Palindromes
''Palindromes" has something to offend absolutely everyone, but it's a Todd Solondz movie, so nothing new there. But even fans of this extreme indie maverick (''Welcome to the Dollhouse," ''Happiness") will probably be shocked by the opening sequence, which cruelly dispatches a beloved character from an earlier Solondz film.
And viewers who can duck the Molotov cocktails that the film fires at their heads may be most astonished to find, at the bottom of it all, a profoundly moving compassion. That said, if you don't want your deepest convictions about adolescence, motherhood, and the abortion wars raked over the coals, you should probably stay home.
Solondz has always been a connoisseur of victimology -- of the social dynamic of picker and picked-upon. And his characters are so unattractively ''real" that it's easy to dismiss them as grotesques. Easier still in ''Palindromes," which opens with an overweight 13-year-old girl named Aviva (Valerie Shusterov) who so wants a baby that she sleeps with a boy she hardly knows.
And easiest of all, when, in the harrowing road odyssey that follows, Aviva is played by no fewer than eight actors, including a young boy (Will Denton), an African-American woman (Sharon Wilkins), and Jennifer Jason Leigh. They each get a ''chapter" of the story, and just as we're adjusting to the new Aviva and her travails, the director pulls the rug out from under us again.
In technical terms: What the hell? Did Solondz get tanked and fall asleep while watching Luis Buñuel's ''That Obscure Object of Desire?" Isn't this filmmaking onanism at its most arrogant?
Well, no, it's not, but you may not notice, so upsetting are Aviva's stations of the cross. Her mother (Ellen Barkin) is a woman of good intentions who has never truly seen her daughter -- the woman's neck muscles are high-tension wires from the effort -- and she reacts as you'd expect the mother of a pregnant 13-year-old to react, as you or I might well react. Following this, Aviva flees home, becomes romantically involved with a socially maladroit truck driver (played by playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis of ''Jesus Hopped the A Train" fame), and settles in with a group of cast-off children under the gentle matriarchal wing of Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk). The latter character is an evangelical Christian with an especially unforgiving attitude toward Planned Parenthood.
You'd expect a trendy off-Hollywood director to make fun of Mama Sunshine, but Solondz sees the boundless love she offers, and also the place where love warps into something that ultimately turns pitch black. It's a toss-up as to which scenes in ''Palindromes" are most unforgivable: the sequences with Aviva and the truck driver, or the Sunshines' nighttime visit to the home of an abortion doctor.
Yet Solondz insists that the truck driver's yearning for love is real, however criminally expressed. More daringly, he insists that Aviva's desire to have a baby is natural -- it is nothing less than what biology demands a teenager do -- and in a perfect world it would be honored. ''Palindromes" is Solondz's explicit measure of the world's imperfectness.
No, he's not saying 13-year-old girls should go out and get knocked up. But he is saying that the most beautiful of human acts, the giving of life, has disappeared from view under layers of civilization. And he's asking you to think about that.
It's an endlessly provocative argument, with something to inspire and infuriate both pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I only wish ''Palindromes" didn't keep tripping over its own shoelaces. The performances are often intentionally stiff, and Solondz is so enchanted with the politics of martyrdom that he makes everyone a victim and Aviva all victims. Thus, the eight actors, get it? It works better in theory, but when it does work in practice -- when the huge, dark, shy Sharon Wilkins is pulled into the Sunshine clan and slowly flowers -- the gimmick turns unexpectedly powerful.
In the end, the most upsetting aspect of ''Palindromes" may be its refusal to console: For all the made-to-order outrage on the screen, it's the pessimism that sends you reeling from the theater. Movies, as we generally understand them in America, are there to make you feel better. This one makes you feel worse -- much worse -- and prompts you to ask why. Not a bad thing, especially when it coexists with the filmmaker's equally bottomless tenderness toward his heroine (in all her avatars) and with her protectors and tormentors (which he sees as much the same). Is it possible to love people and hate humanity? What makes ''Palindromes" bearable is that Solondz has yet to come up with an answer.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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