WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: See it. Screamingly, painfully funny, perfectly observed and acted gem about the cruelties of being at the bottom of the social heap in school. Todd Solondz's extremely promising first movie doesn't just cut deep; it bites.
Everyone needs someone to hate. We all remember the hated ones in junior high school: the kids with too-big glasses, the nerds, the fat kids, the stammerers, the terminally shy, the scrawny. Dawn Wiener (played perfectly by Heather Matarazzo) is like an acrostic of all of the above. She's a smart but hopelessly unopoular girl in seventh grade, with all the odds stacked against her. The other kids slam her with epithets like "wiener-dog" and "lesbo". Her locker is the only one with graffiti on it. The teachers always punish her instead of her tormentors.
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE is about Dawn's torment, but it's not so much depressing an enragingly funny. It finds the blackest imaginable humor in its story and nurses it thoroughly. Remember being lectured by the principal while over his shoulder, through the office window, your enemies are giving you the finger? Or trying to return a spitball to the class bully and hitting a teacher in the face instead? Or delivering a speech in front of the whole school, only to be drowned out by everyone's teasing?
Things are no better for Dawn at home. Her younger sister is a ballerina, a darling of the family. Her smarter older brother just gets what he can out of the family (his unilateral piece of advice is to do what'll look good on your college resume). Her parents are hypocritical in the way they treat their children. Dawn's short-shrifted constantly, with both sweet and harsh words. At dinner we get lines like, "Dawn, you don't leave this table until you tell your sister that you love her!" Dawn refuses. Cut to Dawn, still at the dinner table hours later.
Dawn has a younger friend she later abandons, a frail little kid who the other boys call a "fag". Like all other kids that age, Dawn is impossibly curious about sex, and manages to ask all the (hilariously) wrong questions. She forms a crush on the lead singer of a band that her brother assembles (another cynical move on his part to get something for his college resume), but he's years older and has ambitions about being Jim Morrison. He might as well be from Saturn. Even worse, she becomes an object of torment/affection for the predatory Brandon (Brendan Sexton, Jr.).
One of the best scenes in the movie has Brandon calling up Dawn and threatening to rape her. Dawn at first resists, but then decides to try going along with it. She's that desperate for human contact. What happens next is difficult to describe, but I was holding my breath during the whole thing, because I have never seen a movie pull off a scene so hazardous and dead-on real.
DOLLHOUSE could have fallen apart in half a hundred ways, but both Solontz and the actors involved are exactly right in the notes they hit. Heather as Dawn is the best of the bunch, because she has the tough job of trying to make Dawn likeable even when she's sullen and fed up with being victimized, and taking revenge on random passers-by in unpleasant little ways. It all works.
I laughed a lot during DOLLHOUSE, both because it was funny and because it was incredibly painful. We laugh, that we may not cry. After the credits, I realized I had summoned back up the names and faces of a whole roll-call's worth of tormentors during the film -- kids whose sole reason for life seemed to be found in tormenting me. WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE brought all that anger flooding back to the surface, when survival meant getting the hell out of the school and getting home before your enemies showed up.
I had one regular junior high school tormentor, whose name I don't even recall now. But I do remember arranging things so that I could just grab my knapsack and run out of the front of the building as fast as possible, to avoid getting the stuffing beat out of my by him. The man he became is, I hope, a totally different person, but do I ever remember the bully.
Four out of four clubhouses.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device...
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