Storytelling

Writer-director Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) continues to rub our collective face in the obscene, the irreverent and the absurd in two separate narratives in which storytellers (a professor and his writing students, and a documentary filmmaker and his subjects) wallow flat-footed in issues of sex, race, degradation, celebrity and exploitation. In Fiction, a female university co-ed (Selma Blair) having sex with a classmate with cerebral palsy (Leo Fitzpatrick) also has rough sex with their African-American Pulitzer Prize-winning English professor (a smoldering Robert Wilson). She then reads an account of the affair in class in an outing of feelings, denial and shame. In Nonfiction, a creepy documentary filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) wiggles and bullies his way into the life of a rudderless high-school student (Mark Webber) and his family (parented by John Goodman and Julie Hagerty) and becomes a catalyst of crisis.