That old curmudgeon Todd Solondz (he of Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse infamy) is back and more "twisted" than ever. Palindromes finds him swapping the actress who plays the lead every ten minutes or so (from Jennifer Jason Leigh to a morbidly obese black woman, etc.), a conceit which seems primarily designed to make the viewer wonder what the point of it is. And while you're wondering what the point of it is, you really don't have much time to think about anything beyond the superficial elements of the film. So let's get to that question first.
Maybe the reason for switching the lead (and particularly because the actresses are so distinctly different) is to say that the idea of identity is constantly mutable and changing. For each encounter a person has they also have a unique identity. That is, you are a different person from day to day depending on who you're with and how you want to be perceived. Maybe that's what Solondz is getting at. But that's a pretty trite point to make and hardly one worth devoting an entire film to.
So maybe the reason for the lead swapping is to point out the way people shape their perceptions of each other around how they want to see the person. Or maybe Solondz does it because he wants to distance the viewer from the events of the film, make them constantly aware that they are watching a film and thereby force them to analyze what they are seeing more than they might normally do. Or maybe he does it because he wants to flaunt normal film convention. Or maybe he does it because he's just a cantankerous bastard who wants to mess with people. Or maybe, and this might be the direction I'm leaning, he wants to be inscrutable. He wants people to puzzle over his film and by extension him, but never really get to the heart of what the film (and the filmmaker) is about.
Maybe the reason is one of those. Maybe it's none. And maybe it's some combination. But in the end it doesn't really matter because the film is just plain boring. So boring that, for most of the time I was watching it, I was thinking about things completely unrelated to the on-screen action. For instance, when Aviva is stowed away in a truck on the interstate, I was wondering how the hell Solondz had the money to spend on a helicopter shot. Or maybe he used stock footage. But that would mean that he had to acquire the stock footage first and then dress the truck to match the stock footage. And who would bother to do that just for a few inconsequential shots of a moving truck? And besides, aren't there at least fifteen better ways to spend a few thousand dollars when making an independent film?
Guess I went kinda off the track there but that's the sort of reaction watching this film engenders. There's just not enough on the screen to hold your interest so you fill in the gaps with all sorts of ancillary nonsense. I mean, I guess you could try to wrap your mind around all the targets at which Solondz takes aim (from anti-abortion crazies to the need for gun control to the general stupidity of organized religion to our continued inability to deal with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the need to dispose of aborted fetuses in a more seemly manner) but there's so many potshots aimed at so many classic liberal targets that it's barely worth the wasted effort. It's art, I guess, but art is easy. Being entertaining is hard and on that score Solondz fails pretty spectacularly.
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