‘Dark Horse’

Todd Solondz’s “Dark Horse” continues the writer/director’s fascination with sad, damaged characters searching for happiness, whose suffering we empathize with at times and relish in at others. All the while, Solondz dares us to look away, perhaps into the closest mirror, from the frightening sincerity on screen. As a filmmaker, he is fearless and pushes so far over the edge of what P.C. is these days that he circles back again and reminds us of the importance of breaking the laws and blurring the lines between the tolerable and the taboo.

Jordan Gelber is dynamite in this movie as Abe, an overly confident and confrontational toy collector who is in his thirties and living with his parents. Neither his emotionally distant father, Jackie (a stellar, subdued Christopher Walken), nor his coddling mother, Phyllis (Mia Farrow), expects much of him. His brother, Richard (Justin Bartha) is a successful medical doctor.

Abe works for his father at his real estate office, but Jackie’s secretary, Marie (Donna Murphy) does all of Abe’s work while he spends his time scoping out rare collector’s editions of toys on eBay on his computer.

In the opening scene of “Dark Horse,” Abe is at a wedding sitting at a table beside Miranda (Selma Blair). They are not together, and as he leans in and coolly tells her he doesn’t usually dance, she appears unsettled and uninterested. Later, he finds her again and, in a scene as painful, funny and awkward as Solondz has ever filmed, asks for her phone number.

On their first date, another painful scene where Abe rambles on about fate to a lethargic Miranda, he proposes to her.

Miranda, an emotionally troubled, depressed and medicated woman, at first refuses Abe’s marriage proposal sending him into a spiral of aggression in which he quits his job and curses everyone on the planet. Miranda soon after develops a sense of guilt and changes her mind. She wants to rebound from her passive, morose lifestyle and decides to settle for Abe, telling him as they embrace that “it could have been worse… so much worse.”

We come to understand Abe as a pretty delusional guy. Even from the opening scenes, as we see him pursue a girl who is the farthest thing from interested, and then drive home in his big, bright yellow eye-sore of a hummer while jamming to pre-teen pop music, what Solondz has referred to as “‘American Idol’ music,” we get the sense that Abe is hopelessly holding on to something that is long gone and never to be seen again.

As the film gradual evolves from its more straightforward first half into a kind of surreal series of events punctuated by Abe’s dreams and visions of interactions with Marie, his father’s secretary, we learn that Miranda has hepatitis B and will survive. But Abe is troubled by this and comes to question everything that has come before, and even argues with his mother and brother in one imaginary scene where he wants to know why Richard was the favored son.

With “Dark Horse,” the ever-subversive Solondz twists the “boy meets girl” story to its breaking point, and then in a truly unexpected finale, reveals the underlying sweetness of the whole damn thing. Although it is far from his darkest film, “Dark Horse” feels completely “Solondz” in its approach to telling a story in the age of the man-child. His film is darkly comic and moving without ever feeling sentimental.

Solondz tells a great story, and after his somewhat cold, distant “Life During Wartime,” an interesting but redundant continuation of his masterpiece “Happiness,” “Dark Horse” reveals that he still has a lot more stories to tell.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)