In the age of streaming, there’s a widespread belief that every movie is available, all the time, everywhere. Don’t fall for it! Some of the greatest movies ever made are nowhere to be found due to everything from music rights snafus to corporate negligence. In this column, we take a look at films currently out of print on physical media and unavailable on any streaming platform in an effort to draw attention to them and say to their rights holders, “Release This!”
There are a lot of reasons why great movies can be underrated, ignored, or even reviled. Often, it has to do with a hostile cultural climate, or viewers not being ready for something just a little ahead of its time. One of the less considered yet most widespread reasons is also one of the weirdest: that often it’s the filmmakers themselves who denigrate their own movies, giving lazy critics and audiences an easy excuse to avoid seriously engaging with the work. After all, if the movie’s own creator hates it, it can’t possibly be very good, right?
It’s not uncommon. Steven Soderbergh has bashed the elegantly constructed and emotionally shattering heist film “The Underneath” almost non-stop since he made it over 30 years ago, and as a result, it’s generally considered to rank somewhere toward the bottom of his filmography. (As far as the Criterion Collection is concerned, it doesn’t even count as a real movie — it was a “supplementary feature” on their physical media release of the Soderbergh-approved “King of the Hill.”)
Paul Schrader has similarly dismissed his searing “Hardcore” as a lesser work, even though cinephiles from Quentin Tarantino to Roger Ebert have sung its praises. Another Tarantino favorite, Steven Spielberg’s gloriously excessive comic spectacle “1941,” has been cited by its director as a failure that led him to alter his entire methodology for later films.
The reasons for filmmakers’ negative self-opinions vary — it can have more to do with their bad experiences making the films (fighting with studios, having ill-advised affairs with collaborators, etc.) than with anything actually memorialized on celluloid. The effect, though, is generally the same. Consumers take the filmmakers at their word, and the movies’ reputations never really recover. (David Fincher’s “Alien 3” is a rare exception, a movie disowned by its director that has been reclaimed and championed by a new generation of fans.)
No film has suffered more from its author’s disdain than 1989’s “Fear, Anxiety & Depression,” the debut feature by writer/director Todd Solondz. This movie isn’t just underrated — it barely exists. It’s been so successfully erased from the public consciousness that people tend to think of “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” which came out six years later, as Solondz’s first film.
Even diehard fans of the director of “Happiness,” “Palindromes,” and “Life During Wartime” are largely ignorant of the film, and for one simple reason: It’s not currently available on any streaming platform, and it hasn’t had a physical media release since it came out on VHS in 1990. Solondz’s negative appraisal of it aside (according to film professor Julian Murphet’s book on Solondz, the director “has duly cautioned everybody to avoid it at all costs”), it’s a terrific movie — smart, hilarious, and lacerating in ways that both look forward to and are distinct from the tragicomic masterpieces to come.
“Fear, Anxiety & Depression” tells the story of Ira Ellis, an alternately self-loathing and smugly superior aspiring playwright who writes fan letters to Samuel Beckett while working on plays with titles like “Despair.” Ira’s circle consists largely of frauds and neurotics, from his philandering painter friend Rob to Sharon, a clingy girlfriend who Ira has little interest in — he’s far more attracted to a talentless performance artist who calls herself “Junk.” Meanwhile, the only truly happy artist in Ira’s friend group — played to uproarious perfection by Stanley Tucci — isn’t even much of an artist at all but a shameless name-dropper who seems to stumble into constant success without even trying.
The movie essentially sets all these characters in orbit around Ira as he struggles to maintain his integrity as a starving artist while fumbling between women and jobs. The laughs — and there are many — derive from the complete cluelessness of both Ira and everyone he encounters; the movie is an ensemble study in delusion, and Solondz is both merciless and profoundly insightful in his depiction of an incestuous New York art scene that consists primarily of people putting on shows for themselves that the others feel obligated to attend so that their solipsistic shows will be well-attended, too.
At the time of its release, “Fear, Anxiety & Depression” received scathing reviews that often compared it unfavorably with Woody Allen’s work, a comparison that only makes sense on the most superficial level. The only quality “Fear” really shares with movies like “Annie Hall” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” is its value as a time capsule of New York at a specific moment in time — here, the last gasp of an art scene that the characters don’t realize is on the verge of becoming extinct. But these characters — oblivious hipsters with limited prospects and even more limited resources — couldn’t be more different from Allen’s affluent and accomplished Upper West Siders.
The biggest similarity between “Fear, Anxiety & Depression” and something like “Annie Hall” or “Manhattan” is the fact that the bespectacled writer/director cast himself in the lead. Solondz himself plays Ira, a decision that caused him no end of grief when the movie came out, a “mistake” he never made again (though technically he did appear as a doorman in “Happiness” and played “Man on Bus” for his friend James L. Brooks in “As Good As it Gets”).
Reviewers were unkind to Solondz’s performance in 1989, and its reputation hasn’t improved with age; even Solondz partisan Murphet describes it disparagingly as a “stuttering, neurotic” riff on Woody Allen. Yet Solondz is terrific as Ira in a performance both verbally dextrous and flawless in the precision of its physical comedy. One of the movie’s greatest pleasures is the broad range of its comic effects, as Solondz deftly moves between fast badinage, satire, and slapstick — the film is as hilarious in its intellectual dissections of self-obsessed artists as it is when devoting its attentions to silent-film-inspired set pieces, where Ira takes an ill-advised job delivering glass panes.
There’s a real confidence and control not only in Solondz’s performance but in his filmmaking, as he moves between different comic styles and tones without skipping a beat. The writer/director who would later ride the line between comedy and tragedy so provocatively in “Happiness” is clearly evident in embryonic form here, which makes Solondz’s disavowal of the film so puzzling; sure, it’s not “Happiness” — what else is? — but it’s an extremely assured and entertaining debut.
It’s also, in a way, refreshing given how different the milieu is from later Solondz films. For the most part, Solondz would leave the city behind for suburbia, and even when he does move into urban settings in later films, they lack the liveliness of the New York featured in “Fear.” It’s fun to see some of his preoccupations — particularly his obsession with how we lie to ourselves and others — in a funkier time and place, especially since the world “Fear, Anxiety & Depression” portrays no longer exists in the same way.
Aside from bad bootlegs taken from the VHS release that intermittently surface on YouTube, “Fear, Anxiety & Depression” is more or less impossible to see. Solondz’s fan base may not be huge — he once wryly commented that his career was “very smoothly in decline, each movie making half as much as the prior one” — but those of us who belong to it deserve to experience the filmography in its totality. Here’s hoping some enterprising distributor will pick up “Fear, Anxiety & Depression” (much as boutique Blu-ray label Radiance recently licensed Solondz’s “Palindromes“) and give it the release it deserves.
