Welcome to the Dollhouse

Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse is a funny, painful comedy about a girl whose difficulties do not make her easy to like. It is perceptive enough to deserve the discomfort it causes, though its steady supply of humiliations can become wearing. Early adolescence is the subject, and Solondz has little interest in making it look like useful preparation for a happier adulthood. The film stays close to Dawn Wiener and the small indignities of her suburban life.

Heather Matarazzo gives Dawn the awkwardness and unpleasantness that a more reassuring film might politely remove. Her performance keeps the girl’s wish to belong intelligible even when her behaviour makes sympathy harder work. We laughed at Dawn’s humiliations, then felt ashamed of ourselves. Matarazzo is the reason: she makes Dawn’s embarrassment feel personal, so that laughing can start to feel like joining in.

Solondz’s screenplay is shrewd about the demand that an unhappy child should at least be agreeable. Dawn’s less attractive qualities are essential to the film’s honesty, because being badly treated does not confer good judgement or generosity. We are allowed to find her exasperating without being invited to dismiss what happens to her. That takes careful writing, and Solondz trusts us to maintain an interest in Dawn without requiring her to earn our concern through exemplary behaviour.

Randy Drummond’s cinematography and Susan Block’s production design give the suburban setting a dispiriting familiarity. We recognise the smallness of the world in which Dawn is trying to get by, and that helps explain why its judgements matter so much to her. Melissa Toth’s costume design contributes to that same uncomfortable sense of recognition. The ordinary surroundings are effective because they make the cruelty harder to dismiss as something peculiar to these people.

Alan Oxman’s editing gives a laugh time to become uncomfortable, and the 88-minute running time helps contain material that could readily exhaust its welcome. Jill Wisoff’s music is well judged for a comedy this sour, although it is Matarazzo who does most to determine how far a moment moves us. The pacing serves her performance: we have time to register Dawn’s unhappiness even while the comedy continues to work.

The reservation is Solondz’s insistence. After enough petty humiliations, we begin to notice the writer arranging the next one, and the comedy briefly loses the messy unfairness that makes it persuasive. Dawn can seem to have been placed in a demonstration of adolescent cruelty, with too little room for an ordinary uneventful day. Matarazzo remains convincing through those stretches, but even she cannot make every new indignity feel necessary.

Coming-of-age comedies often make awkwardness something a character must shed before the audience can relax. Solondz has less interest in providing that relief, and Matarazzo makes staying with Dawn worth the discomfort. For all its sourness, the film pays her the respect of taking her seriously when she is hard to bear. Choose it for company prepared to laugh and then have an uncomfortable conversation about why.