E-Mail This Article to a Friend Able was I . . . Todd Solondz wants it both ways with Palindromes BY GERALD PEARY

Why did Todd Solondz call his new film Palindromes? "It’s a loosely metaphoric idea that attaches to themes in the film, a word or pattern that folds in on itself," he explained to me last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival. More help from the director? "Well, ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ are palindromes, the same forward and backward. And the character of Mark Wiener encapsulates some of the philosophy. He believes that the inability to change character is a kind of doom." Like words that in either direction remain the same. Fatalist Mark in Palindromes: "There’s no free will. We’re all robots. Genes and randomness, that’s all there is." Solondz: "I have a sunnier view. To acknowledge this problem can be a kind of liberation, to acknowledge one’s flaws is a good thing."

Palindromes is a sort of sequel to Welcome to the Dollhouse, Solondz’s corrosive 1995 comedy about the malcontented Wiener family, which included pre-teen Dawn and Mark, her teen brother. Palindromes begins with the funeral of Dawn. Mark (played as in Dollhouse by Matthew Faber), meanwhile, is accused of pedophilia. Nobody thinks he’s innocent except his 13-year-old cousin, Aviva.

"He’s not a pedophile," said Solondz. "He’s an accused pedophile. She doesn’t believe he is, and I don’t believe it either. ‘He’s not a pedophile — pedophiles love children,’ Aviva says. It’s natural coming from her, that kind of love."

And Aviva’s feelings for the truck driver whom she wants to sleep with so she can have a baby? "He’s an adult. He’s got guilt and shame, but she’s a child and in her innocence doesn’t feel there’s anything sordid." And when Aviva becomes pregnant? "She remains an innocent. We can all relate to this child who is on a quest for love. She feels a baby will fill this void, because her family is not adequate to her needs. Her mother lectures her, ‘Your child will be brain-damaged, blind, legless, armless.’ When Aviva joins the Sunshine family, she sees those children her mother describes. I wanted to create there an alternate universe, a Through the Looking Glass version of what Aviva is looking for."

It’s a commune in the country for crippled, damaged, unwanted youth, a right-to-life utopia run by Mama Sunshine (Sharon Wilkins). Where’s the irony? The left-of-center art-house ridicule of this anti-abortion Bush heroine? "Mama Sunshine is a woman of conviction. She’s not just an eccentric Bible-thumping Jesus freak a liberal might want to dismiss. Just because you have a liberal mind doesn’t mean you always have an open one. In Palindromes, you get a liberal pro-choice family that gives no choice to its daughter and a Christian pro-life family that kills. Mama Sunshine says, "There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect my children.’ " That includes the murder of abortion-performing doctors.

Few who’ve seen Palindromes have noted the resemblance of the Sunshine refuge to the one to which the children flee after floating down a river in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. Solondz: "When writing, I thought only of Night of the Hunter’s river journey. I went to view that movie after completing the script. It was unconscious, Mama Sunshine like Lillian Gish."

Another parallel for the Jewish Solondz: the relentless, torturous, secular world of French Catholic director Robert Bresson. Like Palindromes, Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) is the troubling story of an adolescent girl passed from one odious person to the next. I told Solondz I view his films as "Bresson with laughs." He replied, "I take that as a compliment, but Mouchette is much grimmer than what we have here."

Like Bresson, Solondz has been charged with being misanthropic and sadistic in his films. He finds this accusation disturbing. "It’s not something I enjoy, this litany, what a cruel, mean-spirited human being I am. We have expectations of how a film should function: it’s about a handsome or beautiful protagonist who behaves heroically and with whom we empathize. My movies don’t function that way. I have neither heroes nor villains but flawed human beings. It’s hard for me to celebrate when I read the papers every day. I don’t think anyone wants to hear, ‘I’m a horrible person.’ But I don’t know what I can do to make people experience my films in a different way."

Contact Gerald Peary at gpeary@geraldpeary.com