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 |
Narrated by | Maggie Moore |
Starring | Emani Sledge Valerie Shusterov Hannah Freiman Rachel Corr Will Denton Sharon Wilkins Shayna Levine Jennifer Jason Leigh |
Music by | Nathan Larson |
Cinematography | Tom Richmond |
Editing by | Mollie Goldstein Kevin Messman |
Studio | Celluloid Dreams Wellspring Media |
Distributed by | Genius Entertainment |
Release date(s) | September 3, 2004 |
Running time | 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 and a sequel to Solondz's 1995 film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. In the same year it was released, Palindromes was nominated for a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.
The protagonist, a 13-year-old girl named Aviva, is played by ten different actors (of different ages, races, and genders) during the course of the film. Palindromes also features an array of secondary characters. The names of the characters Aviva, Bob, and Otto are all palindromes.
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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, became pregnant, and committed suicide. 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.
Aviva is Dawn's cousin who 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 get 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 who the foster father uses is the same trucker Aviva previously befriended and had sex with.
Convinced she is in love with the truck driver, she flees the Sunshine Family to join him on his assignment. The murder does not go as planned as, in addition to the doctor himself, the trucker (whose name is revealed to be Bob) ends up accidentally shooting the doctor's young daughter when she steps in front of the first shot. The police find Bob and Aviva both in a motel room, and Bob commits suicide by cop.
The film then skips ahead to Aviva back home with her parents, planning her next birthday party. During the party, she talks to her cousin, Mark, who has recently been accused of molesting a baby, although he denies having done it. The film skips ahead to Aviva's meeting Judah, who now calls himself Otto, and their having sex again. Once again, Aviva believes she is pregnant and is happy about it.
Palindromes currently holds a 42% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[1] On an unknown, but likely small, budget, the film grossed $553,368 in the domestic box office and $707,269 worldwide after almost 23 weeks in theatrical release.[2] The DVD was released on September 13, 2005.
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