Hell Hath No Fury Like Junior High in New Jersey

Welcome to the Dollhouse

directed by Todd Solondz at Kendall Square Cinema

Todd Solondz's celebrated new film "Welcome to the Dollhouse" brings a tight focus to a circle of hell never before examined on the silver screen--junior high. With relentless detail, Solondz recalls a world of harlequin posters, crop tops, and the first birthday parties where you didn't invite everyone in the class. But the film falters when Solondz pans out, stretches the plot, and attempts to shift from brutal realism to the much more abstract genre of farce.

Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo) is the champion of the geeks at Ben Franklin Junior High school in a New Jersey suburb--even the other nerds call her by her inevitable moniker "wiener dog." Home is no refuge for Dawn. Her mother (Angela Pietropinto), presumably the same woman who inflicts pink and purple one-piece feety-pajamas on a twelve year old girl, bullies poor Dawn, even making her tear down the "Special People Clubhouse." Little sister Missy (Daria Kalinina) steals the spotlight, pirouetting around the font yard in a tutu, and big brother Mark (Matthew Faber) plays clarinet in a nerdy garage band-- The Quadratics--and plots his collegiate escape.

Solondz evokes the hellishness of Dawn's experiences through the use of killer details. When Dawn develops a crush on the town hunk and lead singer of her brother's band (Eric Mabius), her attempts to dance along to his crooning while sitting on a parked car epitomizes her utter awkwardness. The song written to celebrate the Wiener parents' anniversary is a tribute to suburban mediocrity, and the last shot of the film, which has Dawn singing her school anthem, bewilderedly, along with a busload of her classmates/tormentors, evokes the inevitability of Dawn's niche in the junior high universe: for every cheerleader, punk, and student council president, there needs to be a wiener dog.

Solondz' film is not just a nostalgic tribute to suburbs or even geekiness. At times he brings a malevolent darkness to "Dollhouse" which complements well the more mundane perversions of junior high life. Brandon McCarthy (Bredan Sexton Jr), a thug in Dawn's class, shows his affection for the hapless Dawn by making a variety of dates with her on which, he informs her ahead of time, he will rape her. It's a dangerous move on Solondz's part, but within the context of the film the threat of rape becomes so unreal, so divorced from the reality of rape or even sex that it makes the audience experience the confusion of very early adolescence in which terms like these seem an unknowable code of adulthood rather than real entities to be grappled with.

Luckily Solondz' cast is up to the challenge of this loaded material. Matarazzo's performance is seamless, and it seems inconceivable that she could be anything other than the squinting, mouthbreathing girl she portrays. Her dead-pan performance means that her Dawn is tough, not easily crushed by the blows she keeps facing. The resiliency of the developing spirit is thus a tacit message of the film. Bredan Sexton Jr brings out the tender helplessness of a character that could otherwise seem downright evil, while not overplaying the "sensitive" card. Both these young actors deserve praise for the delicate, sophisticated balance and naturalism they bring to their roles, especially when juxtaposed against a supporting cast of cartoon characters.

Unfortunately for "Dollhouse", Solondz cannot achieve this same balance in his script. Towards the end of the movie, "Dollhouse" becomes weighted down by a heavyhanded serving of would-be farce. Missy is kidnapped and imprisoned under a shuffle-board court, Dawn runs away to Times Square to look at her, and the father is rushed to the hospital with the nervous breakdown. The strictly mundane world of "Dollhouse" cannot expand fast enough to support such broad, blowsy strokes.

Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse" is still one of the most imaginative comedies in the theaters today, a carefully observed tour-de-force of detail and character sketch that will seem eerily familiar to those of us who served our time in suburban public schools. The fact that Solondz is a new filmmaker-- "Dollhouse" received the highest possible prize at this year's Sundance film festival-- gives hopes that the unevenness of this film will balance out into a smooth, steady vision in future films.