Palindromes review
Issue #23
directed by Todd Solondz
By Michael Hastings
Published: March 1st, 2005 | 11:59am
If only life were as simple as a Todd Solondz movie. Kind, gentle people would always be revealed as selfish frauds, philanthropic interests would forever be identified as transparent cries for attention, and girls and young women would be nothing more than single-celled organisms who operate solely on pent-up need.
Perhaps sensing that he was starting to repeat himself with his last feature, the drab, obvious Storytelling, Solondz has dressed up Palindromes, his latest cynical morality fable, with a formal conceit borrowed from Luis Buñuel, or perhaps more accurately, from Bewitched: Aviva, his protagonist, is played by no less than eight different actresses of different ages, shapes, and colors. Adding to the po-mo fairytale feel is the movie’s prologue, in which Aviva’s cousin, Dawn Weiner — the lead character of Solondz’s 1995 breakthrough, Welcome to the Dollhouse — is eulogized in a ludicrously tasteless funeral service. Where Heather Matarazzo’s Dawn provided an opportunity to look at the complex cycle of adolescent cruelty, however, Aviva is little more than a myopic representation of a very particular stereotype, the baby-crazed teen girl.
Seizing upon what he perceives to be a universal truth, Solondz then proceeds to drive his point home though a series of misadventures in which Aviva is used, abused, and reused, all because she’s too much of an innocent — or, in the director’s less charitable world, a pathetic stooge — to realize that everyone around her is out solely for his or her own interests. As a result, Aviva gets knocked up, suffers a botched abortion, and runs away from home on an odyssey to get knocked up again.
Certain actors understandably relish the chance to work with Solondz: He allows them to explore the basest aspects of human behavior, free from their usual Hollywood mandate to be likeable. In Palindromes, this means we get to see Jennifer Jason Leigh admirably stammer through a few scenes as one of the Avivas; unfortunately, we also get Ellen Barkin in one of the shrillest performances of her career as Aviva’s inhumanly idiotic mother. In a way, it’s great that the performers learn, grow, and change from their experiences with the director, because his characters — and worse, his audiences — sure as hell won’t.
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