PALINDROMES Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Wellspring
Grade: C
Directed by: Todd Solondz
Written by: Todd Solondz
Cast: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur, Debra Monk, Richard Riehle, Walter Bobbie, Alexander Brickel, Rachel Corr, Will denton, Hannah Freiman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Shayna Levine, Valerie Shusterov, Sharon Wilkins
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 3/29/05 A fellow critic, Andrew Hehir of Salon magazine, cites a terrific palindrome: “Tulsa nightlife: filth, gin, a slut.” This is a lot cooler than “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.” A palindrome is a word or even a complete sentence of more than reads the same backwards as it does forward. Todd Solondz’s new film is a palindrome in that you could start with the concluding resolution and zip back to the beginning of the one-hundred minute story, and you’d see a character go through the same set of experiences. Not literally, since obviously the film does not literally play backwards as it does forward, but psychologically in that one fellow, in a sharply honed monologue, tells Aviva (whose name can be spelled backwards) that people do not change. They may look different: gain weight, lose weight: get a breast implant or a hair transplant. Genetically, however, we’re as fixed as a dog who gets neutered by a veterinarian. If you’re depressed at 13, you’ll be depressed at 50. Or so he says. What’s important here is: how does Solondz put across his belief in the absolute power of genetics? He does this by the unusual device of having eight actors perform in the role of the very same 12-year-old Aviva, people who include a few teens, including an obese African-American woman, an androgynous boy, even the great Jennifer Jason Leigh, who looks three decades younger than her 43 years. While the plot is non-linear, the story line includes these events. The twelve-year-old Aviva, who had told her mother (Ellen Barkin) that she wants lots and lots of kids because “there’ll always be someone to love,” is pregnant. Her mother drags her to an abortionist who, in a botched surgery dooms the girl to be childless for life. Per the writer-director’s principal theme, she will try unsuccessfully to change. She takes off on an odyssey from New Jersey, hitching rides and even sailing across a mystical body of water to reach a family of evangelical Christians in Kansas, led by the well-fed Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk). Once there, Solondz trots out one of the more embarrassing scenes in recent cinema history. A group of young misfits, including a girl with no arms, another with no legs, a kid with Downs Syndrome, a nerd with mucous, among others, energetically sing in praise of Jesus, while Aviva overhears three men plotting in an adjacent room to kill abortion doctors. Though Solondz has been accused of being the most misanthropic of all film directors, he does not share a particular enmity toward humankind. His oddballs are no worse than serial killers trotted out in so many thrillers or people living with suppressed rage as those in works of Neil LaBute. In his best film, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” he portrays the pranks and bullying and sexual threats of just about everyone in an American junior high school, satirizing the Seventh-Grade-from-hell. In “Storytelling,” he has wry observations which poke through the illusions of a wealthy New Jersey family. In “Happiness,” he deals with pederasts and wankers, sending up a telephone stalker who cannot deal in person with women as well as three sisters, their mother and father who cannot deal with their personal demons. “Palindromes” embarrasses us in satirizing groups of losers, taking particular aim against both a fanatical pro-lifer and a mother who, by sad contrast, forces her daughter to have an abortion. But the satire this time is scarcely effective because the filmmaker uses the distancing advice of eight actors (mostly bad ones at that) portraying a single person, thereby leaving us emotionally bereft and empty. Rated R. 100 minutes. © 2005 by Harvey Karten
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