“Their Christianity seems worthy of celebration…”

Last updated on: September 4, 2012 at 9:49 am by Jeffrey Overstreet

“Their Christianity seems worthy of celebration…” 2012-09-04T09:49:21-06:00 Jeffrey Overstreet

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An interesting passage in J.R. Jones’s review of Todd Solondz’s Palindromes:

Solondz has invoked The Wizard of Oz when talking about the theme of Palindromes — there’s no place like home — but Mama and Bo Sunshine’s adopted family is more like the Island of Misfit Toys: most of the children suffer from some congenital affliction, from blindness to missing limbs to Down syndrome. Yet the family is so perfectly loving that for Aviva their home is a paradise. The Sunshines serve as a rebuke not only to her chilly mother but also to Solondz’s mostly left-leaning core audience, who might be tempted to dismiss born-again Christians as idiots.

To some extent the Sunshines are idiots: their breakfast banquet includes heaping platters of “freedom toast,” and the kids collaborate on a Christian rock act called the Sunshine Singers, with prerecorded dance tracks to back their soaring harmonies and synchronized dance moves. Their production numbers are both funny and acutely uncomfortable: casting actors with real disabilities is nothing new, but collecting them into a horrendously tacky showbiz exercise can’t help bringing to mind Tod Browning’s 1932 circus story Freaks. I was a bit ashamed of myself for laughing — a combination of feelings that Solondz courts aggressively, though he avoids any taint of exploitation through his genuine tenderness toward the children. They’re so buoyant, so kind, and so accepting of one another that their Christianity seems worthy of celebration, and the thought of aborting any one of them, as Aviva’s mother surely would have, seems monstrous. It’s the most daring and emotionally complex joke of Solondz’s career, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

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Christianity on the Big Screen

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