odd Solondz knows how to write women. Years before the film industry came to its senses and realised the value in putting ladies of all colours, body types, age brackets, and degrees of distinction into quality top-billed parts, the misanthropic auteur was gifting juicy, vividly drawn characters to fascinating faces like Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse), Louise Lasser, Lara Flynn Boyle (Happiness), Sharon Wilkins, Ellen Barkin (Palindromes), Charlotte Rampling and Shirley Henderson (Life During Wartime), to name but a few. It isn’t difficult to envisage why these gals would be drawn to material reviled as unsavoury by some; morally indefensible by others—an author of fearless punch and piercing insight, the oft-misread New Jerseyan festoons his females with the sort of rich, stereoscopic complexity that’s so often saved for the boys.
As someone regularly appointed to roles unbefitting of their genius (the prissy bookworm, the uptight prude; always the bridesmaid, never the bride), every last smidgen of Selma Blair denotes a towering match for Solondz, her striking features and coolly sardonic persona slotting perfectly into his dour filmic domain, a place where ostensibly decent folk do wicked things, and where emotional ruin takes precedence over happily ever afters. Blair’s work in the director’s seventh and softest picture, 2011’s Dark Horse—a bittersweet hate letter to the modern-day American romcom—feels somehow a culmination of everything she’s played before and, simultaneously, like nothing we have ever seen her do.
A partial continuation of the superlative Storytelling (2001), Blair reprises the role of that pic’s ‘Vi’ (last seen getting railed against a wall by her chauvinist pig of a college professor; a deed considered so taboo by the MPAA that it had to be obscured with a digitised red box in post-production); now going by her forename, Miranda. The character’s return is a detail that could be lost on the untutored: revisiting old acquaintances is something of a modus operandi for Solondz; he collects these misfits like postage stamps, compiling them not in scrapbooks but some kind of freakish multiverse—think Marvel or DC without the superpowers, and a fuck of a lot more swearing. Key to bestowing this practice its perverse singularity, however, is the insistence on swapping out established faces for new ones: look how twiggy, reddish-haired Dylan Baker from Happiness (1998)—as Dr Bill Maplewood, the repugnant kiddie fiddler we pitied and abhorred in equal doses—became dark, hulking Ciarán Hinds in semi-sequel Life During Wartime (2009); or how Palindromes (2004) beguiled us with eight manifestations of the same person—the exploited, heartbroken Aviva. A radical choice, for sure, but it’s no gimmick; instead, an ingenious ruse that lets us check in with these weirdos at pivotal junctures—not too dissimilar, in its own bizarre way, to the trajectory of long-form television. If Storytelling was the experimental season one, Dark Horse would be the bold, fully realised season four, its wearied star debilitated by the misadventures of chapters deux and trois. What a treat, then, for Solondz to allow Blair the privilege of being the only member of his motley tribe to step back into the shoes of an individual they helped create.
Our first glimpse of Vi 2.0—sitting motionless at a wedding reception as guests bump-and-grind on the dance floor—tells us everything we need to know. Gone is the punkish, callow naïveté of her younger self: here she presents an insipid, crumbling shell of a human being, battered beyond repair. A thorough degeneration, what little spark of pep she once disgorged has been well and truly extinguished. Season three must have been a real cunt. Her palpable indifference when a fellow attendee tries giving her his phone number is both excruciating and hysterical: the guy is Abe, petulant, mid-thirties man-child and chief focus of Solondz’s tale. The dalliance that ensues must be one of the freakiest courtships this side of Harold and Maude (1971); to consider either of them a “love interest” would be pushing it—they do get together, but not for one second do we believe that they’re compatible. (Miranda sums it up best with stingers such as “I want to want you . . .” and “We have nothing in common.”) Abe’s besotted with her, but only because she’s the first girl to ever show him affec—well, no, scratch that: she shows him zero affection whatsoever! Blair spends almost the entire runtime in a funereal daze, the malignity of life—failed marriage; non-existent career; insinuated suicide attempts—hovering over her like some soupy, impenetrable smog. Despondent doesn’t quite cut it. Crestfallen feels too polite. Try flaccid, emotionally defunct, and overmedicated to the point of near unconsciousness. Miranda Vi is a moping, mumbling zombie.
And yet one-dimensional she isn’t. Her contused layers are ever-so-slightly exposed as the narrative inches forward, though not in the twee, simpering fashion this genre tends to demand: there’s no “journey” of self-discovery, no redemption. Solondz employs his trademark strain of rapier-like wit to sidestep platitudes at every turn. Just when we think Miranda may be defrosting a little, she freezes back up. Her encounters with Abe—in the toy-adorned bedroom he’s occupied since childhood; or at her parents’ place, where she recently moved back to—are peppered with the type of long, laborious pauses that’d make even the most steadfast of introverts uncomfortable. She’ll open her mouth to speak, hesitate, then stop, as if distracted by something over in the distance. It’s as vexing for us viewers as it is for Abe; we long to know what she might’ve revealed in these moments. Is her evasiveness the result of self-doubt? Pure ambivalence? Fear of hurting sad, pathetic Abe’s feelings? Brain fog brought on by industrial-strength antidepressants? Or is it just that she’s an unnatural conversationalist, chronically at a loss for words? There are times when it feels it could be a mix of all the above. We forgive her, though; not least because Blair’s chestnut eyes—forever spewing dull, disenchanted daggers—are so mesmeric as to appear supernatural. (A scene in which she takes Abe to meet an ex-boyfriend is, quite tellingly, the only time we notice her visage spring into action, those vacant peepers divulging hidden playfulness.) That we yearn to see more of her whenever she’s not around is testament to the potency of Blair’s talents—Abe may well be the picture’s main player, but Miranda is its withered heart and soul.
Is it anything less than criminal that Blair’s résumé isn’t bursting with parts like this, especially now that multiple sclerosis—diagnosed in 2018—has thrown her such a cruel, debilitating curveball? (Please, you must check out Rachel Fleit’s 2021 docu Introducing, Selma Blair, which reveals her to be a vivacious spirit as far removed from her cinematic guise as can be.) One can merely hope and pray that a few more Mirandas might be lying in wait for this formidable performer . . .
Further still, could the chance of taking a final waltz with Solondz ever present itself?
Excuse me while I go daydream.
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