OK, here’s a truly dangerous work of indie filmmaking. I have very fond memories of Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, but I absolutely hated Happiness and was mostly indifferent to Storytelling. Palindromes, however, is a wholly original, viscerally discomforting film which incisively interrogates our cultural obsession with childhood and innocence, family and individuality, self and other, normals and deviants, faith and hypocrisy, the grotesque and the sublime. It comes at the pro-life/pro-choice debate from such a skewed angle, but, in the end, I think it to be a deeply human film and worth the effort.
I watched this last night, and I enjoyed it as well (though I disagree about Happiness and the oft-maligned Storytelling–the former is great, the latter not great but still quite good).
I think it will take some time for me to find and say anything insightful about Solondz’s choice to portray the character of Aviva (a palindrome, get it?) in all her versions. I wonder if he simply asks us to consider our own imaginative identifications: “What if Aviva was this…†and “Would you feel the same way if she was this…â€
But there might be something much more interesting going on.
As far as content, it seems that one could view the film as an extended meditation on the culture of child abuse–by that I mean, simply, the degree to which our culture constructs an idea of the child and subjects it to all forms of cruelty (this comes, as so many of you know, from James Kincaid’s work on the erotic child in Victorian culture). For example, Aviva’s mother, Joyce, (played by Ellen Barkin), seems well-meaning, but is guilty of emotional terrorism. She’s unbearably manipulative at times. The father, too, is gentle in appearance and frightening in his behavior. The scene where he threatens to break down Aviva’s door is sheer terror.
Why are the parents so devastated, so terrified by the thought of their 13 year-old having a child? And could it have anything to do with why Aviva so desperately wants a child in the first place? The film, at times, suggests as much. The opening scene shows Joyce with the “Dawn” version of Aviva (played by a girl much younger than 13). Joyce coos over her, calling her “my angel, so innocent†etc. We are then introduced to another version of Aviva (Judah, I think), and she, too, is enchanted with the image of the young child, frozen in perfect happiness in photo albums (“you were so cute, why couldn’t you just stay that way†she says to a young boy)–so much so that one wonders if this is the sole reason for her wanting to get pregnant. So puzzling are the desires of children–they must be made plain, exposed, stabilized, sterilized and stopped. And after the hurt that goes into this process, why do children trust adults so?
Loitering through all of this is the odd figure of Mark Wiener who, it seems, since we last saw him, has been labeled a pedophile. He certainly isn’t out of place here. Palindromes is as much about the way we love children (or don’t love them) and the way children love each other (or don’t love each other), as Welcome to the Dollhouse is. No other filmmaker has been as concerned with the subject of child abuse (of which molestation is but one manifestation) as Solondz. Why there isn’t more talk about his films is sad, but not surprising. I’ll turn to Kincaid on the problem of child abuse in general:
“More [talk, debate, about possible solutions] is needed…But not more of the same thing, not more plotting of the problems within the same narrative form and with the same images and cast of characters, since this same thing is so patently ineffective, or, rather, effective only in ensuring the continuation of exactly the same string of problems. That children are sometimes murdered, sometimes kidnapped, sometimes raped and forced to submit in various ways to teh needs of others without regard to their own is indisputable…It is not a question of denying those horrors; it is, for me, a question of asking about the questions, wondering whether the pain itself is in any way contained within and perpetuated by the way we understand the problem.”
I think is apt in light of Solondz’s films. They do not, in any way, make it easy for us to understand the problem, which I think, given Kincaid’s argument, is good. His films force us to think differently. They give us different plots, a different cast of characters (he does himself with Palindromes).
Some quick thoughts about characters:
The “Mama Sunshine†character seems a combination of Mia Farrow, Jan Crouch, and Tod Browning, but the film never stoops to throw cheap shots at her on our behalf. Typically, films gleefully rip the lid off such bountiful Christian charity in order to expose it as hypocritical, self-serving, phony. But I think it’s the sincerity of “Mama Sunshine†that is so unsettling [having said that, I should point out that Mama Sunshine’s husband and two other men plot (in the basement, no less) to murder a doctor who performs abortions, and the one who pulls the trigger turns out to be the man that a hitchhiking Aviva (the “Henrietta” version) had slept with].
The film is heartbreaking at times, which is why I like Todd Solondz so much. His films are uncomfortable to sit through. There are moments of genuine shock and disgust. But it’s as if his films are saying, “yes, this is hard to watch, but you’ll see that, whether you like it or not, it is connected to something beautiful and sad as well.†His films are often visually beautiful (the “Huckleberry†Aviva sequence is one of the loveliest things I’ve seen in the cinema in a while), and sometimes just moving (the image of “Bob†Aviva leaning against the trailer door all night).
I’d like to talk more about this film, if anyone wants to dive in (Jeff: I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to see it sooner and comment).
John – you’re saying a lot more about this film than I would ever be able to, but I don’t think that I appreciate Palindromes more, or that I like it more, because of that.
I still think that the swapping of the Aviva characters was a very bad decision for the film, and that it 1. kept more people from seeing it and 2. frustrated the few people that DID see it. In the DVD, there is a series of questions Solondz answers, and the first is about this choice. He has no good answer. (He says Bewitched did it! And, “I wonder why more movies don’t cast this way”) Yeah – I wonder why they don’t….
It’s the weakest of his films I’m afraid (with the exception of his awful first film), and would have been even if Aviva had been played by one person.
The one scene in the film that made me remember why I liked Solondz so much was the party scene with Mark Wiener. I wish he had chosen to follow Mark’s life – maybe in parallel to Aviva’s life.
This is not a thoughtful review of this film, I realize, but I had to cast a negative vote for this one.
we just got done watching it. it felt to me, more than any of solondz’ films, like an exercise in unpleasantness: “you think this makes your skin crawl? wait till you see the next bit!” there is some interesting stuff here, and some heartbreaking stuff (“why can’t we just be friends?”), but solondz seems too committed to just being grotesque. like mark, i prefer john’s reading of the film to the film itself. and, yes, i liked happiness a lot too. it made me uncomfortable without feeling like the filmmaker was trying to make me uncomfortable.