Review of Palindromes (2005) by Bret S — 30 Apr 2005

[font=Century Gothic][color=magenta]Dawn Weiner is dead.[/color][/font].

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[font=Century Gothic][color=#ff00ff]At the beginning of "Palindromes", it has been nine years since "Welcome to the Dollhouse" was released and time has not treated the Weiner family well.(Mark Weiner has been accused of being a pedophile.) Teenager Aviva does not want to share Dawn's fate of committing suicide. She wants to be happy and have a baby. She does get pregnant but is persuaded to have an abortion by her mother. Afterwards, Aviva runs away to Kansas while assuming the name Henrietta along the way.(By comparison, in "The Rain People"(1969), Shirley Knight played a suburban housewife who finds herself pregnant and drives from New York to Nebraska.)[/color][/font].

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[font=Century Gothic][color=blue]The central conceit of "Palindromes" is that Aviva is played by eight different people through the length of the story.(But do we ever see the real Aviva by the way?) I suppose that Todd Solondz' point could be one of reinvention while I was also thinking that it could be multiple personality disorder Aviva is suffering from.(I'm not an expert in psychology, by the way.) For a while, I thought Solondz had gone all the way through misanthropy to find religion on the other side but I think it's more a sense of humanity that he has found. Overall, the movie is not bad, even if I found it all a bit of an empty exercise. But I'm just glad to see Ellen Barkin in anything these days.[/color][/font].