Palindromes

He’s an odd fish is Todd Solondz, and Palindromes – his most politically charged and controversially comic horror to date – will surely and calculatedly polarize folks even more than the cruel soap-opera of Happiness and Storytelling. Some punters will undoubtedly find Palindromes’ brilliantly caustic treatment of abortion and paedophilia to be funny ha-ha, while more sensitive (and possibly humourless) others will deem Mr. Solondz’s efforts as funny-get-the-mace-spray-out-peculiar. Few, however, will quibble with the anti-PC audacity of a burlesque cabaret featuring kids with various disabilities belting out Christian pop numbers (“Every child has a right to be born! Yeah! Yeah!”).
The latest attraction in Solondz’s growing gallery of wretched antiheroes is Aviva (note palindrome), the twelve year old cousin of Welcome To The Dollhouse’s loser queen Dawn Weiner. As this approximate sequel opens, Dawn has committed suicide following a date rape and the development of skin problems. Her lonely young relative, conversely and perversely, becomes fixated on life, specifically the creation part. Her reproductive ambitions are quickly realised after a sweaty encounter with an oafish family friend, prompting her liberal mom (a delightfully wicked Barkin) to make a dash for the nearest abortion clinic.
A botched procedure leaves Aviva infertile, but this does little to curtail her desperate needy quest for love. She runs away from home, the trigger for a mondo reworking of Night Of The Hunter and a series of misadventures involving a paedophile trucker (playwright Stephen Adly-Guirgis) and apple-pie Christians who love by day and kill abortionists by night. Something tells me we’re not in New Jersey anymore. And it’s not just the Kansas number plates.
Only Solondz could present Palindromes’ harrowing sequence of events as a music-box fairytale with droll nods toward Huck Finn, Rosemary‘s Baby, Jewish heritage and peanut-butter brands. As he plays out class and culture wars as grotesque spectacle and in the most provocative manner imaginable (after all, neither life nor choice ideology is ideally equipped to deal with a twelve year old who longs for a baby) he somehow invests his degenerate dramatis personae with a strange tenderness.
In this respect, Palindromes probably represents the director’s best work, but that still wouldn’t inspire one to hang out with any of the ghouls on screen. Even the moving, vulnerable Aviva is damned by the film’s postulation that people – like palindromes – never really change; a point illustrated by the use of eight actors of differing genders, race and age (including Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the main role. Surprisingly, this device never feels gimmicky, nor does the central theme – can’t change, don’t try – play as miserabilism. It may sound spectacularly downbeat, but in a more meaningful way, it’s a liberating profundity worthy of Homer Simpson.

Running Time 100 mins. Cert 18. Opens May 6th.