Palindromes takes place in a similar world. The first problem, however, is that Solondz doesn't seem fully aware that irony doesn't represent reality; rather, it includes the facts of our misbegotten, fallible existence--our impure motives and lack of heroic qualities, the resistance to our plans of other people and of physical matter, and the seemingly fated bad outcomes--that romance narratives leave out. In this interview with FilmForce Solondz says he's not "out to shock," and insists his "movies are tame compared to real life, so it's not that it's shocking, it's just that I'm not playing into what an audience is maybe wanting." He's right to situate his work in opposition to what the audience wants, but his reference to "real life" is worrisome. "Real life" includes frustration, brutality, misery, and horror, of course, but they don't all happen to one person in the span of an hour and a half. To focus on them, as Solondz does, is to exclude in turn a wealth of contrasting facts and experiences, which is fine, but you need to know what you're doing and why. Confounding audience expectations with baleful material, as irony does, is a distortion intended as a corrective to what the ironist sees as the audience's degraded taste for romance. If Solondz isn't being dishonest in saying he doesn't want to shock us then he's terribly unself-aware of what he's up to as an ironic artist.

A further problem is that Solondz's handling of the comedy is so uncertain. This is clearest in the scenes of the Sunshine kids. Solondz has the kids announce their lines into a totally unresponsive atmosphere as if they were on a TV sitcom that refuses to coalesce around them. (There's an implicit, scathing laughtrack, as you might say there is in Simon of the Desert.) The deadpan awkwardness in this section of Palindromes functions ironically but Solondz is pinning the tail on the wrong donkeys.

As Viridiana shows, it's acceptable to depict children as corrupt. (Evelyn Waugh does it spectacularly well, twice, in A Handful of Dust.) But with one exception Solondz doesn't make the Sunshine kids corrupt, he simply congeals them in the aspic of their adoptive parents' religion and lower-middle-class taste. Although they're not ironic protagonists like Aviva, they're made to seem equally grotesque, which isn't too hard considering their disabilities. This isn't like Napoleon Dynamite in which you laugh at the dance moves of the gawky, ill-tempered, delusional protagonist because he embodies your own remembered adolescent awkwardness, petulance, and cluelessness. In this interview at About.com Solondz puts a preposterously self-glorifying spin on his use of the kids, saying that it would be to "disenfranchise" them if he didn't show their "delight in singing and dancing." Even assuming it's an unintentional side-effect, the singing-and-dancing Sunshine kids come across as symbolic freaks, bringing our aesthetic discomfort to bear against their adoptive parents.

Solondz struggles in Palindromes to find characters and forms for a broadly disenchanted outlook and he doesn't want to indulge in anything that might appeal too easily to the audience. Similarly, in Storytelling he boldly has the college kid with cerebral palsy and the African-American novelist use their minority status to intensify sex, which makes them far more individual than such characters usually are in American movies. (The way the kid knows his relationship is failing because his girlfriend has become "kind" is especially good.) Solondz also uses certain kinds of professional clumsiness intentionally, in the performance of the first little girl who plays Aviva, with her weirdly extending tongue, for instance. Struggling with form is also part of what made Buñuel so fascinating from the beginning to the end of his career.