Todd Solondz’s Inverted World

What do you do when your 13 year-old daughter comes home pregnant and she wants to keep the baby?

No matter what your ideology, it is an almost impossible dilemma, a lose-lose proposition. And it is the central event in Todd Solondz’s new film “Palindromes.” The man who birthed “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Happiness,” and “Storytelling,” hasn’t lost his desire to provoke.

In a personal interview with The Crimson and a public question and answer session following a screening of his new film at the Harvard Film Archive, Solondz talked about the titular device behind his new film, what he is trying to get across, how TV shaped his sensability, and why director Mike Leigh wants everybody to be his martyrs.

In person, Solondz is stooped and balding with large-framed glasses that magnify his eyes to a bulgingly, distracting level. His slight nervous stutter, nebbish Jewishness, self-mocking, and ingratiating demeanor combine to resemble Woody Allen, an impression mostly confirmed throughout the conversation. Solondz is, in reality, the scion of a middle-class family. He grew up in suburban New Jersey and went to Yale and NYU film school. The only dissonance to the impression of a younger Woody is when an interviewer probes his work and its relationship to his personality; then, he starts resembling an older Woody with a dark secret he refuses to expose.

Solondz begins his film with the funeral of Dawn Weiner, the protagonist of “Dollhouse,” who has killed herself, because she couldn’t stand the nature of the world. The rest of the film traces the bizarre story of Dawn’s cousin, the palindromically named Aviva, as she wishes for “lots and lots of babies,” has sex with a horny family friend, and is forced into an abortion by her well-meaning mother (“Sea of Love” femme fatale Ellen Barkin in a strong return to the screen). After the operation, Aviva runs away and has a series of encounters with pedophiliac truckers, a right-wing Catholic enclave for discarded children, and an abortion doctor killer, who is then, himself, killed. And then she is returned to the welcoming bosom of her family, still wanting to be a mom. The end is the beginning.

A MAN, A PLAN...

“Palindromes” goes beyond the bounds of Solondz’s past tales of suburban dystopia, as its narrative sets up, according to Solondz, “a structure of a Jewish liberal secular family and a conservative Christian one; those are such poles apart that to throw into relief the moral dimensions of some of these convictions that we stand by and what it really means.”

Aviva “is suspended between the pro-choice family that gives no choice and the pro-life family that kills.” Solondz recognizes that “it’s certainly my most politically charged, I think morally complicated movie that I’ve made so far.”

Most attention-getting, however, is Solondz’s device of having the main character be played by seven actresses and one actor over eight segments, from an overweight African-American woman to a Caucasian red-head to “Single White Female” Jennifer Jason Leigh. During the ninth segment, all the actors appear.

“I know initially, audiences are going to be confused,” Solondz says. “Something you know in your sleep—Ellen [Barkin], black child, something’s wrong, wait she’s Latina, wait she’s a redhead. And at a certain point it kicks in, we’ve got one character and a certain amount of different performers.”

“In a sense, any one of us in the audience could play an episode in this young innocent’s life story,” Solondz continues. “The hope is that the cumulative effect of all these different shapes and sizes of Aviva would be greater in some sense than if I had but used one.”

In some ways, this experiment, combined with the circular nature of the story, does reiterate one of the central lessons of the story: no matter what the girl looks like, or what happens to her, as Solondz says “there is a part of ourselves that resists change, that stays the same.”

TV ALSO GOES IN CIRCLES

Interestingly, Solondz cites the primary media influence for his stories as his childhood watching of TV. Solondz was part of “the first serious TV generation.” When asked about his cinematic influences, Solondz says, “I can mention movies that I loved or was moved by growing up as a kid, but…the main force of all the stories, was not what I was reading or the occasional movie, but was television.”

As Solondz remembers, TV “was the medium that colored, characterized and fed me. If you want to call it nurturing; others might have other ways of describing it—nurtured, damaged, what have you.”

It is an effect clearly recalled by Solondz’s experiment—serialized adventure drama form with provocative topics and ripped-from-the-headlines content.

Getting his stories from the newspapers has created a broad commentary on our political environment, which Solondz thinks is fertile ground for storytellers of all stripes, saying “if you were Stanley Kubrick and were making a movie about 9/11 you would cast George W. Bush as the president. It’s so rich that it’s almost hard to understand how people could have trouble finding ideas.”

Solondz understands that his film will engender many types of response, saying “There are people who tell me it’s my best, there are other people who tell me it’s the most vile thing. It has no meaning for me.”

Somewhat strangely, for a writer/director so obsessed with making his characters’ undergo humiliating, painful and scary trials, Solondz asserts, “I’m not a masochist. I don’t ‘google’ myself…I wish it could be masturbatory. It’s just a little depressing.”

Even more frustrating to Solondz is when filmmakers he respects lose their integrity in pursuit of a wider audience. While discussing his favorite filmmakers, Solondz raised writer/director Mike Leigh’s recent movie, “Vera Drake,” in which Imelda Staunton gave an Oscar-nominated performance as the titular abortionist, as an example of when great filmmakers go bad. Solondz takes pains to praise Leigh’s talents as a “masterful filmmaker, the actors were beautiful, it was beautifully shot and it’s a wonderful indictment of a patriarchal system and so forth.”

“But, I want to scream,” Solondz continues. “‘Would it have been a crime for her to get paid for a job well-done? Does she have to be sanctified?’ Because of course, what happens is the audience all become martyrs,” he explains. “I respect him so much and yet, the idea that we’re all martyrs for the good fight, that’s no examination of the moral nature of any of this.”

It is the easy sentiment of the provoker; those who do not confront the audience with equal vigor have betrayed their talents to the desires of the mass.

‘THE UPSIDE OF MISERY’

But is it any better to overwhelm? Walking out of “Palindromes,” it is hard to feel anything but numb. Solondz’s confrontational tactics produce a viewing experience unlike any other modern American director and it is not for everyone, but provocation is effective. Seeing the group of sickly and discarded children sing Christian pop as The Sunshine Singers is an experience that’s hard to forget. The central device, even when it fails, fails in interesting ways that are worth seeing.

If you can stand being a part of Solondz’s world, this movie is worth seeing for all its faults. Just remember, that when I asked Solondz, in light of all the unhappiness rampant throughout his films, “What brings you joy?” he refused to answer. Instead, he replied that only “joy is so much more keenly experienced the greater your misery has been… that’s the upside of misery.”

—Staff writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.