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Palindromes
Wellspring Media


6.9

based on 36 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 20 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Ellen Barkin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Adly-Guirgis, Valerie Shusterov, Rachel Corr, Richard Masur, Debra Monk, and Sharon Wilkins

Described as a "fable of innocence," his latest film allows Todd Solondz to savor the profound flavor of moral complexity. (Wellspring Media)

GENRE(S):	Adventure \| Comedy \| Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Todd Solondz
DIRECTED BY:	Todd Solondz
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: September 13, 2005 Theatrical: April 13, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	100 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

Nominated, Golden Lion, 2004 Venice Film Festival

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Like all this adventurous filmmaker's work, it's truly one of a kind.

100

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Most comedies start with a straight story and hang jokes on it; Solondz begins with a cosmic joke and takes his characters by the hand as they suffer through it.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Then there's Todd Solondz's Palindromes, which is that rare event: a memorable provocation.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Solondz beats on abortion defenders, stomps on the pro-life crowd and finishes up by telling us there is no free will. If you want some easy laughs tonight you'd be better off curling up with some Kierkegaard.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole

Palindromes is a cracked American picaresque.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

As depressing as it is hard to watch, Palindromes is also consistently, horrifyingly funny and sharp-witted, and the darker and more well-observed its humor, the more it belies the director's unsentimental, even grudging empathy for his fellow DNA monkeys.

Film Threat Eric Campos

You love Solondz's films, you'll love Palindromes. That same twisted sense of humor is there and certain scenes go on for an uncomfortably long time, but you wind up savoring the discomfort.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

What could have been Solondz's most complex and challenging film winds up being a bit on the flat side. Still, the life-forms skittering over its surface are fascinating to behold.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Palindromes isn't a wise movie, or a particularly true movie, but it's an honest one and a singular experience.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

What makes Palindromes bearable is that Solondz has yet to come up with an answer.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Solondz likes to put the screws to moral hypocrisy. As always, he goes too far. As always, you don't want to look away.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The experience isn't for everyone. But it amounts to intellectual penicillin for our sequel-driven, franchise-heavy entertainment culture.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Palindromes becomes a strangely compelling fractured fable, a grim cinematic fairy tale heightened by Nathan Larson's delicate, bittersweet score.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

With the possible exception of Neil LaBute, I can't think of a filmmaker who can divide an audience as efficiently as Solondz.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Aviva emerges undamaged for all of her trauma. That may be the most compassionate, human act Solondz has offered in his career up to now.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

Variety David Rooney

Like the symmetrical word that supplies its title, the mordant comedy-drama recovers ground to become a boldly intriguing if not entirely satisfying subversion of American family values.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

The heroes are villains, the villains are heroes, and in between are the innocents who become casualties in their wars waged in the names of morality and righteousness.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Based on Palindromes, it's easy to see what Solondz is railing against but almost impossible to tell what he's railing for.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Solondz's determinedly removed eye for the graphic and shocking is by now practically a cliche. If Solondz really wants to outrage anyone, he'll have to make a sweet and heartfelt drama.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Solondz, for reasons best discussed with a therapist, can find no good in people -- or at least none that he expresses in his films.

Empire Adam Smith

It’s occasionally sick-funny, but large swathes are unforgivably dull.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

You could call this film repugnant and abrasive, and Solondz would probably agree.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

If the point of "A Dirty Shame" was that nothing human is foreign to John Waters, Palindromes seems to suggest that, for Todd Solondz, everything human is.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Palindromes read the same way backward and forward, and Todd Solondz' sour tale ends where it begins.

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

It's a highly stylized piece of work typical of director Todd Solondz, who renders wildly exaggerated sequences on a topic not generally thought of as a basis for comedy. He leaves it to the viewer to decide if it's insightful whimsy or meaningless drivel.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

A shallow, transparent satire/social commentary, Palindromes lives and dies on a gimmick.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

As a director, Solondz seems to have his own locked-in fate -- to favor caricature over compassion -- and his movies are the worse for it.

New York Magazine Ken Tucker

Mostly stiff acting and intentionally flat, banal dialogue.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Palindromes finds him (Solondz) stuck with his single theme inside a sealed dollhouse of his own construction. He has gifts to give a larger audience, if ever he breaks out.

Slate David Edelstein

A thesis movie, almost a manifesto for despair, and certainly worthy of the aforementioned NR-DS rating. Except that its bad vibes don't linger. Have dinner and smart conversation with friends, hug a child, pick up a good book--and poof, life returns with a happy vengeance.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

This is extremely dark and politically loaded material.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

I've never seen anything crazier than Palindromes. You can read that as praise if you're that sort of person, but I don't mean it that way.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 20 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

M. Daye gave it a10:
Fiendishly bittersweet, Palindromes will have you both laughing at and feeling for the most sensitive of characters.

Sharon S. gave it a2:
Although there was much thought on a young girl wanting to have a baby at the age of 13- the young girl Aviva obviously was not taught any consequences to her choices which in reality there is. Secondly, at the age of 13 most girls do discuss the issue of wants and needs with her peers before acting out. So I found the movie offered no advice, and encouraged the choice of being premiscuous. A good parallel would have been the movie called monster. The choices one makes leads to the same ending-trouble. The movie confuses love with the act of sex in seeking acceptance of one self.

Chad S. gave it a9:
The Sunshine Singers, the singing group led by Mama Sunshine (is Solondz making fun of Mia Farrow?), perform Contemporary Christian songs which made me laugh, but it's not them; it's the genre itself. "Normal" people would sound and look like doofuses performing the Sunshine Singers' repetoire. Solondz is often accused of hating his characters, but in this instance, his hatred is saved for the moviegoers who have pasts that correspond to these "flawed" children. But here is the kicker. The people who look after these throwaway children are insane. What is Solondz inferring? "Palindromes", in typical Todd Solondz fashion, loves nobody. Apart from being merciless on both sides of the abortion front, this film takes a barb at colorblind casting. Here again, we revel in Solondz's moral complexity. Sharon Wilkins (Mama Sunshine Aviva) is simultaneously ridiculous and convincing playing white jailbait. Wilkins is no more jarring than say, Denzel Washington as Julius Caesar on Broadway. "Palindromes" doesn't want to entertain, it wants to provoke, and since most films don't do the former, judge this film on its ability to do the latter.

Tod K gave it a9:
This is bold, brilliant, in-your-face post modern film about family, love, violence, compassion, selfishness and loss. It is (intentionally) hard to watch and easy to hate on many levels. Many people will hate it on a content level and others on a story-telling level but when is bold, harsh statement ever well received? It is a much smaller film than Happiness and more focused than Dollhouse. Like all of his movies you will laugh and hate yourself for it but the end of film when all the scattered pieces come together and you realize that this is the proverbial with a story with 1,000 faces on it I found it chilling.

Benjamin Bunny gave it a1:
Happiness was a masterpiece because it depicted the lowest form of human life with a small amount of compassion and plenty of cartoonish (but dark) humor. The characters in this film are even more vile, putrid and unsympathetic, and save for a couple scenes involving dance sequences to Christian pop, nothing is remotely funny--the premise is just too inhuman and disturbing to do anything but evoke disgust. A terrible, heartless and sickening film.

Conscious Entity gave it a0:
Solondz is a cynic who believes that life is absurd. To support such a view, he must undermine all positive conceptions of morality. In Palindromes, Solondz accomplishes this by depicting persons on *both* sides of one of the great moral debates of our day (pro-choice vs. pro-life), as variously insensiitive, toxic, murderous and above all deluded. Thus, by means of a generalization that the director clearly intends, the entire film amounts to an extended ad hominem argument against any and all conceptions of moral purpose. It is easy to see why this director has so often been accused of misanthropy, but to me it seems that his attacks upon humanity are just a means to his more fundamental purpose of declaring life itself to be without meaning.

Damon C gave it a6:
The would-be-libertarian and wannabe-misogynist that I am, I wanted to like the movie - no, I wanted to love the movie, as much as I loved Happiness and Dollhouse. But no, I didn't like it that much, and this is why. First, while I'm intrigued by the multiple portrayals of Aviva, I left asking myself: why? What did it add to the film beyond the gimmick? Was it to suggest that having babies is the universal desire of ALL women? I'm not sure, and the film certainly doesn't answer that question. Secondly, was there anything else more to palindromes than the spelling of Aviva (and perhaps Otto)? Can the movie be viewed back to front to arrive at the same result? Perhaps, but how would one ever know? So I walked out of the theater with all these vexing questions, and after thinking about them for a few days, I still had nothing to show. Ultimately, Palindromes has the usual mordant humor and way-out-there situations, but it casts light on human condition as much as a baby doll with a bottle stuck up her ass would, or on second thought, a little less.

Palindromes Wellspring Media

Palindromes
Wellspring Media