REVIEWED - PALINDROMES: The poisonously intriguing new film from Todd Solondz, director of Happiness and Storytelling, could be viewed as a responsible attempt to present contrasting arguments on behalf of both sides in the abortion debate, writes Donald Clarke.
Of course, this brilliant director being the grim misanthrope he is, the film's ultimate conclusion is that everybody is ghastly, nobody knows what he or she is talking about, humans are incapable of change and we're all going to die unfulfilled. Life is like a palindrome: whichever direction you read, the meaning is equally grim.
The film begins with the funeral of Dawn Wiener, the unhappy hero of the director's Welcome to the Dollhouse. Dawn has committed suicide, and her 13-year-old cousin Aviva determines that to avoid becoming similarly miserable she will have many babies and surround herself with love. With this in mind, she allows the sour, loaf-headed son of family friends to impregnate her.
Aviva's mother, played with nauseating intensity by a terrific Ellen Barkin, insists that the unfortunate child have an abortion. Distressed and (though she doesn't know it) rendered infertile by the procedure, the good-hearted naïf runs away from home.
In a sequence that recalls The Night of the Hunter (scored to a la-la vocal refrain borrowed from Rosemary's Baby), Aviva finds a boat and drifts downriver. She is then taken in by a fundamentalist mother-earth figure, whose house has become a hostel for various children - the blind daughter of a drug addict, a boy with Down syndrome, another with cystic fibrosis - who might, if the abortionists had had their way, never have been born at all. Mind you, Todd's metrosexual fans may feel that life as part of a happy clappy Christian rock group - the kids' fate - may barely be worth living. Solondz always denies that he sets out to provoke his audience, but it can hardly be a coincidence that there is something here to annoy everybody.
Indeed, any serious political purpose is subsumed by the director's stubborn determination to remodel the world to his own icky designs. As in earlier films, we get starkly inert compositions, harsh white walls decorated with cheap ornaments and actors who seem drugged into impassiveness. But there is a new trick here. Aviva is played by eight different performers: six children, a large African-American adult and - dear goodness, imagine the scowling - Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Solondz is investigating the audience's capacity to look beyond an actor's physical appearance and identify with the fictional character as written, but the most notable result of this fascinating conceit is to turn an already unsettling fairy story into something unforgettably sinister.
