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Welcome to the DollhouseFirst released in the UK in 1996, Todd Solondz's Welcome To The Dollhouse remains one of the most savagely funny explorations of the pain of adolescence ever produced. Arriving in the midst of the American independent film boom of the 1990s (and the recipient of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance film festival), it was the antithesis of the standard Hollywood high school movie and opened the door for the likes of Rushmore and Napoleon Dynamite - iconoclastic movies in which the geeky, ugly duckling protagonists don't undergo miraculous transformations simply by removing their glasses and getting a decent haircut.
It's the story of Dawn Weiner (Matarazzo), a socially awkward 11-year-old junior high student. Tormented at school by her peers, ostensibly for being ugly (as one girl puts it), her lack of academic ability doesn't curry much favour with her teachers either, most of whom treat her contemptuously even though she's clearly making an effort.
Her home life is little better. The middle child in a middle class family, she's sandwiched between an equally geeky elder brother desperate to get into a good college and an egregious little sister whose cuteness has made her the family favourite. Nothing goes right for Dawn. Her attempts to ingratiate herself with the older boy she adores are painfully off the mark. Her desire to be accepted by the people she hates mean she's not averse to passing on their abuse to the one friend she has, the nerdy little boy next door.
Solondz impresses in his staunch refusal to alleviate Dawn's plight with any sentimentality. We see the whole world from her point of view, but the film doesn't set her up to be any kind of hero or martyr. Empathy is generated by the acuity of Solondz's writing (both wise and convincing) and a raw and honest performance from then-debut actress Heather Matarazzo. Solondz always wanted to make another film about Dawn; Matarazzo, perhaps understandably, did not; which is why he began his later film Palindromes with her funeral - a fate that seems entirely consistent with the realisation she comes to at the end of this film: for some people, life will never get any easier.
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