Todd Solondz's Palindromes: Hopeless Times Eight - Page 2

Solondz's situations are more extreme than Payne and Taylor's but his attitude can be opaque. Not when Aviva's mom Joyce (Ellen Barkin) is trying to convince her an abortion is the right "choice," which is a classic form of irony, showing a bald assertion of will inside the mother's attempts to nurture. And the combination of smiley optimism and murderous righteousness among the Sunshines is a standard (low-grade) form of topical satire. (This is the crudest aspect of the movie because it constructs allegory from an overbroad generalization: you can't say all fundamentalist Christians are hypocrites because other fundamentalist Christians are killers, i.e., they're not necessarily part of the same "family." It's simply too much to say that militating against abortion inevitably leads to such murders. Solondz shows the same prejudice as David O. Russell did with the adoptive fundamentalist Christian family in I ♥ Huckabees.)

What's opaque is Solondz's attitude toward Aviva herself. On the one hand she's the kind of hypersensitive child you fear for in life because she has a desperation for experience without the shrewdness or toughness to avoid the most obvious pitfalls in gaining it. (She's literally and figuratively the cousin of Dawn Wiener in Solondz's first feature Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996).) At the same time, however, Solondz makes Aviva nearly impossible to identify with, notably by casting seven actresses and one actor of different races, ages, and body types to play the role by turns. He unifies their performances by having them speak in the same hushed, whiny tone and carry themselves with the same downcast air, which only makes Aviva less open to us.

In addition, about half the actresses who play Aviva are overweight, one of them obese, and Solondz puts them in midriff tops and hip huggers, their soft bellies and rolls bulging. (Will Denton, the adolescent boy cast as "Huckleberry" Aviva, is the only conventionally pretty girl among them.) Solondz thus makes Aviva pitifully unself-aware, exposes her to the harsh world, but does not by these strokes make her sympathetic. The urge toward compassion is invoked but constantly defeated by the fact that Aviva has no admirable or enviable qualities, either obvious or innate, which makes her more grotesque. Solondz's protagonists are always bigger losers than even irony requires, as if he were afraid that a too-ready identification would prevent him from getting where he wants to go.

It is thus a problem that he doesn't seem to know where it is he wants to get to--he just knows what style he wants to arrive in. And yet, to be fair, the sense of experimentation is part of what makes him interesting. He's certainly aware of the discomfort he causes his audience; as John Goodman hollers at Paul Giamatti, the satiric documentary filmmaker in Storytelling, "Stop trying to impose your misery on others!" Like all ironists, Solondz believes that "his" misery is really everybody's misery. The problem for him isn't so much that American movie audiences don't much cotton to this way of telling stories as that he doesn't display enough mastery of it to consolidate a sizeable enough specialty audience (unlike Alexander Payne, for instance, or Wes Anderson, or perhaps Jared Hess).

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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