The Reluctant Satirist

A scene from Palindromes, a film by Todd Solondz.

Losers, outcasts and degenerates crowd Todd Solondz movies, but it’s hard to spot a victim in their ranks. We North Americans love victims, and their absence from the freak show may be part of the reason why writer-director Solondz divides audiences so (plus, themes like pedophilia and sodomy just don’t please the crowds the way they did back in Gomorrah). As soon as you inch towards a character in trouble, extending sympathy, she turns and bites your hand off. Where’s the personal growth in that?

The first nips came from the snout of Dawn Wiener, a study in tween awkwardness dubbed “Wiener Dog” by her torturing classmates in Welcome to the Dollhouse. One felt for the slack-jawed untouchable, certainly, but it’s not easy to stay heartbroken for a girl who accepts a bully’s invitation to an after-school rape — her own (the rape doesn’t happen; Solondz often leaves the most hideous acts in the realm of the potential, where they’re scariest). Palindromes, Solondz’s latest dizzying provocation, begins with Dawn Wiener’s funeral. Pregnant by a date rapist, she has killed herself.

Solondz trades in such bitter ironies but provocation for provocation’s sake is trying, a lazy form of genius that has crippled less interesting filmmakers like Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. Solondz is different, and his films — however uneven, indulgent and even repulsive — are never gleeful or cavalier about the grotesqueries he creates. Solondz takes little pleasure in walking us through these fetid relations; he is a reluctant satirist ramping up every horror to show us just how ugly human behaviour can get, and he’s as disappointed as we are at what he finds. When we laugh — and we do, though less during Palindromes than his more taut last film, Storytelling — it’s not with prurience, or contempt. The laughter is nervous, aimed straight at the exaggerated follies of his characters, which are, of course, our own.

Killing Dawn doesn’t help Solondz wriggle out of his hair shirt. He will always find another hateful-hated protagonist, a victim-victimizer naïf in the wings. In Palindromes, it’s 13-year-old Aviva, Dawn’s equally bland, equally sexually confused cousin (the girls in Solondz’s films, with their unbearably misguided desires, are actually radical; those first sexual urges really can be as ugly and misunderstood as Solondz makes them out to be. But here’s something new: teenage lust of any sort in movies is almost exclusively the domain of boys). Aviva sees Wiener Dog as a dark omen of her own future and so she marches from the funeral to the bedroom of a loafish adolescent family friend, begging him to impregnate her so she’ll “always have someone to love” (this terrifying simplicity made me think of Britney Spears). Without fanfare — kissing and sex never occur simultaneously in Solondz movies — he succeeds, and soon Aviva is experiencing morning sickness over the toilet where, if you look closely, a fly lands in her hair.

The vomit is the starting gun of a Voltairean journey that moves from the strip malls and Tudor mansions of New Jersey to the heartland. Along the way, Aviva is played by eight performers, including a boy, an obese African-American woman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The effect isn’t just to show off; it works surprisingly well. Aviva is stripped down to essence; without a single actor’s continuous quirks and mannerisms, we see only her. As her body changes, we’re forced to check our own responses: what does it mean for a pretty girl to be in bed with an older man? How about an ugly girl? As Solondz shows in film after film, the surface, that point of impact for injury, matters.

As Joyce, Aviva’s mother, Ellen Barkin appears so botoxed that she acts mostly with the tendons in her neck. They’re very talented tendons. Poisoned by suburban decorum (“What if the baby’s deformed?” she screams), Joyce is also caring, and aggressively protective of her daughter. Frantic, she forces Aviva against her will — or as much will as the spacey little thing can muster — to have an abortion. Pro-choice, then, is not really about choice at all.

Aviva runs away, floating downriver on a plastic dinghy like Huck Finn towards America. At river’s end, she finds a second mother in Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk, exuding energy through a face as massive and pulpy as Barkin’s is drum-tight), matriarch to a clan of happy, disabled child cast-offs who might just be the deformed, unaborted kids feared by Joyce. The kids — a limbless girl, an albino, a boy who needs to vacuum his lungs nightly etc. — form an 'N Sync-style band that hits the church circuit with synth-wrapped lyrics like: “We’re going to heaven/ and we’re so excited/ ’cause there’s a party/ and we’re all invited.” The music scenes are at once so insane and so good natured that I was left reeling, unsure whether to cheer — here it is, people: true equality at last — or weep. Solondz makes Diane Arbus look like she had boundaries.

Aviva, as she rocks out on backup, also happens to be played by a large black woman (a soft, shimmering performance from Sharon Wilkins) forced by Mama to change from her teenage hoochy gear into a Peter Pan-collared Christian dress. Oh, it’s all quite hideous, including the lullaby music straight out of Rosemary’s Baby. But when Mama tucks Aviva into the bunk bed at night, the girl — and she seems like a girl, despite her woman’s body — laps up the love, healing before our eyes. It turns out, sadly, that Mama is as much a manipulator as Joyce. Down in the basement, the Sunshines are plotting the murder of a doctor who performs abortions. Clunkily, Solondz completes his palindrome that began with the pro-choice lesson: pro-life, then, is not really about life at all.

Palindromes writer/director Todd Solondz.

Aviva’s desperate quest for love leads her towards a self-hating pedophile truck driver and would-be abortionist killer named Earl (playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis) who wails: “I can change!” By now, that envelope Solondz has been pushing is just a tattered strip of gummy confetti. This is delicate stuff: Aviva worships Earl because he gives her what she wants. He is, in fact, the only person who listens to her, even as he — yes — engages in sodomy. But put aside the indignation for a moment: is this not a real-world type of predator? Don’t some pedophiles offer emotional candy to lure their prey?

Kernels of truth are scattered across the scorched earth in Palindromes. However hard to watch, Solondz is a fascinating director; he doesn’t operate from the cold distance of other anti-suburbia rants like American Beauty, high above bourgeoisie bad behaviour, tsk-tsking with boho superiority. Instead, he slips around in the blood of his walking wounded.

But where does he leave us? Nowhere useful, if one is looking to Palindromes as an issue film. Politically, Solondz is cripplingly palindromic, so able to see both sides, backwards and forwards, that he takes no stand. But he has an eye for human behaviour, in all its muckiness, that is totally clear. One senses from interviews that Solondz is the original Dawn Wiener. With his thick glasses and simian mouth, he obviously feels an affinity for the people he creates, most of whom desperately want to change and fulfill the American destiny of constant reinvention. Of course, they fail, and fail big, but at least they have Solondz onside calling foul on the Mama Sunshines and Joyces who back the ones they should love into a corner. True compassion demands a multisided perspective, even when looking at what’s ugly. Solondz is not willing to let his characters off the hook by turning them into victims, and that’s a form of artistic bravery. Visceral and shocking, Palindromes is hard to like, but harder to ignore.

Palindromes opens May 13 in Vancouver and Toronto.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.