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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Welcome to the Dollhouse: Abandon all hope ...

By David Walsh
29 July 1996

Todd Solondz, in his Welcome to the Dollhouse, presents the plight of Dawn Wiener, a junior high school student in suburban New Jersey. The time is not precisely the present. The film takes place in the eternal Now of the pre-adolescent, for whom 10 minutes of psychic torment lasts at least a lifetime.

On the surface, Dawn (the remarkable Heather Matarazzo) has very little going for her. She wears thick glasses, dresses unattractively, possesses few, if any, of the necessary social graces. She is neither academically accomplished nor conventionally pretty. Her older brother has a single goal, to "get into a good college." He weighs each course of action according to its potential value on a future resume. Her younger sister, named Missy, spends much of the film prancing about in a pink tutu. Excessively sweet and lovely, at least in front of adults, she is a perpetual thorn in Dawn's side.

Her parents are perfectly well-intentioned, if harassed and slightly selfish, middle class people. They don't mean to persecute Dawn, it simply works out that way, and they haven't the strength of character to resist the inevitable. In any case, the story begins at the point at which their influence over their eldest daughter, be it for good or ill, ceases to be decisive.

Welcome to the Dollhouse is not an attempt to reproduce the facts of a life. It is an account of the experiencing of those facts. If the world seems to be in league against Dawn, it is no doubt the way she perceives things. Insensitive or vindictive teachers and school officials persecute her. Bullies, of both sexes, pick on her. Suffering endless indignities, she knows no peace at home or school.

Solondz, to his credit, provides some surprises. Dawn's chief tormentor is a budding "juvenile delinquent." After she rats on him to the school authorities for some abuse or other, he threatens her with retribution. "At three o'clock, I'm going to rape you." One expects a violent or humiliating outcome. Instead he walks with her to an abandoned lot and the two have a talk. The kid obviously has feelings for Dawn, an outcast like himself. He has difficulty expressing his needs in anything other than brutal and threatening language.

Later the boy is unjustly accused of dealing drugs and, faced with the threat of reform school, flees to New York City. If it were only for the scene in which Dawn visits his impoverished household just before he takes off, Welcome to the Dollhouse would stand out among contemporary American films.

Desire has been awakened in Dawn--in fact, the film is about the dawn of desire and its consequences--and it drives her on. She develops an impossible crush on the most handsome, popular boy in her brother's high school, a would-be rock'n'roll star. She is nothing if not dogged in her determination to win his attentions. This only leads to new disappointments, of course, but she somehow struggles on.

In the film's final scene, Dawn is aboard a bus bound for Disneyland as part of a school singing group. While the rest of the girls are singing in cheery, but undistinguished unison, Dawn's voice is heard apart from the rest, musically a little uncertain, but sturdily independent. Solondz's implication seems to be that something very particular will come of all this misery and thwarted desire, that this has been the Portrait of the Artist as a junior high school student.

The film's strengths include its steady, unsentimental gaze, its obvious concern for the fate of its characters, its critical treatment of a variety of institutions. Moreover, Solondz makes the effort--in opposition to today's conventional wisdom--to link emotional to economic deprivation.

In a peculiar fashion, however, the very strength of the filmmaker's outrage at the injustices being committed against his young heroine weakens his work. To put it bluntly, a tone of self-pity occasionally makes itself felt. When Welcome to the Dollhouse neatly divides its world into helpless victim and her victimizers it loses some of its strength. At such moments one almost feels the film pulled toward a tiny point located offscreen, perhaps in the film-maker's brain. Everything and everyone becomes distorted, monstrous, out of proportion. These are middle class people trying to get by without much to go on, after all, not a band of sadists.

The film's strongest moments occur when Solondz momentarily places in the background the (genuine) injuries that Dawn suffers, and perhaps his own traumatic memories, and trains his camera, more or less objectively, on other people's difficulties or "normal" family life. In the scenes of the latter, at the dining table, in the basement "rec" room, the physical and emotional details are exact. When no one is being monstrous to Dawn, the real source of the inhumanity of the situation, which lies outside the individuals' motives and obsessions, is thrown into clearer relief.