Welcome Back to "The Dollhouse"

Growing up, all of us at some point felt like Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), the awkward seventh-grade heroine of Todd Solondz's pitch black teen comedy "Welcome to the Dollhouse." Dawn is adolescent misery personified, a constantly overlooked and unloved middle child with giant glasses, awful clothes, and a difficult personality. She has no discernible talents or good traits, and is just self-aware enough to realize it. Her mother (Angela Pietropinto) always sides with Dawn's spoiled younger sister Missy (Daria Kalinina) against her. School is torture, where Dawn is bullied relentlessly, particularly by her classmate Brandon (Brendan Sexton III), and punished whenever she tries to stand up for herself.

If you've seen enough films about teenage losers, like "Napoleon Dynamite," you know that there's a formula for these stories. Ugly ducklings get makeovers and the bullied kids stand up to and defeat their tormentors. In the better ones, the oddballs learn to carve out a measure of happiness for themselves on their own terms, resolve some small conflicts, and learn a few life lessons that suggest a better future for them is possible. "Welcome to the Dollhouse" systematically subverts every single one of these tropes. Does Dawn's classmate and fellow oddball Lolita (Victoria Davis) look like a potential friend and ally? Nope. She's another bully who hates Dawn for taking up so much of Brandon's attention. Does Dawn's only real friend, a younger boy named Ralphy (Dimitri Iervolino), prove to be her salvation? Nope. Dawn torpedoes their relationship after a bad incident, and viciously rebuffs all attempts to make up. When misfortune befalls Missy, does Dawn save the day, prompting her family to learn to treat her better? Of course not. In fact, Solondz gleefully teases us with the possibility, and then pulls the rug out from under us immediately.

Dawn turns out to be a pretty terrible person herself, reflecting much of the abuse she's suffered, and does some pretty despicable things. However, I still rooted for her wholeheartedly. I love that she fights back with everything she's got, even when she's clearly in the wrong or being petty. I love that she doesn't let reality get in the way of her aspirations, even when those aspirations are depressingly low. Her older brother Mark (Matthew Faber) puts together a garage band and convinces a popular high schooler, Steve (Eric Mabius), to be the lead singer. Steve is clearly a lout, but Dawn falls for him, and this sparks a larger rebellion in her against the rest of the world. It's easy to dislike Dawn for specific wrongs, to point out that she's a hypocrite and brat, but it's impossible not to empathize with her when the injustices against her keep getting piled higher and higher.

Heather Matarazzo, despite her subsequent successful career, is never going to look like an attractive movie star, and that's a big part of why Dawn works. This is not a young actress who is trying to play someone plain and gawky. This is a plain and gawky young actress, and a very good one, who is using what she has to really give her performance some teeth. It almost hurts to look at her at first, because she's so genuine, exactly the kind of girl who would get picked on at school, who we instinctively want to turn away from for fear of being targeted too, by association. It took me a couple of scenes to appreciate how good Matarazzo's performance is, and how fearlessly she tackles Dawn's negative traits. Her seething, compounding dissatisfaction is palapable, and when she finally does lash out in various ways, it's very satisfying.

"Welcome to the Dollhouse" was not Todd Solondz's first feature film, but it was the first to show the sensibility that would come to define his work. There's the constant casual cruelty, the underdeveloped sexual crudeness, the repulsive yet sympathetic characters, and the inane facades of suburban normality. The humor is mean to the point that we know we should feel bad for laughing - at Ralphy getting his heart crushed, for instance - but it's very hard not to. What really struck me here was how well Solondz captured the emotional reality of Dawn's situation, the anger and resentment that are impossible to put a positive spin on. In his later films like "Happiness" and "Storytelling," he would push the envelope further, digging into the lives of miserable adults screwed up beyond repair.

"Welcome to the Dollhouse" and its heroine still retains a little hope, a possibility that Dawn will survive long enough to grow up and become part of the crummy world on her own terms, instead of always being its victim. There are small moments that hint at things the film doesn't say outright: that Dawn really does love Missy deep down, that Mark was once in Dawn's position, and that their father is not a healthy man. The sentiment is almost invisible, but there's still enough of it there that the film doesn't feel too hopelessly cynical and dark - and that's probably why it remains one of Solondz's most popular and resonant films.
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