Todd Solondz has and will continue to be labeled as a provocateur, and certainly, undeniably, the content his films have made a case for it. His latest film, Palindromes, has been and will continue to be viewed as a scabrous and divisive piece of cinema - and, in many cases, an objective one. I don't completely share this opinion. Yes, it is shocking and upsetting to great degrees, and yes, one must assume Solondz exercised maturity and control on the set during certain troubling scenes involving children, and yes, one can almost assuredly expect that he is pushing certain buttons on purpose, for the sake of topicality; but while Palindromes is unquestionably disturbing, I would suggest that it is also somewhat subjective; that Solondz has put more of himself into this work than in the past, and thereby made a more sensitive film; and above all, that there is a some degree of comfort to be found in it.

This last point may be the most difficult to justify, and so I'll tackle it first. What I mean when I say comfort is not that Solondz wraps up everything in a neat and tidy bow, with an ending that is merely happy, or merely ironic, or merely shocking; it's a deeper and more troubling matter than that. He acknowledges that the issues he's dealing with run deeper than ideological differences or culture wars; that while either side of an issue has its rights and wrongs, that the issue - entirely by itself, without its supporters or detractors lobbying for or against it - is a quandary that cannot be wholly whitewashed nor condemned.

And that's where he lets it rest. To be content with the inconclusive is a novel and surprisingly satisfying approach, especially when the topic is one as incendiary as abortion, which is what Solondz chooses to deal with, at least in part, in this film.

It may seem as if I've just described a completely objective approach after suggesting that the film is anything but. In a sense, it is objective, in that it bluntly and satirically condemns both sides of the abortion issue. Because this is a Solondz film - because its subject is a 13 year old girl who is desperate to have a baby - we must consider the fact that we're dealing with satire, and any extremity thus implied (and indeed, the film is as frequently hilarious as it is shocking). It is in his refusal to ultimately subscribe to any overall status quo - and perhaps suggesting that we do the same - that he is making a statement. We've seen films with couples overjoyed to discover they're going to have a baby, and films in which that same discovery is cause for great unrest; this is a film that makes no call for or against either of those reactions, but simply acknowledges that they are both in response to exactly the same thing.

How is this different, then, then what Solondz did in Happiness, in which a pedophile's sexual urges were contrasted plainly and objectively against those of the rest of the ensemble of unhappy characters? The difference is the heart of the matter. Solondz did not judge his characters in that film, but he also did not embrace them. Here, after all the pro-lifers and pro-choicers and their arguments have been discarded, we have, simply, this 13 year old girl, whose name, Aviva, suggests the phonetic phenomenon of the title and is thus representative of the film's point of view: any way you look at it, this girl is a human being, whose feelings, however misguided, are her own. Solondz shows us Aviva at her best and at her worst; he beatifies and comes close to vilifying her; in the end, however, he embraces her as an individual - something not afforded to the characters in his previous works. There's a sweetness here that he's never displayed before; that aforementioned sensitivity

Of those previous works, the only one I feel was a failure is Storytelling, which was an awkward miscarriage of a good and potentially very personal ideas. In many ways, it appeared to be a response to the critics who accused Solondz of being exploiting shocking subject matter for its own sake - an attempt at self-defense that self-destructed. Solondz acknowledges this in Palindromes, when he has one of his characters, a would-be filmmaker, say "I don't want to spend two years of my life making something that's gonna suck." He also makes up for the missed opportunity when near the end he introduces what could very well be considered a personal avatar in the form of a character from Welcome To The Dollhouse, Mark Weiner. Mark has been accused of being a pedophile, and at a family reunion, Aviva, likewise an outcast, is the only one to sympathize with him. He says something very important: that in spite of whatever chemical or physiological or emotional transmutations may occur, people will essentially remain the same, on an individual level.

This is an explanation of multitude of things; chiefly, the by now well-known fact that Solondz has cast eight different actors of different age, ethnicity and even gender to portray Aviva (for the record, and to give credit where credit is due, these actors are: Valerie Shusterov, Hannah Freiman, Will Denton, Rachel Corr, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Shayna Levine and, most impressively, Sharon Wilkins). I've neglected mentioning this thus far simply because it is, with one minor exception, a flawless conceit; the character of Aviva is as rich and multifaceted as she is clearly defined; despite her shifting physical traits, which might inspire judgments when viewed outside of context, she remains the 13 year old girl. It is a bold creative choice, executed by Solondz and the cast with exquisite grace and skill - to the point, in fact, that the explanation provided by Mark Weiner isn't completely necessary. But I do think it illustrates Solondz's own perspective on himself and his films; rather than defend them, as he may have been trying to do in Storytelling, I think he is suggesting that he's content simply to make them as he sees fit, and to let the public judge them - and him - as they like. That I think the film is brilliant - Solondz's best, perhaps - and that I find in it the qualities I've outlined, ultimately does not and cannot change the film itself.