Todd Solondz, nerd cinema pioneer

Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an adult Aviva.

If Todd Solondz were to direct Meet the Parents 3 or a sweet high-school romcom, there's little likelihood he would ever become a well-liked American film-maker.

There's something inescapably abrasive about Solondz' world view that rubs people up the wrong way, no matter how much critical approval he wins.

I once sat next to an American journalist at a festival premiere of a Solondz film. Even as the opening credits rolled, my neighbour cradled his head and moaned, "God, I hate this guy. God, I hate him so much."

Solondz specialises in making his viewers squirm. His acidic moral comedies do not make pleasant viewing, because they are not about pleasant people or a pleasant society. His first successful film, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), was about a gawky teenage girl growing up - like Solondz himself - in the New Jersey suburbs, and relentlessly humiliated by everyone around her. Its follow-up, Happiness (1998), portrayed a gallery of misfits, all behaving wretchedly towards each other. Its most notorious figure, a paedophile dentist who is also a proud suburban father, may have been the most alarmingly spectacular aspect of the film's will to disturb, but even he was just one among an embittered crowd of loners, narcissists and emotional sado-masochists.

People loathed Happiness because they felt Solondz was, behind the dispassionate comedy, moralising. One critic called it "a masturbatory fantasy about how miserable all the phonies around Solondz must be". But many more must have hated the film because they felt that the mirror Solondz was holding up to society was not distorting, but all too accurate.

"I'm not interested in showing people as simply virtuous or noble, it's people's flaws that for me are revelatory about human behaviour. I find myself incapable of celebrating the wonderfulness of humanity, but it's not that I'm trying to indict and say that we're terrible either. If I can get at certain truths about who we are, that is a goal I have."

His new film Palindromes is certain to make him more enemies, but it also confirms that he is one of the most audacious and thoughtful of current American film-makers.

Palindromes is the story of 12-year-old Aviva, who dreams of having a baby. When she becomes pregnant, her middle-class, liberal mother (Ellen Barkin) insists she has an abortion.

Aviva heads out in search of her destiny. What makes her tale so disconcerting is that the heroine is played by seven different actors - four teenage girls, a 6-year-old girl, one 12-year-old boy, and two adults: Jennifer Jason Leigh and an exceptionally large black woman named Sharon Wilkins.

The idea, says Solondz, was to block off any possibility of reassuring identification with a protagonist we can root for. "My fear was that it would be simply alienating. The aim was that it would be more affecting, the cumulative effect of all these people having played this role."

All the Avivas, he explains, have different functions.

Sharon Wilkins, he says, "is really Gulliver surrounded by the Lilliputians", and when we reach Jennifer Jason Leigh at the end of the film, "you feel you can read off Jennifer's face that she's lived a life, although she's still 12 years old".

On one level, Palindromes is a characteristic Solondz panorama of human vanity and callousness, but it's also a political film, addressing both the Christian Right and contemporary American attitudes to abortion (including homicidal attitudes to abortionists).

At one point, Aviva takes refuge with Mama Sunshine, a fundamentalist figure who presides over an adopted family of disabled children, all-singing, dancing, happy-clappy God-botherers. What's so unsettling about their presentation is that you realise that Solondz might for once not be lampooning these people, but presenting their squeaky clean world as a genuine oasis of tenderness. "It's a paradise of sorts, in the sense of love and sharing - all you could want for a child is there. But because we have certain prejudices, or because people are suspicious of me, and because there's always beckoning a satirical thrust regardless of where I am, people are going to think it's a source of mockery and ridicule - an easy enough target if you come from the East Coast."

Solondz, now in his mid-40s, was born in New Jersey, in a Jewish home that was kosher but not especially religious.

His first film, Fear, Anxiety and Depression (1989), is such a painful topic to him that he omits it from his official CV. "It's a kindness if you never view this first feature - it was ill-conceived and ill-begotten for many different reasons."

Some critics have accused Solondz of running a freakshow, displaying misfits both emotional and physical for our amusement. He insists he's only making films about the type of people who interest him.

"I'm more taken by people that others may characterise as ugly or unattractive; I don't see them that way. I'm somewhat impervious to a lot of the conventional charms."

No wonder this is the man who has pioneered what could be termed "nerd" or "loser" cinema.

- INDEPENDENT