to join him on his assignment. They have anal sex. The murder does not go as planned as, in addition to the doctor himself, the trucker (whose name is revealed to be Bob) ends up accidentally shooting the doctor's young daughter when she steps in front of the first shot. The police find Bob and Aviva both in a motel room, and a guilt-ridden Bob commits suicide by cop. The film then skips ahead several months later to Aviva back home with her parents, planning her next birthday party. During the party, she talks to her cousin, Mark, who has recently been arrested and accused of molesting his sister Missy's baby (although he denies having done it and it is loosely implied that Missy might have made it up for attention). Mark tells Aviva that there is no such thing as free will; people are what they were genetically “programmed” to be, and can never truly change. The film skips ahead to Aviva's meeting Judah, who now calls himself Otto, and they have sex again. Afterward, Aviva happily exclaims that she has a feeling that, this time, she is going to be a mother. Casting Palindromes is most notable for having eight different actors of different ages, races, and genders play a 13-year-old girl named Aviva. Although Solondz's film premiered in official competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2004, it received little other laudatory notice and remains his most polarizing with critics. With regard to Solondz's employment of multiple performers to play a single character, film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his positive review, "If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own. Consider the pathos brought to Aviva by the actress Sharon Wilkins, who is a plus-size adult black woman playing a little girl, and who creates perhaps the most convincing little girl of them all. Or Jennifer Jason Leigh, three times as old as Aviva but barely seeming her age. These individual segments are so effective that at the end of each one we know how we feel, and why. It's just that the next segment invalidates our conclusions." Contrarily, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott concluded in his negative review, "[...] Aviva's appearance changes -- from black to white, from fat to thin, from brunette to