PLOT: A teenager who longs to have a baby is talked into having an abortion instead. Later, she runs away, has various sexual misadventures and encounters a happy family of physically and mentally challenged children before returning home.

Maybe you'd best get another opinion about the new Todd Solondz movie, Palindromes, because we don't think we understood it. And that's after two viewings, just to be on the safe side.

Palindromes -- as the title suggests -- concerns how people are pretty much always the same, backward and forward, though they may seem changed at times.

The movie opens with Dawn Wiener's funeral, an inside joke for fans of filmmaker Solondz' Welcome To The Dollhouse. After that we meet Aviva, the central character. Aviva (her name is a palindrome, of course) is supposed to be 13 and is played by various actors, including Emani Sledge, Hannah Freiman, Sharon Wilkins, Rachel Corr and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It doesn't much matter.

Aviva longs to have a baby. She gets pregnant, and wants to keep her baby, but her mother (Ellen Barkin) and father (Richard Masur) talk her into having an abortion. Mom, who tells Aviva about her own abortion, seems not so much well meaning as stupid and self-centred.

Engaged in fumbling sexual encounters that are painful to watch and surrounded by cruelty, deception and idiocy, Aviva continues to wander through her life looking for answers.

At one point, she awakens on a river bank and is led to the house of Mama Sunshine, a woman happily raising the handicapped children others have given away. Mama Sunshine's kids have various physical and intellectual differences. By the time the kids launch into a song and dance number, your faithful viewer was left dazed and confused and incapable of understanding what the hell Palindromes was all about.

Much as we'd love to believe that Solondz is not a total misanthrope, the movie ended for us in a scene that has Mama Sunshine saying, "Our special daughter ran away and she didn't even have any legs!" Laugh? Cry? Give up and walk out?

Palindromes has Christian fundamentalists planning to kill doctors and other obvious reversals of that nature, and folks with palindromic names like Bob or Otto and several people claiming they can change their ways. It's really all the same, one way or another. So you could skip it.

(This film is rated PG)
More Movie Reviews