Palindromes
The other night, as a refresher course, I sat down and watched Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Happiness (1998), and Storytelling (2001) all in a row. It’s a wonder I didn’t hang myself. His characters are so lonely, so unhappy, and so helplessly cruel to one another that as a group they make a convincing case that the human race is doomed. Among the people I spent my evening with were a suburban father who’s secretly a pedophile, a portly man who makes dirty phone calls to women, a Latina maid slaving away for a spoiled white family while her own son is executed, a white college student so consumed by liberal guilt that she lets a black professor sodomize her, and of course homely Dawn Wiener from Welcome to the Dollhouse, possibly the most hounded and wronged preteen in movie history, who responds to her junior high gauntlet of humiliation with a silent rage of epic proportions.
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Like Preston Sturges, Solondz dearly loves his misfit children, and intimate encounters between them often crash past the barriers of misery into hilarity. No comic filmmaker in America today works so hard to stay on the knife’s edge between humor and pathos or is so eager to challenge his viewers emotionally. Irony has become a dirty word of late, but Solondz’s sense of irony verges on the symphonic. In Palindromes, his first film since Storytelling tanked at the box office, a young girl gets pregnant, submits to her mother’s demand for an abortion, and then runs away. Ultimately she lands at the rural home of a born-again couple who tend to a blissfully happy family of adopted handicapped children, but the new family hides an unpleasant secret too. Both pro-lifers and pro-choicers are viewed with horror, and–just to make the movie a little more commercial–Solondz has divided the lead role among eight actors, ranging from a six-year-old black girl to a teenage white boy to Jennifer Jason Leigh.
To some extent the Sunshines are idiots: their breakfast banquet includes heaping platters of “freedom toast,” and the kids collaborate on a Christian rock act called the Sunshine Singers, with prerecorded dance tracks to back their soaring harmonies and synchronized dance moves. Their production numbers are both funny and acutely uncomfortable: casting actors with real disabilities is nothing new, but collecting them into a horrendously tacky showbiz exercise can’t help bringing to mind Tod Browning’s 1932 circus story Freaks. I was a bit ashamed of myself for laughing–a combination of feelings that Solondz courts aggressively, though he avoids any taint of exploitation through his genuine tenderness toward the children. They’re so buoyant, so kind, and so accepting of one another that their Christianity seems worthy of celebration, and the thought of aborting any one of them, as Aviva’s mother surely would have, seems monstrous. It’s the most daring and emotionally complex joke of Solondz’s career, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
