"Welcome to the Dollhouse"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                               July 6, 1996


   The film that opened at the Tampa Theater last night, "Welcome
to the Dollhouse" written and directed by Todd Solondz garnered a
lot of acclaim on the independent film festival circuit,
especially at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.  It's
supposed to be the indy hit of the season.  But I, for one,
didn't care for it very much.

   It's a dark, not very funny comedy about the horrors of life
in junior high school, particularly as they beset twelve-year-old
Dawn Wiener (played by Heather Matarazzo), an unpopular middle
child in a middle class family, in some unnamed middle New Jersey
suburb.  In trying to think what the award givers found to admire
in this film, I can only surmise that it is Solondz skill in
creating and sustaining the overall satiric  tone of the film
both in visual and narrative terms.  The whole thing feels as
though you're looking, metaphorically, through a slightly
distorting lens that exaggerates the ugliness, the absurdity, the
meanness of everything and everybody. Sustaining the tone is not
an easy thing to accomplish and if that was one of Solandz's
goals, he achieved it.  But that may not be enough to sustain
adult audience interest in a feature length film.

    The film does, early on, zero right in on the horrors of
being in the seventh grade and elicit some chuckles of
recognition of how seventh graders behave and the what a pit a
public junior high school can be.  And it does a good job of
placing Dawn at the bottom of the pecking order in a suburban
family where the father is more or less absent, the mother is
mostly hysterical, the oldest child is a nerdy brother whose sole
motivating factor is whether something will look good on his
college entrance application and the youngest child is a cloying,
hyperfeminine, ballerina whom everyone thinks is adorable.  Dawn
is neither smart like her brother or cute like her sister and she
is the object of virtually everyone's scorn or indifference.

    The only film I know that is even remotely similar to this
orgy of dysfunctional suburbia is Jane Campion's very early short
film called "A Girl's Own Story."  Thinking about this film in
contrast to that one helped me to sort out what I think is wrong
with this one.  First of all, Campion made her film when she was
still a teenager and it was a remarkable achievement in one so
young.  She was also close enough to her material to bring a kind
of truth to the subject that an older filmmaker might not be able
to achieve.  I don't know anything about Solondz, but my guess is
that he's probably in his twenties, so he doesn't get any points
for Campionesque precociousness.  By choosing to make a feature
length film rather than a short film, he's found himself in the
predicament of having to stretch out his limited ideas further
than they really warrant.  And, perhaps in the hubris of youth,
he has taken on a huge challenge of crossing the gender lines in
writing his main character--a challenge that, in the end, he is
unable to deliver on.  If he had chosen to write about a boy
presumably he would have built upon his own junior high school
experiences.  In fact, the main male character in the film,
Brandon McCarthy (Brendan Sexton, Jr.) is much more successfully
realized as a character than Dawn is.  But Solondz chose a twelve
year old girl as his central character, and in the end I came
away thinking that he doesn't really have a clue what life is
like for a seventh grade girl.  The character of Dawn is
contrived lacks the ring of bizarre truth that Campion's girls
had.  Dawn remains a caricature of a character (as all the
characters are supposed to be) but unlike  the Brandon character,
we never see behind or beyond the caricature to what she might
really be feeling.  Oh yes, there's a dream sequence that's
supposed to do this, but it's as superficial and contrived as the
rest of her characterization, so it doesn't do the job.  If the
main character in your film never connects with your audience at
any level, you're in trouble.  And a character as unrelievedly
unattractive as Dawn can't even evoke much pity, let alone
empathy from the audience if there's no ring to truth anywhere in
her realization.

   So, while I think that Todd Solondz is a pretty accomplished
director, I think it's his screenwriter hat that failed him in
this film.  Perhaps next time he'll find a collaborator or he'll
find it in himself to write a better screenplay.

     For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez
McAlister on Women and Film.
   Copyright 1996 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.