think it was until after 'Palindromes' that I said, 'You know what? I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker.' It's hard to believe—people would think, You really thought you were? But, in my head, because my movies are very simple narratives and they're engaging . . ." He trailed off. "They just happen to be unengaging for people who don't like the subject matter."

That independent filmmaking has been hollowing out for decades, thanks to studio conglomeration, streaming platforms, and risk-averse financing, is no surprise. "Todd still has the fact that the intelligentsia likes his movies," John Waters said. "But I think, unfortunately, that audience is fading, because young people want to go see comic-book movies in a mall and have a riot after." Ted Hope, who produced a number of Solondz's movies through 2011's "Dark Horse," sensed conditions shifting back when distributing "Happiness," which his company struggled to screen widely, owing to antipathy from commercial markets and ambivalence at test screenings. In 2015, Hope joined Amazon Studios and helped establish its original-production pipeline. Early on, the company bought Solondz's "Wiener-Dog," which follows a dachshund as it passes through people's lives, at Sundance. The film takes its structure from Robert Bresson's " Au Hasard Balthazar ," about a beleaguered donkey, and it is one of Solondz's more tender offerings, especially in the uneasy last-resort romance between an adult Dawn Wiener, resurrected and played by Greta Gerwig, and her former bully (Kieran Culkin). Still, it needles: Danny DeVito plays a washed-up film professor who is discarded by the social-justice culture of his university—one could speculate that the character is a Solondz self-insert, but he denies it—and straps a bomb to the dog to set off inside the campus.

Richard Brody wrote in this magazine that "Wiener-Dog" "wouldn't be unworthy to share a space on the shelf somewhere near Bresson's great work." Amazon, however, marketed it as a quirky, dog-centric indie flick. It is currently advertised on the streaming platform as "several stories featuring people who find their life inspired or changed by one particular dachshund," which likely explains its two-star rating and pages of blistering reviews. "If you own a dachshund (or have a love for dogs), the first 10-15ish minutes are all you'll want from this movie," one user wrote. Another said, "It was kind of like watching a guy hammer a nail into his nose."

This dynamic—in which markets lowball ambitious movies, and streaming platforms ply audiences with algorithmic chaff—leaves little room for both enthusiasm and good-faith challenges. "It used to be that indie film, art-house cinema, and festival titles were the cultural course correctors for an industry that got stuck in ruts," Hope, who resigned from Amazon after five years, told me. "A movie like 'Happiness' says, 'You guys have been way too tame, and it's time to broaden out with what you can do,' whether that's 'Eternal Sunshine' or what have you. It shows people that there's a far greater range of not just story subjects but how we choose to tell the story. And we've lost that."

At the hotel, I asked Solondz if he felt that he was on some sort of blacklist, or if he was simply facing the same industry headwinds as everyone else. He had spent years coming to terms with his budgetary constraints, yet it clearly stung that he was spending a free afternoon here, rather than behind a camera in Spain. "I don't seek to be hated. I am human," he said, with some fatigue in his voice. "I never set out to offend. In fact, to the contrary: I try to win over my audience. I have to find a way of seducing them with fun and lollipops, so to speak, so that they can come closer and see what's on my mind."

A few hours after we strolled toward the park and said our goodbyes, Solondz e-mailed me. "My predicament of continuing to write scripts and never getting a movie made—it's very funny to me," he wrote. "Seeing myself get all excited and hopeful—and then very sad at the same time, cause nothing happens. It's like I'm living a movie of my own making!" It was a thought I'd been having since we first met, but I was still happy to get the note. Despite the disappointment, or maybe because of it, he seemed to be having the urge to write something new.