WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Sony Pictures Classics) Starring: Heather Matarazzo, Brendan Sexton Jr., Matthew Faber, Daria Kalinina, Eric Mabius, Bill Buell, Angela Pietropinto, Scott Coogan. Screenplay: Todd Solondz. Producer: Todd Solondz. Director: Todd Solondz. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), an 11-year-old resident of suburban New Jersey, is a typical seventh grader, which is to say that she's miserable. Actually, she may be more typical, which is to say more miserable. Saddled with intelligence, less than spectacular looks and a cruelly unfortunate name, Dawn lives in a daily hell in which finding a safe place to sit in the cafeteria is an ordeal and a good day is one in which she isn't called "Wienerdog" or "lesbo." Tortured at school and ignored at home, Dawn is the kind of character which in a more mainstream movie would find some inner reserve of strength or discover a heretofore unknown talent, and become loved and respected by all. Well, WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, Todd Solondz's brutally funny portrait of the nightmare that is adolescence.
It should be made perfectly clear that WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE is not, in that favored film terminology, a "coming-of-age" story. No one becomes an adult at 11, and while Solondz features such rites of passage as Dawn's first big crush and first kiss, she learns no great truths about life. No, WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE is about a much more basic truth -- that there is no more unpleasant time in a human life than the middle school years.
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE is an episodic story which follows Dawn through several weeks of her seventh-grade year, and some of those episodes are so perfectly handled that they are painful to watch. When Dawn is forced by a teacher to read an essay on "The Importance of Dignity" in front of the class, she reads quickly and almost silently, wanting nothing more than for the moment to be over and to shrink into the walls. In a later scene, Dawn plays piano for the object of her desire, her brother's garage band-mate Steve (Eric Mabius), and practically glows when he pays her an off-handed compliment. It is surprising that Solondz has captured the world of a young girl with such detail, but he is dealing with a time where the horrors of unpopularity are very similar between the genders, and where knowledge about sex is still too abstract to make the psychology of adolescence completely different. Dawn is a girl, but she didn't have to be.
The fact that she _is_ a girl simply allowed Heather Matarazzo to nail the part with a startling willingness to look completely homely, and to be less than heroic. One of the things which makes Dawn such a convincing character is that she is no less vicious than the classmates who tease her; she simply doesn't have the power over them that they have over her. When she finds someone over whom she _does_ have power, like her younger sister Missy (a distressingly adorable child perpetually wearing her pink ballet outfit and prancing about, played by Daria Kalinina) or wimpy playmate Troy (Scott Coogan), Dawn lashes out at them in exactly the same language with which she herself has been victimized. Solondz realizes that the essence of this time between childhood and adulthood is status, established through threat, insult, appearance and conformity. Dawn is petty and vindictive, and given the opportunity, it is clear that she would treat other classmates the way she is being treated. The magic of Matarazzo's performance is that we feel for her not because she is better than those who torment her, but because her fate is so familiar.
When Solondz does stumble, it is because he tries to move beyond the simple truths of Dawn's life to big-picture issues, or to give his story an artificial sense of resolution. A school bully (Brendan Sexton Jr.) with whom Dawn develops a strange friendship is given a bad home life to explain his behavior, and the plot takes an implausible turn as Dawn goes on a quest in New York. Some of the surreal comic moments (like Dawn nearly blinding a teacher with a spitball) are funny, but they pull us away from the everyday horrors of Dawn's life, which are funny only with the remove of years. The old saying that comedy is simply tragedy plus time is most certainly true when it comes to adolescence, and WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE is a winning portrait of the only story that matters when you are eleven years old and different: getting out alive.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 living dolls: 9.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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