PALINDROMES

Palindrome: word, verse, or sentence (as "Madam, I’m Adam") or a number (as 1881) that reads the same backward or forward.

-Webster’s Dictionary

Todd Solondz probably doesn’t like you very much. If you’re a fan of his first film Welcome To The Dollhouse he probably likes you even less. How else to explain the brutal and mean-spirited fate he exacts on the film’s protagonist, Dawn Weiner, in the opening moments of Palindromes. The writer/director seems determined to spit in the face of his admirers, daring them embrace his ever-bleaker view of humanity. One thing is certain; Solondz is unbiased in his misanthropy, he despises everyone equally, exhibiting contempt for both his characters and his audiences.

Palindromes methodically picks at the festering scabs that cover suburban life while reveling in the director’s favorite subjects: sexual predators, childhood alienation, and parental hypocrisy. All families are hideously dysfunctional, all adults are manipulating liars and no one is to be trusted. Only children are pure. And that is why they become targets for the most detestable behaviors or naïve puppets controlled by society’s most pathological impulses.

The story follows the grotesque misadventures of Aviva, a 13-year-old girl, who yearns to have babies, lots and lots of babies. Bedding the lumpy petulant son of family friends, she fulfills every suburban mom’s nightmare by becoming pregnant. Forced to have an abortion by her self-absorbed and condescendingly ‘reasonable’ mother (Ellen Barkin), Aviva runs away from home, determined to get pregnant all over again. She falls in with a conflicted pedophile trucker and then, eventually, with Mama Sunshine, a happy-faced Christian family that provides sanctuary for disabled children while nurturing anti-abortion assassins.

Played by six different actresses of varying age, race, and body type (not to mention, a young boy in one scene), Aviva becomes the tortured embodiment of a brutalized female experience. So, Solondz brutalizes his character repeatedly, exposing her to unprovoked cruelty and unrelenting mendacity. Her journey, the grimmest of American fairy tales, is filled with both violence and tragedy and yet it she learns nothing from it. Aviva ends up where she began: frustratingly meek and desperately needy.

Which is Solondz’s point (one he repeats ad nauseum); that mankind is incapable of rising above its limitations. There is no learning from one’s mistakes, no understanding of anything outside one's own selfish reality. Our identities are a prison and we are forever trapped in a hell of our own making. Black, white, fat, thin, male, female it doesn’t matter. We’re all equally fucked.

Despite its limitations, Palindromes still manages to cast an oddly compelling spell. Its profane imagery and haunting soundtrack elicit a certain morbid curiosity. The scenes where Aviva is played by Sharon Wilkins (an obese black woman) are as unsettling as they are poetic, underscoring the character’s vulnerability and awkwardness.

The movie also scores points with its venomously deadpan humor. Barkin delivers a wickedly funny lecture about abortion and Mama Sunshine’s disabled castaways are mercilessly parodied, as they vogue and croon in a pop group that delivers boy-band swagger with 700 Club lyrics.

Solondz is clearly a talented and fiercely independent filmmaker and it’s to his credit that Palindromes tackles so many distasteful and sensationalistic topics without ever truly offending its audience. He gives the story a tranquil; almost catatonic, quality that blunts the impact of its most transgressive moments but also, unfortunately, robs the film of any real drama. By adhering to his mantra that we all end up where we began, the director delivers a stale narrative that offers no insight and instead strikes the same unpleasant note over and over again.