Palindromes

Creepy Christians: 8/10

WTF moments: 9/10

Rise to vote, sir: 7/10

My name is great because it is short, to the point, and the same backwards as forwards.  In elementary school I learned that this meant my name was a palindrome, and a palindrome is one of the most useless literary devices there are today.  When I learned that a movie was called “Palindromes”, my initial instinct was that it would be a cool psychological thriller that would play roughly the same backwards as forwards.  I was wrong.

We are introduced to Aviva, a young girl with babies on the brain.  Her plan seems to be to have as many kids as possible so she will never be alone and always have a friend.  Seriously.  When she meets up with the son of her parent’s friends, she convinces the boy to get it on with her in order to hopefully capture his seed.  When the deed doing is done (racecar), she is left pregnant and happy at the age of 13.  Her mother and father, however, are not so pleased.  They spend the next 10 minutes convincing her in every way that they can think of that abortions are the hip and trendy thing to do for blossoming 13-year-olds.  Everything goes smoothly until the abortion leads to an unexpected side effect-a hysterectomy.  Things start to get heavy from there.

Distraught and angry, Aviva runs aways from home and begins hitch-hiking across the vast expanse of the mid west, meeting a kind 40+ year-old trucker who likes to have sex with kids.  She instantly falls in love, and is shocked when he leaves her at a roadside motel, alone and helpless.  She wanders the nearby woods and stumbles upon a the most perfect house with the most perfect family in the most perfect world, owned by a husband and wife who take in defective children like stray animals and let them join the menagerie that is their Christian household.  Aviva can finally feel accepted!

But just when things are looking up, a visit from the doctor reveals that she is unclean, after the abortion and all, and things take a turn for the worst.  She has to run away, again, and finds a trailer that is home to…..you guessed it(senile felines), her estranged 40+ year-old lover!  He awkwardly agrees to take her on the road in order to keep her quiet, and because he has a difficult mission ahead: The Christians have told him to assassinate a doctor that is the poster child for the abortion movement.

I think they are praying for the death of all atheists...

Fueled by her anger at her own abortion, Aviva is more than enthusiastic about the task at hand, and does everything in her power to make sure that the trigger is pulled.  When the police show up and gun down the trucker, Aviva is left to return home and pick up the pieces of her shattered life.  Bummer.

Probably the strangest aspect of this movie is that Aviva is played by several different people, from a skinny little white girl to a 30 something year-old black woman.  The point is, I think, to show that we are always the same inside no matter what happens to us on the outside; our lives are the same backwards as forwards(did you see what they did there).  And just in case you can’t get that from the rest of the movie, a guy tells you it at the end point-blank.  And thus concludes the epic of a stupid little(or big) girl.  Radar.

Thank you to Eric for suggesting this review!  And as always, let me know if there is any movie I can add to my list!