"Palindromes"

"Palindromes" is a quietly crazy picture, its mood largely one of dread and menace (which is certainly true to the fairy-tale tradition). Its episodes start, ramble on and stop with little sense of internal rhythm (and, of course, with Aviva transformed into someone entirely new in each chapter). The camera moves as little as possible, and soundtrack music is limited to interstitial material. In the early scenes in Aviva's suburban home, we're somewhere at least adjacent to realism, with Ellen Barkin as Aviva's controlling, pseudo-feminist mom and Richard Masur as her hapless, sitcom-style dad.

Solondz's dialogue always feels self-mocking and overly earnest, as if he's trying to provoke pathos and make fun of you for having an emotional reaction at the same time. And there's no explaining the weird feel of the scenes when Aviva, played by the enormous Wilkins in a frilly pink dress, lands in Mama Sunshine's prefabricated home. We're in some stretched and flattened imaginary heartland of monstrous Christians, where people speak in enthusiastic complete sentences and kids laugh creepily in unison. It's a way less hip (or naturalistic) universe than "The Brady Bunch"; it might be less hip than "Father Knows Best."

I would like "Palindromes" a lot better if I thought Solondz were actually satirizing something -- the uptight, purportedly liberal atmosphere of Aviva's suburban town, or the apocalyptic certainty of Mama Sunshine's world, or both. But the point of "Palindromes" is its sense of narrative dislocation and emptiness, its depiction of a world in which nothing changes except our innocent Alice-in-Wonderland heroine, who changes sex, race and age, is raped and traumatized and made into a killer, but who will also never grow up. Solondz is exactly the kind of filmmaker coffeehouse intellectuals like me are supposed to admire. After the modest success of "Welcome to the Dollhouse" a decade ago, a clear career path lay open to him as a rueful, tragicomic chronicler of real life in downscale suburbia. With his subsequent films "Happiness" and "Storytelling," and now "Palindromes," Solondz has walked away from money and fame and any possibility of reaching a mass audience to follow his own tormented muse (who seems, unhappily for him and for us, to be an abused child). There are no collaborations with George Clooney or "Batman" scripts in Solondz's future, unless we want to see the Caped Crusader as a codeine-guzzling middle-aged perv, fiddling with Robin's shorts. All this is commendable; he wants to be (and in fact is) a filmmaker closer to Godard and Buñuel than to anything on the contemporary American screen.

But that's not an excuse for cheap nihilism and empty cruelty. We learn early in this film that Dawn Wiener, the lead character from "Welcome to the Dollhouse," has died. (Aviva is her cousin.) Well, OK, that's what happens. But we also hear that Dawn was obese and suffered from some terrible dermatological condition; she committed suicide after being date-raped and getting pregnant. That piling-on of detail is not narrative irony or a quirk of fate or a little wicked humor or whatever else Solondz thinks it is; it's a disturbed kid, blowing up his sister's dolls with firecrackers.

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