Oh, baby
The mommy track is mighty twisted in Todd Solondz's Palindromes.

By Johnny Ray Huston

My sweet Lord: Peter Paul (Alexander Brickel) and Aviva (Sharon Wilkins) pray in Palindromes.
SLIGHTLY STUNNED, usually listless, and alternately plump or skinny, Aviva is always dressed tragically. Her uniform of preteen sexuality: a pale blue, sleeveless unicorn T-shirt with an exposed midriff that allows rolls of flesh to spill over too-tight lowriders. Though still a child, Aviva desires nothing more than a baby of her own. "They're cute. I want one," she says in a queasy-making little voice, as if begging for a new blouse at the mall. Her mother, Joyce (Ellen Barkin, who seems to have melted into a Dianne Weist look-alike), isn't too pleased about this request, especially since Aviva is already carrying around a clump of cells that could be called a tumor – Joyce's view – that is, if it isn't named Henrietta.

"No matter what anyone says, you'll always be you," mother assures daughter early on, a hop and a skip before she tries to coddle her through an abortion. Within the heavily schematic world of Todd Solondz's Palindromes, this sticky-sweet sentiment is both true and false. Over the course of her wannabe-teen-mom odyssey – from a charmless boy's bed, past picket lines, to the cargo section of a truck driven by a pedophile with a taste for buggery, only to be delivered into the woods and momentarily rescued by a family of differently abled Christians – Aviva is embodied by seven women, as well as one little boy. But whether she's a Carrie-era Sissy Spacek type (Valerie Shusterov, introduced making a dedication to the porcelain god as a bug crawls down her caramel tresses) or a formidable yet sensitive black woman suspicious of all the bizarrely affectionate white people buzzing around her (the superb Sharon Wilkins), Aviva's heart, soul, and foolish plight essentially remain the same.

With this multiple-actor gambit, Solondz usurps the plans of another indie Todd, surname Haynes, even if both are following in Buñuel's footsteps. (Using different people to enact various stages of its subject's life, Haynes's I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan will include at least one black woman playing the rocker – some sources even claim Beyoncé has been considered for the part.) Wilkins's arrival in Palindromes is the moment when the director's foregrounded skewering of liberal pieties reaches full bloom, as does Aviva's humanity. By the end of the film, the character is back where she started, her experiences illustrated by the life-lined face of a surprisingly understated Jennifer Jason Leigh. Since Leigh's career began with a pleasureless beneath-the-bleachers adventure in teenage pregnancy in Fast Times at Ridgemont High – and since each time Aviva lies as still as a stone under a man, waiting for something worthwhile to happen, Solondz seems to pay tribute to that moment – she makes a fine final home.

The religious fervors around The Passion of the Christ and the sanctity-of-childhood obsessiveness that courses through a capital-A American movie like Mystic River are the grist for Solondz's satire, which packages the rampant contradictions of a pair of recent documentaries – Capturing the Friedmans and My Flesh and Blood – into slightly restricted fictive form. For the soundtrack, he's employed lead Cardigan Nina Persson and ex-Shudder to Think member Nathan Larson to create an update of Krzysztof Komeda's creepy "la la la" Rosemary's Baby melodies. While there's an affirmation of life in Aviva's palindromic name, this theme music undercuts her reproductive impulses from the get-go, suggesting every child is a child of doom. And yet, if Solondz looks at people and finds them seriously wanting – only differentiated from one another by their flaws – his movies have grown more compassionate as his approach to narrative has become less straightforward.

Among Palindromes' gallery of broken yet prideful Americans, Christian figurehead Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk) and her flock of singing, dancing children come off more flatteringly than Aviva's lefty-seeming Jewish blood relatives. In gazing sympathetically at Jesus-loving zealots, Solondz plays the devil's advocate, but he's just as critical of their hypocrisy, personified by bespectacled Peter Paul (Alexander Brickel), a slightly charming variant of the hateful child in the last of the tales that made up Solondz's previous feature, Storytelling. A flair for charity has already been hammered into little Peter Paul, a lowercase nerd who promptly offers an uppercase Nerd to tired-looking Aviva upon meeting her. But like so many faithful sheep, he's attracted to the very bloody acts he condemns.

By the time Aviva has returned home, she's accompanied an abortion clinic sniper on a botched assassination attempt that provides her with an opportunity to finally do some mommying – comforting him just before his stunted desires prove fatal. True to the spirit of Palindromes, Solondz's greatest weakness as a writer-director is exactly what distinguishes him – his tendency to reduce people to case studies. This static tendency is unsettled during Aviva's stay at Mama Sunshine's. As blind or armless girls and orphaned boys perform early Britney-style odes to Christ with endearing enthusiasm, the movie is overtaken by a love for life otherwise wholly absent from the director's work. In spirit, the sequence travels back past Julien Donkey Boy's "Black Albino Straight from Alabama" rap and Herzog's dwarves to Tod Browning's early attempt at giving the movies over to precisely those people usually excluded from them.

Most directors make films about things that happen in the world, but Solondz is one of only a few today who overtly target the human condition; at last year's Toronto fest, only Lukas Moodysson's antiporn Hole in My Heart had a similar impetus. This approach doesn't necessarily make for superior movies, but Palindromes – its unremittingly unlovely New Jersey, color-leeched and always wearing a cloud blanket, about as far from Hollywood as any U.S. location can be – is a necessarily bracing tonic for these times. Solondz isn't creating the zeitgeist, as he did with Welcome to the Dollhouse, that emblem of when Sundance still mattered. This time, he's zapping it.

'Palindromes' plays May 6-19, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. (415) 621-6120. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.