![]() ![]() ![]() Besides, it allowed her to give her only child, Aviva, everything, including N'Sync tickets and "that GAP account." So she had an abortion, which she describes as an easy experience that she has never regretted. A few years after Aviva's birth, she was pregnant again, and very happy at first, until she began to sense the financial burden a second child would cause. When Aviva resists, the mom berates her emphatically, "The baby has to go," and then shrieks, "What if it turned out deformed?" Sensing that she may have already given too much ground, the mom backtracks and argues, "It's not really a 's more like a tumor." When these desperate pleas fail, the mother resorts to a confession. Her mom learns the news and insists on an abortion. ![]() Initially a young black girl, then an awkward teen, Aviva manages to become pregnant during a sexual encounter with a boy named Judah. ![]() Pro-choice narcissists, pro-life assassins, and an accused child molester as prophet - that's the lineup in this story that follows the adventures of Aviva (a girl played by a number of different actresses, both white and black, and by one actor) whose single desire from her youth is to have lots of babies so that she will always have someone to love. Solondz's film at least has the merit of giving equal time and treatment to both sides in the abortion debate, but the occasional glimmer of an insight is overwhelmed by Solondz's addiction to cartoonish exaggeration. With its focus on pro-abortion and pro-life families and its mildly clever motif of the palindrome, wherein the world is "all looking-glass," Palindromes seems to have something new to say. Viewers might wish Solondz were capable of formulating a version of his born-again character's query: "How many times can I replay the same tired drivel about alienation in the suburban family?" Mama Sunshine clearly loves the children, yet she comes off as a subtly domineering cult leader who has made them over with a wholesome conformity that renders them mere reflections of her ”goodness.” It’s no wonder that Aviva, played in this sequence by the marvelous Sharon Wilkins, feels saved and lost at the same time.In what is just about the only funny line in Todd Solondz new film, Palindromes, one of the Christian characters laments, "How many times can I be born again?" As in his previous films - Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling - Solondz strives to establish himself as the most sophisticated dramatist of suburban, familial alienation. Solondz flirts with creating a youth version of Freaks, except that he treats these kids without a trace of mockery, letting any exploitation reside in the eye of the beholder. Many of her kids have disabilities (there’s a girl with no legs), and when we see them perform the catchy-creepy teen-pop number ”This Is the Way (That Jesus Made Us),” the layers of irony are head-spinning. A devout antiabortionist, with a husband whose feelings on the subject are even more extreme, Mama Sunshine regards herself as a holy savior of children. On the road, Aviva connects with Earl (Stephen Adly Guirgis), a trucker with a guilty taste for young girls, and she lands at the homestead of Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), the relentlessly upbeat Christian matriarch of a family of wayward adoptees. Is Solondz making a pro-life statement? Yes, but not the one that you think. Solondz, who seems to have entered his avant-garde outlaw phase, has made a movie that demands to be seen because it’s like nothing you’ve seen before. Think Welcome to the Dollhouse meets The Night of the Hunter meets Huck Finn in Wonderland. Describing what happens in Palindromes, however, doesn’t begin to capture what it’s like to watch - the disturbed and heightened curiosity, the feeling of a social odyssey that unfolds with the suspense of a demented screwball dream. Palindromes, at its simplest, tells the story of Aviva, a morose 13-year-old Jewish girl from New Jersey who gets herself pregnant, is forced by her mother to have an abortion, and ends up running away to a heartland America of wonders and terrors even more disquieting than the suburban enclave she left behind. Solondz, the naughty-boy poet-joker of desire and despair who made Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling, is peerless at inventing new and visionary ways to get under your skin. Then there’s Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation. Each year, a handful of movies are hailed as ”daring” and ”edgy” and ”subversive” and a great many other things that turn out, almost invariably, not to be true. ![]()
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