A palindrome is a word that is spelled the same forward and backward. This movie ends just where it begins: with confusion. It's like an episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, but not as funny.

Aviva is a teenage girl who wants a baby, going so far as to have sex with a boy just so that she can get pregnant. Palindromes presents a unique situation: Aviva wants to have a baby, but her parents want her to have an abortion (usually, it's the other way around). Aviva's mother reveals that she had an abortion years ago, when Aviva was three years old. Her mother was pregnant but couldn't support a second child.

Her parents completely ignore the fact that Aviva, even though a teenager, desperately wants a child, and so they force her to have an abortion. The film implies that the abortion is botched somehow, but we can't be sure, since the discussion between the doctor and the parents about what happened during the abortion appears only from Aviva's point of view, and it is distorted because she is still partially unconscious.

Following the abortion, she runs away from home, first hitchhiking part of the way with a man who later turns out to be an accused child molester. This man doesn't approve of her running away from home and so tries to take her home. She abandons him and hides in the truck of a truck driver named Joe. Aviva is almost pathological in her desire to have a baby, convincing herself that she is in love with Joe after they have sex. When Joe ditches her, she wanders for an unknown amount of time.

She stumbles upon an exceedingly, irritatingly Christian family who takes in children people don't want. As it turns out, the family is so Christian that the father, conspiring with a doctor named "Dr. Dan" and a local named Earl who lives in the nearby woods, murder abortion doctors. "Earl" turns out to be the very same "Joe" who met Aviva earlier in the film, and he is charged with murdering an abortion doctor. The murder goes awry, Earl (whose real name is Bob) is killed by the police, and Aviva returns to her family.

Solondz takes an approach that is unclear and confusing: he has several different girls play the part of Aviva. In some cases, the girls look similar enough that all you notice is that Aviva looks different, but you're not sure why. When Aviva is played by an overweight black girl, the effect isn't as much artistic as it is confusing, especially since we're unprepared for it.

The movie seems to come out in favor of abortion, since it depicts the Christian "Sunshine" family in a satirical light, as well as depicting the father as a hypocrite for being "pro-life" yet murdering abortion doctors. The only underlying theme appears to be that Aviva wants a baby. We have no idea why she wants a baby; the film doesn't delve into her motivations, and this is one of its shortcomings. The film merely chronicles her almost pathological attempts to have a baby and even to fall in love. Aviva doesn't know what love is and she cannot see beyond her blind desire to the fact that she can't raise a child.

I watched this film at Ned's request and I'm unsure of what the film is trying to say. It doesn't approve of the anti-abortion philosophy and it presents Aviva as very uncertain of herself and so blinded by her desire to have a baby that she ignores common sense. She wants to be a wife and mother but doesn't understand, realistically, what that entails. She's infatuated with the idea of having a baby, but we get the impression that she's definitely not mature enough to be a mother.

This is a key problem with Palindromes: it tries for profundity by being ambiguous. The ambiguity, though, never gets to the profound because it's too ambiguous. We, the audience, must fill in too many blanks. The apparently pro-life argument in the movie, represented by Aviva, is a terrible pro-life argument because Aviva is crazy. A lot of this movie doesn't make sense, either because I'm not smart enough to understand it, or because it doesn't make sense.