Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Palindromes / USA / 2004

NYFF COVERAGE – Todd Solondz’s latest provocation is Palindromes, yet another uncomfortable fable of suburban dysfunction, puberty, and statutory rape from the director. Once again, Solondz’s subject is the furtive, agonizing path of a young girl to sexual maturity, and again there are many awkward sexual trysts, jabs at moralizing ideologies, and gags that tow the line between morbid perversion and hilarious gross-out comedy. How many films would feature a thirteen-year old girl asking, “Can you still get pregnant when it goes in there?” and elicit both cringes and laughs from the audience? There are not many, but at their best, Solondz’s films have the rare power to charm even as they anger and annoy.

Much of this blend of irritation and sweetness comes from Solondz’s casting, which seems to privilege a certain ingenuous, amateurish quality in the films’ heroines. In Palindromes, the director has found eight different actresses to play the protagonist, Aviva, and each of these (from an obese black woman, to a skinny teen, to Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a variation on the same wide-eyed, soft-spoken performance. In each of her various incarnations, Aviva confronts the prejudice and weakness of the world with a child’s innocence and confusion.

Aviva’s only desire in life is to have a baby, a child that will provide the unconditional love she so sorely lacks at home. When the son of a family friend impregnates her, Aviva’s liberal Jewish family refuses to let her keep the child. As her sniping, neurotic mother explains, “It’s not a baby – not yet. It’s like it’s just a tumor.” But as a result of complications during the abortion, Aviva is given a hysterectomy, destroying her dream of ever bearing children. Apparently distraught, the girl runs away from home looking for the affection and understanding she been unable to find elsewhere. Making her way out to the heartland, she meets a family of born-again Christians, disabled children and saccharine do-gooders who eat “Jesus’ tears” cookies and freedom toast for breakfast, perform Christian rock, and assassinate abortion doctors.

Solondz’s satire of Aviva’s New Jersey liberal family and the evangelical “Sunshines” occasionally threatens to upend the film with spiteful stereotyping. But for all of its prurience and unsubtle politics, Palindromes demonstrates such pity and affection for its characters’ foibles and shortcomings that it is difficult to consider the film wholly malicious. Through the character of accused pedophile Mark Wiener (also a character from Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse), the film expresses a deterministic attitude, viewing its protagonists’ search for change and fulfillment as the futile scramblings of humanity. Like Aviva’s name, we are palindromes, “backwards and forwards … always the same.” And like Aviva herself, no matter how much we seem to change, we always arrive at the same basic desires and weaknesses. As Aviva’s middle-aged, evangelical sniper boyfriend asks himself, “How many times can I be born again?”

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Celluloid Dreams 35mm print
12 Oct 2004 10:37 PM | Submit Comment