Humanity Hallows Issue 5 Out Now
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By Christopher Witty
Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz’s 1996 feature debut is a blacker than jet-black comedy which follows the tribulations of Dawn Wiener, beautifully played by Heather Matarazzo. As an eleven-year-old outcast coming to terms with the onset of puberty, she suffers the taunts of her fellow class-mates within the hostile environment of junior high, primarily from the equally outcast Brandon, who hides his affection for Dawn behind psychological and physical bullying. Her only friend is Ralphy, who is two years her junior, and her parents compare her unfavourably to her little sister, Misty, whom they lavish with attention at every turn. She is obsessed with high school senior Steve Rodgers, who is so self-absorbed that he is hopelessly unaware of his lack of talent as singer/guitarist in her brother’s equally inept garage band.
On paper, this basic premise could be any number of coming-of-age films and, in the hands of a mainstream film-maker, it could have quite easily turned into a cliché-ridden, over sentimental study of adolescence. Todd Solondz, however, is as far removed from being a mainstream film-maker as you can get, as his follow-up film Happiness proved. Independently produced, Welcome to the Dollhouse steers clear of the formulaic, over-sanitised portrayals of high school life depicted in the films of John Hughes (God rest his soul). Here, adolescent sexual awakening is not dealt with to an accompanying 80s feel-good song; rather, it is shown as ugly, awkward and confused. The students in the school don’t yet fully understand how to act on their impulses, so they resort to degrading terms such as ‘faggot’, ‘Wiener dog’ and, in one of the more shocking episodes of the film, threats of sexual violence. Their inability to put a name to their feelings results in anger and humiliation.
How, then, does a film as dark as this still manage to be funny? Simple. Almost everybody, at some time in their pre-teen or teenage years, has either been the perpetrator or the victim of such behaviour, and it is to Solondz’s credit that he forces his audience to not only observe his characters’ behaviour, but simultaneously dares them to identify with at least one of them on some level, which is the basis of all good comedy writing.
This is Heather Matarazzo’s film all the way through, with her either appearing in almost every frame or, when she isn’t, her point of view is. Having said that, the supporting players are faultless: Brendon Sexton, Jr. plays Brandon as though he is a coiled spring, a sociopath whose own emotionally charged hormones dictate the way he acts; Dawn’s mother, played by Angela Pietropinto, is so hell-bent on projecting the image of an all-American suburbanite that she is even more angst-ridden than her daughter, while Dawn’s dad spends most of the film in a stupor which results in a near-breakdown.
With a superb turn in the plot that exposes the seedy underbelly of suburban Americana and a closing, heart-wrenching shot that sums up Dawn’s alienation in less than a minute, Welcome to the Dollhouse will stay with you for a while. It’s sort of like a friend who dares to say what everyone else is thinking and because of, or despite, that, you like to have them around.
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