In Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996) writer and director Todd Solondz presented a poignant portrait of one girl's valiant effort to survive the cruel and tense world of adolescence. She gets no respect at home or in school. In this odd and melancholy film, Solondz returns to the twilight zone at the end of childhood and the dire effects of not being loved.
Twelve-year old Aviva is frightened that she might wind up like her suicidal cousin Dawn Wiener, the lead character in Welcome to the Dollhouse. Her mother, Joyce (Ellen Barkin), assures her that she is the apple of her eye. But after her daughter secretly has sex with Judah (Robert Agri), the son of close family friends, her mother changes her tone and becomes very authoritarian. When she becomes pregnant, Aviva says she wants to have the baby but her mother remains adamant that it is out of the question. Joyce reveals that she had an abortion years ago and never regretted it since she wouldn't have been able to give Aviva all that she needed. Luckily her husband Steve (Richard Masur) went along with the decision.
Following the abortion, which doesn't go smoothly, Aviva runs away and takes the name she had chosen for the baby if it turned out to be a girl — Henrietta. A truck driver named Joe (Stephen Adly Guirgis) has sex with her and then abandons her at a roadside motel. She then finds sanctuary in the home of Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk), an evangelical Christian who with her husband has adopted a band of disabled kids. They take great pride in having saved them all and rescued them from the cruel pagan world. Under her leadership, the kids have formed a gospel singing group that tours and proclaims the rights of the unborn. But beneath this goodness and light lurks the shadow of hatred and violence. Joe is their friend, and he has been summoned to assassinate the doctor who performed Aviva's abortion. When she learns of this plan, she makes her decision on what to do. Eventually, she returns home and her mother throws her a party. Among the odd assortment of guests is Judah, who has some unfinished business with Aviva.
One of the most innovative aspects of Palindromes is the use of eight different actors — two adults, four teenage girls, one pre-teen boy, and a six-year old girl to play Aviva/Henrietta. Solondz enables us to see that every teenager no matter how normal, naïve, or bizarre has many personas to present to the world. At the party, Aviva listens to Mark Wiener (Matthew Faber), a neighbor who has been accused of being a pedophile, expound upon his philosophy of life. He is convinced that no one really changes and that everything is either determined by genes or a random roll of the dice. Palindromes hits the mark by presenting us with a strange world where trees are dying of disease, suburban households are filled with sexual predators, children are forced to look for love in all the wrong places, born-again Christians can talk about Jesus one minute and plan to murder an abortionist the next, and the most cynical souls of all look with dismay on this human menagerie without love.
