Todd Solondz makes suburban humiliation funny without making the people enduring it agreeable. We rate him highly for taking difficult people seriously, though he sometimes arranges their misery too neatly.
Fi1m perspective
Dawn Wiener is unhappy, badly treated and often exasperating, and Todd Solondz lets all three facts remain on screen together. In Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), he keeps returning to the everyday humiliations of suburban adolescence without promising that they will build character. We laughed uneasily at Heather Matarazzo's Dawn because she makes the girl's hurt apparent without softening her less agreeable behaviour. It is a perceptive, funny film, and a strong place to begin with a director whose care for people is easy to mistake for dislike.
The important turn comes after Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989), his first feature, and several years away from filmmaking. The return with Welcome to the Dollhouse establishes his reputation for unsentimental accounts of suburban adolescence. In Happiness (1998), that attention extends to an ensemble and more disturbing sexual behaviour. His deadpan style gives little encouragement to relax when a scene becomes funny; the people remain unhappy, and laughter does not necessarily make them any easier to understand.
Later films change the way he organises these unhappy lives. Storytelling (2001) divides its material into two parts; Palindromes (2005) casts several actresses as one character. Wiener-Dog (2016) follows a dog through a succession of dysfunctional lives and returns to Dawn Wiener. He keeps his attention on people who struggle to belong.
With Matarazzo, the writing has an actor who can keep Dawn convincing when the indignities begin to look arranged. Solondz gives her no obligation to be generous simply because she has suffered, and this is where the film earns our concern. The trouble comes when he keeps providing another humiliation after the point has been made. We start to notice how little opportunity Dawn has for a day in which nothing especially awful happens. Begin with Welcome to the Dollhouse, preferably with company prepared to find the same girl funny, irritating and worth caring about.
Biography
Todd Solondz is an American filmmaker and playwright. He directed, wrote and produced the film Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996). His other directed and written features include Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001), Palindromes (2005), Life During Wartime (2010), Dark Horse (2012) and Wiener-Dog (2016).
Solondz studied English at Yale University and attended New York University’s Master of Fine Arts programme in film and television. Earlier in his career he taught English as a second language to Russian immigrants in New York City. Welcome to the Dollhouse won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. He is a professor at New York University.
