Happiness

Palindromes

Directed by Todd Solondz

By killing off Dawn Weiner, the troubled child of Welcome to the Dollhouse, at the beginning of his new film Palindromes, Todd Solondz opens with a reproof to all those who misread his intentions and have balked at the challenge of his later movies. Indie-cult cynicism has turned Dollhouse into Solondz's most popular film because it's the one that enshrines the cruelty of high school bullies. (It's become a perverse classicenjoyed most by those who now consider themselves the cool kids.) But Solondz's artistry has moved far beyond Dollhouse. Palindromes is the most inventive film yet by an artist whose focus on human behaviorand the peculiar confusions of this erahas become bewilderingly powerful.

Solondz knows that no one wants to be a sexually inept loser like Dawn Weiner; they either want to ridicule or take advantage of her. And so, in an audacious artistic risk, he has the heroine of Palindromes, a young girl named Aviva, portrayed by several different actorsincluding the great emotional chameleon Jennifer Jason Leigh. Imagine Aviva emerging from the sarcophagus of Dawn Weiner then going through several metamorphoses. Each one builds on her teenage uncertainty, her lack of physical confidence (which leads to her unprepossessing lack of physical grace), her fears, suppressed anger and dumb bad luck. This lets everyone share Aviva/Dawn's tortured soul.

A cynical view of Palindromes' concept would see Aviva as simply a lightning rod for other unfortunate types, but Solondz uses her sojourn among various outsiders and disadvantaged folk asand this can't be overlookedan ironic Christian parable. Despite the media's fashionable disdain for Christian values, Solondz follows that fundamental example of yielding compassion without being sectarian. After Aviva gets pregnant, she runs away from her stifling, humiliating parents and suffers some on-the-road hardships. She is taken in by Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), a good Samaritan who creates a home for handicapped children, even teaching them Christianity. Yet, Solondz's satirical instincts don't fail him. He shows orthodox Christian characters to be as idiosyncratic as his non-orthodox Jews.

Solondz takes the idea of a palindrome (a word spelled the same forward or backward) to show what's common in the lives of people who appear to be different. Every sad sack is searching for satisfaction. Pro-life Mama Sunshine, like Aviva's own abortion-urging mother (Ellen Barkin), adheres to a particular social ideal with almost freakish determination. While highly aware of class-based behavior, Solondz forges a nearly classless satire. He's not a shock-jock equal-opportunity offender; rather, his perspective on human oddity is almost egalitarian. As his assorted Avivas traverse a world of moral conflicts, embodying various ethnic types, your emotions are extended in all directions.

This may be the one truly new development in modern cinema. Through multiple Avivas, Solondz answers the solipsism of most contemporary indie films. He's not saying Aviva c'est moi, but Aviva c'est nous. His multiprotagonist inspires a shocking yet compassionate form of satire. Only a few other filmmakers have this giftRobert Altman, Mike Leigh, the Farrelly Brothers and Jared Hess, director of Napoleon Dynamitewho all look at unglamorous society with irreducible, pitying honesty. They make you laugh at your own repulsed responses. (The romantic neuroses in the Farrellys' Fever Pitch are especially worth watching.) But Solondz shakes up our dormant humane reflexes to the point that many viewers aren't sure how to react. That's because Palindromes explores new terrain.

Following Dawn's funeral, frightened little Aviva is assured by her mother, "You and Dawn are completely different." However, in this scene Solondz casts a young black girl as the presumably white Jewish Aviva so that that line (spoken with desperate fear) plays on racial incongruity along with both mother and daughter's abhorrence of Dawn's social status. Solondz takes Bunuel's old multiple-casting ploy in That Obscure Object of Desire and complicates it. The rotating Avivas are not just a cinematic gimmick; each one adds a political dynamic to Aviva's crises. Observing her experiences helps us understand how others would fare under the same circumstances. Solondz's breakthrough comes from keeping each Aviva's personality consistent, thus making you feel sympathy even while recognizing society's most obscure objects of ostracism.

It's the fourth Avivaplayed by Sharon Wilkinsthat poses Palindromes' essential challenge. Wilkins is a young steatopygous black womanthe kind of person movie-casting agents usually avoid. But Solondz pays attention to the sweetness in her large features, and Wilkins is a vivid enough actress to convey the sensitivity of Aviva's feelings. With this bold gesture, Solondz's interest in characterizing human pathos becomes a masterstroke. He confronts us with a racial, sexual and social type who not only embodies a single young woman's insecurity but who expands it to address wider social issues. Aviva's internal complexes are outsized. Solondz provokes a kinesthetic response to Wilkins' flesh. She is introduced as Aviva lies near a forest streamdiscovered by Peter Paul (Alexander Brickel), a spectacled white nerd who invites her to join the family of outcasts at Mama Sunshine's. As big Aviva with her huge shoulders and bulging midriff walks with little Peter Paul toward the wood-frame house, they evoke a fairy-tale odd couplereversing the image of Jack the Giant Killer.

But Solondz isn't making a fable, even though Aviva and Peter Paul suggest the benevolence of one. He's also a tough-minded social commentator, pushing geniality to its limits. At Mama Sunshine's, Aviva is introduced to kids with heartbreaking birth defectslike the real-life figures the Farrelly brothers open-heartedly employ. And its here you realize Solondz's miracle: he enables us to view all his characters from the inside out, looking past their deformities. When the kids gather (a dwarf, an armless girl, an albino, among other anomalies) to perform a happy singalong, a visitor exclaims, "You guys should be on MTV!" Fat chance!

Solondz's intention is to expose and subvert the prejudices of the mainstream. That's why he emphasizes the "abnormality" of common peoplefrom Aviva's mother to Mama Sunshine and the tormented young men Aviva meets who provoke society's most hostile, self-righteous intolerance. Everyone's desire to belong can be seen in their thwarted sexuality: teens exposed to fornication before affection, men impeded from social acceptance by their deviance. Solondz recognizes sex as the engine for emotional frustration, the platform for social retardation. This keenly felt adolescent dilemma can continue into adulthood, where hypocritical conventions bear down on fragile individuals. Most movies lie about this tragedy; Solondz reveals its cause and effect through his concern with life's hilarious miseries.

Sharon Wilkins makes Solondz's humanism real, of course, but so does Jennifer Jason Leigh, who picks up the role of Avivaspelling it backward in a wayjust in time to certify that Solondz's concept is not gruesomely exploitative but is, in fact, genuine serious art. Leigh, the finest American actress throughout the 90s, is still a contender. (She brought startling immediacy to the overwrought sci-fi film The Jacket.) Aviva has suffered and matured, and Leigh makes her complexes cleareven wearily beautiful. Her face details a heart struggling with hurt the way Tennessee Williams would verbalize it. And in Leigh's climactic scene, she accomplishes Solondz's most difficult ambitionconfronting the wretched and demoralized among us and drawing from that person a surprising understanding of human virtue. Aviva learns a lesson Dawn Weiner could never articulate. It's a startling moment in a great film.