Writer/director/producer Todd Solondz beautifully captures the horrors of being a pudgy, blank-faced 11-year-old in thick glasses and ghastly floral prints, sentenced to life in a relentlessly tacky New Jersey suburb. Humiliation after humiliation befalls the hapless Dawn, whose efforts to fight back just lead to further humiliation. Depending on how much emotional distance you've put between yourself and the seventh grade, however, Welcome to the Dollhouse is darkly hilarious. There's Dawn's consuming passion for the long-haired, low-talent guitarist in her brother's band (she makes an altar for him). Or her twisted interactions with a class bully (Brendan Sexton, Jr.), who tells Dawn to meet him at 3 o'clock so he can rape her; they meet and he inquires thoughtfully about her curfew and confides his family problems. Or Dawn standing over her sleeping sister with a hammer.

Does Dawn save the day by shining through with a talent that only she has? Only in her dreams. With his attention to detail, and his unwillingness to make Dawn's life bearable for us, Solondz continually reminds us that this is not Hollywood -- it's Jersey. Get real.

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An overnight sensation first at the Toronto film festival, then at Sundance, Welcome to the Dollhouse, a wonderful new independent film written and directed by 36-year old Todd Solondz, has just opened commercially. If you have been disappointed (as I have) by such recent indy efforts as I Shot Andy Warhol and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, Welcome to the Dollhouse will go a long way to compensate, and then some.

Welcome to the Dollhouse is the story of 11-year old Dawn Wiener, as she suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous humiliation attendant to a hellish 7th grade in suburban New Jersey. Let's face it, it would be kind to call Dawn awkward and geeky, a fact not in the least bit lost on her schoolmates, who tease and taunt her in ways that are sometimes out and out brutal. And there is no consolation to be found on the home front. Mr. and Mrs. Wiener are emotionally absent for Dawn, much more intent on lavishing their praise and attention on her younger sister Missy (Daria Kalinina) who, clad in her ballerina Tu-Tu, pirouettes her way through the film with such nauseating cuteness that you want to kill her. It's a thought that, in one powerful sequence, occurs to Dawn as well. Then, there's Mark (Matthew Faber), the older brother. At one point described as "The king of the nerds," he divides his time neatly between his computer and his rock band (in which he plays clarinet!), and early on, viewers are treated to a rendition of the Stones' Satisfaction that is so bad, it will have you rolling in the aisles. The musical quality of the band takes a definitive turn for the better when older and longer- haired teenage heart-throb Steve (Eric Mabius) is recruited as the new lead singer. Dawn is instantly smitten, but of course, her feelings aren't even remotely reciprocated.

The crux of Welcome to the Dollhouse, however, is the dark and complex relationship which develops between Dawn and the school bully Brandon McCarthy (Brendan Sexton, Jr.). Brandon starts out as the stock bully from the wrong side of the track, given to such monstrous behavior as threatening Dawn with "Rape." I place this in quotes because it is one of the film's major notions that children appropriate adult language of violence, use it without fully understanding the true import of what they're saying, and occasionally even transform it (unintentionally and hence very poignantly) into meaning something very near the opposite. The would-be "rape" scene is arguably the most fascinating and touching scene in the film, and the best scene of its kind in any American film I can recall about children. Suffice it to say nothing remotely approaching a rape actually occurs. Quite the contrary, points of commonality are subtly and tentatively formed between this seemingly unlikely pair based on their shared feelings of intense alienation and hurt.

Welcome to the Dollhouse is ostensibly a comedy and many, many moments will make you laugh. But there are just as many moments that will make you shiver, for Mr. Solondz does not shy away from those moments of humiliation and pain which we all know are so much a part of growing up. The young actors are amazing, and the adults are not bad either, though it is in the nature of this kind of film that they tend slightly towards caricature. But what is most rare and admirable is Mr. Solondz's unrelenting honesty and assiduous avoidance of cutesiness and sentimentality. I can't wait to see his future work. If Welcome to the Dollhouse is any indication, Todd Solondz is someone to watch closely.

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Welcome to the Dollhouse
Reviewed by Roger Ebert

``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' remembers with brutal and unforgiving accuracy the hell of junior high school. Many movies reconstruct those years as a sort of adolescent paradise; it's a shock, watching this film, to remember how cruel kids can be to one another, and how deeply the wounds cut.

I can recall today with perfect accuracy the names and faces of 11-year-olds who made my life miserable. If I met them today, so many years later, would I forgive and forget? Not a chance. I still hate them. Was I also cruel? Did I have my own victims? Strange, but I can't remember...

``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' stars Heather Matarazzo in a dead-on performance as Dawn Wiener, an unpopular seventh-grader whose glasses are wrong, whose hair is wrong, whose complexion is wrong, whose clothes are wrong, and who is as gawky and geeky as it is humanly possible to be. The first time we see her, she's performing one of the most painful rituals in life: walking through the school cafeteria with a loaded tray, trying to choose a table. Her objective is to sit with students as far up the school social scale as she dares, without being rejected. ``Can I sit here?'' she asks, regarding an empty space. ``Someone barfed there third period,'' she's informed.

Because Dawn's family name is Wiener, she is inevitably known as ``Wiener Dog'' in school (I was ``Eggbert''). She is also known as ``Lesbo'' and ``Stupid,'' and when she asks a classmate why she hates her, she gets a refreshingly direct answer: ``You're ugly.'' She isn't ugly, simply unformed in that in-between way, but she projects the vibes of a potential victim, and there are always going to be sadists whose antennae lead them straight to their targets. Inevitably, her only friend in school is a boy much smaller than she is, who is regularly beaten up and called a ``faggot.''

Do the lesbo and faggot words indicate homophobia? Not necessarily. Kids that age are fascinated by sex and terrified by their own ignorance, so they attack others to assert self-confidence. Any difference at all, real or imaginary, makes someone a target. What qualifies as a difference? Anything you are that I am not, or that I fear becoming.

But I'm making ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' sound like some sort of grim sociological study, and in fact it's a funny, intensely entertaining film: intense, because it focuses so mercilessly on the behavior of its characters that we are forced to confront both the comedy and the pain.

Dawn lives in a split-level house with an older brother who is a nerd, and a younger sister who is a ballerina. Her parents claim they love all of their children equally. They are lying. Her brother Mark (Matthew Faber) is focused on getting into a good college, and everything he does is planned to enrich his application. He starts a garage band, and recruits a popular student named Steve (Eric Mabius) as his lead singer. Steve is a mature, handsome hunk, and Dawn gets weak-kneed just looking at him. He's the kind of guy who will break a woman's heart just for the pleasure of hearing it snap, but of course Dawn's heart is far beneath his attention. Nor is he much interested in the band (``That doesn't sound much like `Satisfaction,''' he notes, after a clarinet passage by Mark.)

Dawn is very badly informed about sex, but willing to learn. She will essentially do anything for Steve, who can't be bothered; there is a well-written scene in which she has him alone at home and plies him with junk food.

Meanwhile, she's tormented by Brandon (Brendan Sexton Jr.), who makes her life miserable. Dawn is smart enough to sense or guess that boys Brandon's age often express affection through hostility, and she puts up with him because he's essentially the only game in school. In one of the movie's best scenes (which works only because it is perfectly written, acted and understood), Brandon actually makes a date with her to ``rape'' her, and she turns up for it. Of course nothing resembling rape takes place, although I'm not sure whether Brandon knows that.

Scene after scene, ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' piles on its details, re-creating the acute daily misery of being an unpopular adolescent and remembering, too, how resilient a girl like Dawn can be--how self-absorbed, how hopeful, how philosophical, how enduring. Dawn's revenge, we hope, is that someday she will be rich, famous and admired, while the snotty little cheerleaders who persecuted her will have been sucked into the primeval slime of the miserable lives they deserve.

``Welcome to the Dollhouse,'' which won the grand prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, is a first film for its writer-director, Todd Solondz. He shows the kind of unrelenting attention to detail that is the key to satire. It isn't the big picture that matters to a girl like Dawn, but the details: how she looks today in the mirror, and how this dress looks, and what small hopeful signs might have been sighted, or imagined, on the far emotional horizon. If you can see this movie without making a mental hit list of the kids who made your 11th year a torment, then you are kinder, or luckier, than me.

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

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