Nothing about Palindromes is easy to resolve. This should come as great news for fans of Todd Solondz, whose last film, Storytelling, felt like a series of predigested cruelties. Palindromes is a major return to the emotional depth of Solondz' early works, Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, in which pain and humiliation yield uncomfortable laughter and pathos, and in which no one ever catches a break. Solondz hasn't begun to let his characters off the hook--Palindromes contains the murkiest misery he has ever conjured for the screen, including forced abortion, sexual humiliation, child molestation, murder, and Christian rock. The good news is that the film is full of rich, powerful contradictions that aim right at the heart of American life in 2005.

Palindromes opens at the funeral of Dawn Wiener, the awkward heroine of Solondz' most popular movie, Welcome to the Dollhouse. By killing his most beloved (if you can call her that) character, the filmmaker makes it clear that no one is going to get off easy here, least of all himself. He also sets the stage for another preteen protagonist--in fact she's Dawn's cousin--whose life becomes an odyssey of misadventure and tragedy. Aviva is a lonely, quiet girl who wants a baby--presumably as a refuge from the smothering, conditional love of her ultra-liberal artist mother (Ellen Barkin). After some painfully awkward sex with her horndog cousin Judah, Aviva winds up pregnant, much to the horror of her parents, who demand that she get an abortion, lest she resign herself to a life of food stamps and ruination, caring for a baby that will obviously be deformed.

Their arguments form a hysterical burlesque of the pro-choice "dialogue," ending with the mother's declaration that "it's not a baby yet, it's like it's just a tumor." The pre-abortion scenes are positively gruesome, and at times, uncomfortably broad, which of course is Solondz' tone of choice. But if there's any doubt about his sympathy for Aviva, it's vanquished by moments like the sequence in which her father (Richard Masur) tries to get her to open her bedroom door, just to talk. Within moments, his cajoling voice has become a booming threat, the door shaking from his attempts to break it down. Solondz accomplishes this transition with only two shots--Aviva cowering helplessly in her little bed and the reverse angle on the door--but there's a wealth of reassuring humanity in them.

By the time they arrive at the abortion clinic, where protesters literally get on their knees and beg Aviva not to kill the baby, Palindromes has entered the form of a very grim fairy tale. Needless to say, the operation goes awry and Aviva has soon run away from home in the fruitless search for a man who will fill her with the baby she still desperately wants. Her quest leads her first to a pedophile with whom she falls in love, despite the fact that his proclivities aren't very helpful ("Can you still get pregnant if it goes in there?"). Next, she falls in with a pack of Evangelical Christians whose ark-like house is a haven for unwanted, misfit kids--exactly the kind of deformed, diseased, and disabled children that Aviva's mother was afraid of. Led by the glowing, impossibly sweet Mama Sunshine, they sing and dance in an *NSYNC-like gospel group. But nothing gold can stay, and Aviva soon learns that the Sunshines have a sinister purpose, one that will bring her back to where she started, like an odyssey. Like a palindrome.

It's hard to know which facet of Palindromes is the most disquieting. Is it the fable-like atmosphere? Is it the sexual activity of the young girl? Is it the sexual activity of her partners? Is it the funny/sick dramatization of the pro-choice agenda? Is it the funny/sick dramatization of the Christian agenda? The nervous laughter that punctuates every scene? Yes, on all counts. Solondz' gift lies in refusing to flinch at the collision of wild paradoxes. Aviva's options, which Solondz recently characterized as "a pro-choice family that offers no choice at all, and a pro-life family that kills," spell out a hopeless course for a girl who, at bottom, only wants what every kid wants: to be loved unconditionally. To get there, she suffers through all the cant, hypocrisy, and profound loneliness that contemporary life is made of. That the film can envision her journey as a folktale--in which poetic sequences like Aviva trudging with her wheelie suitcase across a glowing field of spinach trade off with the Swiftian satire of the Sunshine family--doesn't diminish its power. On the contrary, it makes the point that the beef between the warring factions of 21st-century America is so irreconcilable as to constitute a kind of fantasy world.

Solondz is obviously committed to making things as difficult for his audience as for himself. As if his subject matter weren't troubling enough, Aviva is played by eight different performers at various stages: six girls, an androgynous boy, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It's a conceit you either swallow or you don't. There are plenty of defenses for it, the best of which is that Aviva goes through so many changes that the multiple actors are like outward manifestations of her inner turmoil. By the time the weather-beaten Leigh shows up, it's clear that this little girl's trip through hell has taken a serious toll. You could just as easily argue that Solondz' experiment is an artistic shortcut, and that one genuinely talented young actress could communicate Aviva's journey just as effectively without such a literal disjunction. The trouble is that either way, the multi-casting is so conspicuous as a device that you're likely to spend the entire film trying to decide if you're on its side or not--a condition that should come as no surprise to people who've seen Solondz' films before. Whichever side you come down on, it's clear that no other filmmaker at work today is as morally complex--or as troubling.