Palindromes
Todd Solondz’s bleak worldview won over viewers in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Happiness (1998), then lost many of them with Storytelling (2001). His new film, Palindromes, tells the tale of Aviva, a young girl who runs away from home after her mother forces her to have an abortion, using eight different performers to play the lead part.
A palindrome is a word, verse or sentence (as “Able was I ere I saw Elba”) or a number (as 1881) that reads the same backward or forward. In the press notes, Solondz states he uses it as a loose metaphor for that part of us that does not change (as a parent in the movie tells a child, “No matter what happens, you’ll always be you.”). He also claims that this is not an “issue” movie, that the whole abortion thing is merely a framework to hang his “fable of innocence.”
So what exactly are we watching here: a grim, but bracing look at the growth limitations of the human character that tweaks both pro and anti abortion forces along the way? Or is it just a big pile of horseshit from a self-important misanthrope?
I saw the movie Monday night and I’ve been going back and forth ever since. A number of the characters and situations moved me and the portraits of both sides of the abortion debate made me pause and look over my own thoughts on the subject. At the same time, there is a certain freak show sense to the whole production, and having the lead role played by eight actors comes off as little more than a silly attention-getting device.
Regardless of whether the film is grim, but bracing or just horseshit (I’m leaning toward the latter as I type this sentence), Palindromes is undeniably provocative and deserves a look-see by adventurous filmgoers.
Fans of Welcome to the Dollhouse should know that the film opens at the funeral of Dawn Wiener, the young woman whose adolescent misery won the hearts of many. Solondz tried to get actor Heather Matarazzo to reprise her role (he also tried when making Storytelling), but she refused. Once he accepted her decision as final, he made one of his own. “I didn’t want there to be any confusion about Aviva vis-a-vis Dawn,” he explains in the press notes, “and so I referenced Dawn and Welcome to the Dollhouse as a way of saying, that was then, this is now; that was that movie, and this is going somewhere very different.”
What else do I want you to know before you see the film? The only actors you will likely know are Ellen Barkin and Richard Masur, who play Aviva’ parents, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays one of the Avivas. Several of the actors, by the way, are not very good, but somehow that doesn’t matter. Also of note is a tremendously cheesy ballad that pops up at least twice, a charmingly wretched thing that sounds like a knockoff of the theme from the 1967 camp classic The Valley of the Dolls.
So there you go. If you are a fan of extreme cinema, check out Palindromes at Key Cinemas. You may find it a work of stunning artistry or you may dismiss it as a gimmick movie fueled by cheap shots. Either way, it will rile you up, and that’s good for your bloodstream.
A final note: I’m giving the movie three stars because I have to put something up there. While writing this piece, I have swung back and forth between giving it four stars and giving it one and a half. Three stars is a compromise rating.