When is an apparent fixation just a bluff on the part of the filmmaker? Does Lars Von Trier really have a problem with women, and was Todd Solondz's childhood in fact entirely free of molestation? Because that's where we are again, although ostensibly the main focus is on abortion. The main character of Aviva, a plain teenager stubbornly set on having a baby, is played by eight actors of varying sizes, ages and races, one even male. This fragmentation made sense in, for instance, Todd Haynes's recent Dylan biopic I'm Not There, where each change of actor came with a change of directorial style to highlight a different aspect of the Dylan persona. Here, however, it can only be meant to bring across the universality of the protagonist's aspirations. It's a pretty clumsy device, not to mention an unnecessary one.
And there are also other elements which jar badly, like the Christian fundamentalist family that takes Aviva in at one point, who do musical numbers on Jesus and basically come across like the cast of Freaks, as in Tod Browning's 1932 circus sideshow film. It's all very close to a perennial fallacy in American storytelling, i.e. that if you populate the story with enough disparate and outlandish elements and lace it all with pain (as in the hoax novels of JT LeRoy), what comes out will be some kind of more holistic truth. Instead of a smashed kaleidoscope, which is unfortunately the case here.
Solondz's modus operandi is to cut close to the bone, so the fact that here it just hacks to and fro and mostly misses shouldn't be too disheartening, for all the attempts at balance by coming at the subject from both extremes, and trying to shake us by placing deliberately adult notions in the mouths of babes. His is a preciously singular voice, and there's certainly another Happiness or Storytelling in his tank.
5/10
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