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 ew directors have managed to backslide like Todd Solondz. Once he was a celebrated, singular satirist who won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Welcome to the Dollhouse and galvanized audiences with the endlessly unsettling Happiness. But Solondz's latest film, Palindromes, has been reviled by even the festival audiences who first embraced him. His movies have always enjoyed controversy, always received a pat on the back for every condemnation, but critics who once championed his particular brand of painful anti-comedy now turn away in shame: "I say this with a heavy heart," wrote A.O. Scott in his New York Times review of Palindromes. "You will want to be as far away [from this film] as possible."
So what happened? Was he just too dark? Too edgy for us? Solondz would probably have you believe it. "Why do people have to be so ugly?" whines a prissy creative writing student in his third film, Storytelling. It was a direct hit at critics who bemoaned the hysterical bleakness of Happiness, with its interwoven stories of murder and child molestation. Happiness' hollow depiction of the American family is simplistically bleak, but it's still a successful movie, full of unforgettable, puzzling scenes, fine performances and searing dialogue. ("If only I'd been raped, I'd be a real writer," spoken by Lara Flynn Boyle's Helen, is a personal favorite.) Solondz's later films fail for different reasons, and yet I get the feeling he wouldn't understand that, like the chubby girl who thinks all the guys break up with her because of her weight when, in fact, her personality kind of stinks.
Consider Palindromes. It has dark, quirky characters and a shock-the-bourgeousie narrative: Little Aviva wants nothing more than to be a mother. At thirteen, following a pathetically inept (but not wholly unbelievable) first sexual encounter, she becomes pregnant only to be dragged under the knife by her
An ugly, empty tale whose characters ring false. |
image-conscious, pro-choice parents. Of course, the abortion is bungled, and poor Aviva — who only wants to love and be loved by her own flesh and blood, dear thing — is rendered barren. From there, the story breaks into a kind of Huckleberry Finn haze, with Aviva literally drifting downstream and washing up at the house of Mama Sunshine, an evangelical Christian with a seeming addiction to adopting "differently abled" children. Oh, and somewhere along the way, she sleeps with a pedophile trucker. ("Turn over," the guy tells her in bed. "Okay," she says. "Can I still get pregnant if we do it this way?") And an abortionist is killed. And his little kid. It may seem like I'm giving away too much, but I promise — there's nothing to ruin here. Palindromes is an ugly, empty tale whose characters ring false. Ellen Barkin, who plays Aviva's mom, may think it's the best work of her career, as she has stated at various film festivals, but her character's self-righteous liberal narcissism is so over-the-top it loses all meaning. Mama Sunshine's husband is a pro-life Christian so evil he should be twisting the ends of his handlebar mustache.
The big, artsy-fartsy gimmick of the film, cribbed from Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, is that Aviva is played by different people, including a young boy and a very large black woman. "On the one hand it throws in relief this idea of change versus stasis — how for all the sordid, traumatic, difficult, emotionally devastating kinds of experiences [Aviva] goes through, she remains an innocent from beginning to end," Solondz told The Austin Chronicle. "And yet we see all these metamorphoses of size, shape, color, and sex, and so forth take place. So, for all these changes that are constantly taking place with all of us, we are also at the same time paradoxically remaining the same."
It's an interesting conceit, but it fails. The effect de-humanizes Aviva rather than giving her experience any resonance. It's a Brechtian distancing technique that forces us to think about what we are watching rather than to feel and sympathize with it (like we might have in Welcome to the Dollhouse, to which this film is a semi-sequel). That might be all right if Solondz gave us anything to chew on thematically, but this is what he comes up with: Both sides of the abortion debate can be irrational, hurt children often find sad ways to soothe themselves, and people never change. Umm, great. Thanks.
Solondz insists we could never understand his lead character — and, by extension, him. |
Storytelling showed early signs of such artistic slippage. It was divided into two sections, which gave the odd impression that Solondz didn't trust the narrative of either. But the films do mesh nicely, even if their discussion of the symbiotic relationship between artist and subject isn't as accessible as dysfunctional siblings and middle-school angst. With its washed-out tones, head-scratching racial issues, IFC in-jokes and defensive stance against criticism, Storytelling was a movie designed not to please. But it's actually quite good at times: As Scooby, a numb high schooler poisoned by popular culture and boredom, Mark Webber is one of the most convincing teen actors I've seen in some time. But Solondz can't resist pushing his characters to hyperbole — to baffling acts of violence and cruelty — and they become pawns in his sad worldview rather than human beings. With Palindromes, Solondz seems hell-bent not to repeat the mistake of Welcome to the Dollhouse (that is, to make a film so fraught with familiarity and pain that all who watch it relate to its lead character). Solondz wants to insist we can't feel her pain, that we could never understand her — and, by extension, him.
Curiously, Palindromes begins with the funeral of Dawn Wiener of Welcome to the Dollhouse. We learn that she endured a lifetime of failure and eventually killed herself. "I hope I don't grow up to be like Dawn," Aviva tells her mother, but of course she will. Why? Because life is cruel? Because things don't always turn out for the best? Or because happy endings, even plausible ones, are for other directors? By dwelling solely in the ugly crevices of human nature, Solondz has limited himself. He's already broken taboos. He's already taken on censorship. He's spoofed family values, politics, youth culture, even his beloved filmmaking. What's left in his arsenal? If Palindromes is any indication, it's a big bag of nothing. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. |
©2005 Sarah Hepola and Nerve.com.
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