Palindromes
Solondz returns with the controversial but disappointing Palindromes
Palindromes
Director: Todd Solondz
Starring: Joyce Victor, Emani Sledge, Jennifer Jason Leigh
Pregnant 13 year-old Aviva is forced into having an abortion by her loving but floundering parents. Complications occur during the operation, and the doctors are forced to perform a hysterectomy • but an unaware Aviva runs away from home where she tries once again to realise her dreams of having a baby, reasoning that ‘they’re cute’.
On the road she becomes involved with a fundamentalist anti-abortion Christian group, and eventually ends up involved with the murder of the doctor who performed her own operation. Todd Solondz has always excelled in satirising hypocrisy. Take for example one of his more poignant creations; the smug, self-promoting suburban housewife from Happiness, whose pride in her status (she has children, a successful psychiatrist husband and a seat on the P.T.
) is only enabled by her wilful ignorance of the monstrosity in her home (her husband also happens to be a serial child molester). Unfortunately in Palindromes, Solondz seems to have lost his subtlety, and in the process all of his previous work's biting profundity. Gone are instantly recognisable and horribly relevant everyday hypocrites, with Solondz now insisting on exposing the obvious fraudulence of zealously pro-life Christians who are willing to kill for their beliefs.
Even so, there are still some Solondz trademarks. There’s the refusal to romanticise without ever coming off as being illogically cynical or misanthropic, painfully honest and well informed attitudes towards deviance, and (sadly far too few) blackly comic moments (when Aviva tries to object to the abortion, her mother replies “It’s too late, I already booked the appointment.”) But overall the film is evidence that the king of disillusionment might be running out of steam.
26th May 2005