Welcome To The Dollhouse

English/88 Minutes/1995/Rated R

“Who ever told you to fight back?” - Mrs. Weiner

“Welcome to the Dollhouse” was Todd Solondz first movie and while it is well made and earnest it never achieves the emotionally devastating power of his later works. Having seen some of Solondz's other films (Happiness and Storytelling) I found this one to be his least engaging and most readily digestible. There are themes he would later revisit (hatred of younger siblings, child abuse and kidnapping) but here they are in a much more reserved form.

In “Dollhouse” we find young Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo) who is going through the hell which is junior high. She is neither popular nor attractive and is subject to some pretty far out abuse (a girl demands she take a shit while she watches, a boy threatens to rape her). The tone seems to be mixed, trying to be blackly comic but not always getting the tone right. For the most part though Solndz film is spot on.

The family dynamic shows Dawn stuck between an overachieving older brother, Mark (Matthew Faber), and sickeningly sweet baby sister Missy (played by Daria Kalinina in eternal tutu). Her father is a non-entity in the house wanting only peace and quiet while her mother is manipulative and domineering. She is estranged from her elder daughter, praising instead her brother and doting on her little sister. Dawn is supposed to play the silent middle role, always acquiescing to everyone else's needs.

Dawn is reaching an age where she is beginning to express herself and each time she attempts to carve out a place to stand she finds that she is pushed away. Solndz reminds us of what it was like to be 12 or 13 and through Dawn we can experience it all again, for better and worse. It is to both Matarazzo and Solndz's credit that we feel a bittersweet knowing. For we know what the results of many of Dawn's experiments will be.

We see Dawn in what is probably her first crush on an older man (Eric Mabius) and we share her disappointment when she finds he already has a girlfriend. We see her fumbling romance with a boy who is a different kind of outcast as they find a common ground. We see the moments when she learns, as we all did, the painful truths of life and what it means to know yourself.

I am reminded of one particular scene where Dawn is asked to write an essay on dignity after an embarrassing debacle in detention. Her essay shows she has no understanding of the word means but throughout the film in her little rebellions and assertions of self (even where they are passive-aggressive), we find that she has a stubbornness, a quiet dignity that she does not know she has.

Her life changes when she has a run in with one of the school's bullies, Brandon (Brenden Sexton Jr.). After Dawn makes fun of him one day he tells her that he will rape her after school. She shows up, he has a knife, and we are not sure where this will lead. This is, I think, Solndz only real mistake as the shift in subject matter without a shift in tone makes for a sort of cognitive dissonance. Once we learn more about Brandon it makes sense but it is a jarring way to introduce someone.

The surprising thing is that Brandon is not a beast. In a performance that rival's Matarazzo's, Sexton makes Brandon a frightening aggressor only to have our sympathy once he opens himself to Dawn. As with most bullies, we find that he is just as sad as those he abuses. He comes close to stealing the show with his honesty and vulnerability.

But the story belongs to Dawn and how she deals with the difficulty of being a young girl. By the end we see that she has lost some of her shine, a little tarnish on her tiara. Even as she is the protagonist (in the literal sense) her forays into the world and into identity are spurned and ground down at every turn. In what could have been a turning point scene for Dawn in different film she does not assert herself, merely stands there quietly crying. I so wanted her to stand up and say how she really felt. But this is not that kind of movie.

In the end, Dawn realizes that she will never be first in her family's affection, she has learned a little of what a broken heart will be. The closing shot implies to me that nothing has changed for Dawn except that she has found she can bear more suffering than she thought. For Dawn wants desperately to be loved and praised. She doesn't just want to be popular or “normal (which is the worst word in any language),” she wants to be noticed by boys, by her family, by her peers. She wants to find her place in the world as we all do and like the rest of us she is still looking. Recommended.

Rated R for Language