Palindromes (film)
| Palindromes | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Todd Solondz |
| Produced by |
Mike S. Ryan Derrick Tseng |
| Written by | Todd Solondz |
| Starring |
Matthew Faber Ellen Barkin Emani Sledge Valerie Shusterov Hannah Freiman Rachel Corr Will Denton Sharon Wilkins Shayna Levine Jennifer Jason Leigh |
| Narrated by | Maggie Moore |
| Music by | Nathan Larson |
| Cinematography | Tom Richmond |
| Edited by | Mollie Goldstein Kevin Messman |
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Production
company |
Celluloid Dreams
Wellspring Media |
| Distributed by | Genius Entertainment |
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Release date
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Running time
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100 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English Hebrew |
| Box office | $707,269 |
Palindromes is a 2004 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Todd Solondz. It references Solondz's 1995 film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. It competed for the Golden Lion award at the 61st Venice International Film Festival.
The protagonist, a 13-year-old girl named Aviva, is played by eight different actors of different ages, races, and genders during the course of the film and features an array of secondary characters. The names of the characters Aviva, Bob, and Otto are all palindromes.
The film opens with a funeral for a young woman; the deceased is Dawn Wiener (the protagonist from Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse), who went to college, gained a lot of weight, and committed suicide after she became pregnant. Her brother Mark (Matthew Faber, reprising his role) reads the eulogy while Dawn's tearful parents (Angela Pietropinto and Bill Buell) sit in the audience.
A few years later, Aviva, Dawn's cousin, desires to have a child. She has sex with Judah (Robert Agri), a family friend, and becomes pregnant. Aviva's parents are horrified and demand she gets an abortion. While the abortion is technically successful, it is implied via a fractured, emotional conversation with the doctor (Stephen Singer) that Aviva can no longer have children. Not fully conscious, Aviva is unaware of this, and her parents, already fragile, lead her to believe all is well when she awakens, afraid to upset Aviva.
Aviva runs away from home. She befriends a trucker (Stephen Adly Guirgis) and has sex with him; however, the trucker abandons her at a motel. She is eventually found by the Sunshine Family, a Christian fundamentalist foster home that cares for orphans and runaways. She tells them her name is Henrietta — the name she picked for the baby she was persuaded to abort. While at the Sunshine Family home, she discovers a dark side to the foster father; he assassinates abortion providers. His next target is the doctor who performed Aviva's abortion. The hitman whom the foster father uses is the same trucker Aviva previously befriended and had sex with.
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