Palindromes

[Ghostboy]

What Solondz did next
Geoffrey Macnab
Wednesday September 8, 2004
The Guardian
 
Abortion is becoming something of a theme at the Venice film festival. The screening of Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, the story of an abortionist in 1950s London, was enthusiastically received here this week. Now Todd Solondz's Palindromes has provoked controversy and bafflement. Featuring references to foetuses in dustbins, images of placard-waving campaigners and even a gruesome sequence in which an abortionist and his child are assassinated, the film wades into what is one of the most contentious debates in the US election campaign.

Hollywood, Solondz said yesterday, didn't want to go near such incendiary material, so the director ended up bankrolling Palindromes himself. "This movie was made for very little money ... nobody would touch it," he said.

As ever, Solondz, director of Happiness and Storytelling, takes a quizzical approach to his subject matter. The heroine is a 12-year-old girl who longs to be a mom. When Aviva sleeps with an obese neighbour, her own mother (Ellen Barkin) insists on the pregnancy being terminated. Aviva then runs away from home. She ends up staying with Mama Sunshine, a loving Christian matriarch who has adopted dozens of disabled children. ("It's as if each of those children are children who were aborted in some sense," Solondz says.) Mama Sunshine will do anything to protect an unborn child - even kill. Disconcertingly, Aviva is played by a small army of actors of different ages, races and sizes: two women, four teenage girls, one 12-year old boy and one six-year-old girl.

Solondz argues that the debate around abortion in the US has long since ossified, with both parties in such entrenched positions that little dialogue is possible. In Palindromes, he shows "a pro-choice family which gives no choice to the child and a pro-life family which kills. Somewhere between the two, Aviva is suspended."

Is he pro-choice himself? It certainly seems that way. "They (the pro-life movement) have been winning the war for a long time," he said, referring to the bombing of abortion clinics in the US and the harassment of doctors who perform abortions. "That's the sad irony. You have the Islamic front and the fundamentalists. Then, in our country, we have the same thing - this movement which is just growing exponentially and creating its own base to set policy. And what sets policy in the US of course has ramifications throughout the world."

[ono]

OMG I GET THE TITLE NOW!  ALL IS CLEAR!!!

(Actually, it is a very good title, now that I know more about the film, and seriously, thanks for starting the thread.  Been waiting for this film for a while, thought about starting it last week, but no news that I knew of then, other than it was in post.)  This film seems a bit different from the original descriptions.  Guess that's because not much was known yet.

[Sleuth]

here's a good Solondz site:  http://members.aol.com/FearAndAnxiety

[hedwig]

Solondz/rules.

Palindromes is going to slaughter me. I can't wait to be slaughtered.

I love you, Todd.

[SiliasRuby]

I really can't wait for this, sounds awseome.

[MacGuffin]

In "Palindromes," Middle-class Jersey Life Again in Solondz' Sights
by Peter Brunette/indieWIRE



*READ AT OWN RISK*

After the brouhaha occasioned by his last feature, "Storytelling" (2001), American indie director Todd Solondz is back with "Palindromes," another assault on middle-class American pieties. It's still too early to muster a definitive or even definite opinion of the film -- it's achingly simple and extraordinarily complex at the same time -- and it's sure to split audiences. What can be assayed here therefore is little more than a first description, an interim report.

As with all his previous films, including the masterful "Welcome to the Dollhouse," which first announced him as a major new talent in 1995, and the equally accomplished "Happiness" (1998), "Palindromes" is set within a middle-class Jewish family living in suburban New Jersey. Once again the social landscape is peopled by a host of misfits, grotesques, pushy parents, and deeply unhappy teenagers.

Twelve-year-old Aviva wants nothing more than to become a mother, and does what she needs to do to make that happen, but her Mom (played with gusto by Ellen Barkin), steers her toward an abortionist to put an end to that unlikely dream. She runs off and encounters a deeply Christian family named the Sunshines, a stand-up-for-Jesus group that is populated by an assortment of crippled, retarded, and otherwise damaged kids. Aviva ends up back in New Jersey with Earl, a friend of the Sunshines (and a truckdriver who had earlier raped her, but whom she loves), as he seeks to murder her abortionist.

This plot may sound a bit outlandish, and certainly ripe for the irony that Solondz heaps on by the barrelful, but easy enough to follow. What greatly increases the complexity, however, is that in each part of story, Aviva is played by a different actress, stretching all the way from an innocent young girl with pigtails and braces to an older, supremely overweight black woman to, at the end of the film, Jennifer Jason Leigh. It's impossible to tell exactly what motivated this choice, but even though the character stays exactly the same as written, from scene to scene, it's amazing how different our reactions are depending on whom we see before us.

The humor is deeply black here, as always in a Solondz film, and the Christian right comes in for some powerful skewering. This occurs not through cheap point-scoring via the articulation of sanctified liberal sentiments -- if any liberals had the temerity to show up in a Solondz film, it's clear that they too would be creamed -- but mostly by simply setting the Sunshine family in front of us and exposing us to their aggressive, relentless cheer and good will. At the dinner table, the pathetic kids vie with each other to tell the most grotesque personal history. Over and over, you want to laugh at them but feel guilty about it -- the classic Solondz topos -- especially, for example, when the lame and the halt are made to dance wildly before us in praise of Jesus. It's like watching a series of Diane Arbus photographs that have come magically, and painfully, to life.

Solondz's forte, as always, is the delicious gap that he is able to create between the tone of a scene and the sentiments characters express within it. Thus, when the Barkin character is trying to comfort her daughter by recounting an earlier abortion of her own, amidst all the overwrought expressions of a mother's love and the gooey, sentimental music, she talks of "getting rid of that little Henry guy." At another moment she tries to convince Aviva that her fetus is not really a baby at all, but "just a tumor."

If there is a moral to the story, it comes at the suburban get-together near the end of the film when the nerd Mark, an accused pedophile and clear stand-in for the director (he even looks like him), makes a little speech to the effect that we can never, ever change, and that we are condemned to live the lives that have been ordained for us by randomness and our genes. This sentiment stands in direct contrast to that of Earl, rapist and anti-abortionist, who has earlier plaintively wailed, "How many times can I be born again?"

"Palindromes," it must finally be said, is not quite as strong as Solondz's previous films. There are too many flat moments, moments where the bitter irony is merely repeated rather than developed. And it gets tiresome, finally, laughing at people. But even on a less than perfect day, Solondz is way better than almost any other American director of his generation.

[Sal]

Could be decent..  I watched HAPPINESS tonight and was thoroughly dissapointed.

[ono]

Por quoi?

I found with Happiness, it's really hard sometimes to concentrate on the message, because it gets lost in the noise of sensationalism.  That said, it's not a bad film.  A good one, really, but just a little too much at times, if you get what I'm saying.  I've always championed Storytelling as a great film, Solondz's best, so going with the trend of his films just getting better and better, Palindromes could be great.  Or, it could be a disaster if it remains in that "mean spirited" territory and doesn't inject enough humanity in its characters.  That may be a possibility because it is Solondz territory, and the material is quite incendiary.

[hedwig]

Somebody on IMDB saw this movie and called it "sickly great"

That's dumb.

[cine]

IMDB reviews are dumb. Don't read 'em.

[Sal]

Por quoi?

I found with Happiness, it's really hard sometimes to concentrate on the message, because it gets lost in the noise of sensationalism.  That said, it's not a bad film.  A good one, really, but just a little too much at times, if you get what I'm saying.  I've always championed Storytelling as a great film, Solondz's best, so going with the trend of his films just getting better and better, Palindromes could be great.  Or, it could be a disaster if it remains in that "mean spirited" territory and doesn't inject enough humanity in its characters.  That may be a possibility because it is Solondz territory, and the material is quite incendiary.

It's a problem with the way Solondz constructs the material.  With "Happiness," his use of music subverted any serious attempt at drama because the irony was laid on very thick.  So, when you approach scenes between the father and the boy, and that culminating last dialogue on the couch together, it's bereft of any genuine feeling despite how "honest" it is.  Many people like the movie for that; I find it unrealistic and not sincere, which, for this material, is easy to treat as such.  Didn't Solondz say he'd failed the audience if people didn't look at his characters as more than freakshows?  I didnt see them as freakshows, but I didnt see them as real people either.

[MacGuffin]

'Palindromes' sold to Wellspring
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Wellspring, a division of American Vantage Media Corp., has acquired all North American rights to Todd Solondz's "Palindromes," starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly-Guirgis, Richard Masur and Debra Monk. The film, produced by Derrick Tseng and Mike S. Ryan, is screening as part of the New York Film Festival. Wellspring head of acquisitions Marie Therese Guirgis negotiated the deal with ICM, which repped Solondz. An April release is planned.

[ono]

An April release?!  That's crazy, Mr. Chubbs!

[Finn]

Poster:

http://www.impawards.com/2004/palindromes.html

[hedwig]

woah. that's awesome.




....









yeah, it's still awesome.