MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

sharky_55 Many similar Dawn Weiners of the past will empathise with what Todd Solondz channels in Welcome to the Dollhouse. That terror-stricken walk in the cafeteria, clutching lunch tray and desperately trying to find a place to fit in is a cliché because it rings true - belonging is a see-sawing struggle in junior high. It's a pity because despite the intentions of Solondz to find a delicate balance and sensibility of the 11 year old girl who feels the whole world is against her, it becomes less a dark comedy and more a over-the-top caricature with a mean streak behind it. Overloading the main character with woe after woe and a barrage of insults and dumb luck is just as boring and uninspiring as the character whom has nothing go wrong for them. To signal her complete underdog status, the big-nosed Heather Matarazzo is cast, but that's not enough, we have to stick spectacles on her face too. Nerd, the bullies might jeer. And there are so, so many of them. An entire assembly chants insults in a tender moment. She is branded a lesbo almost immediately by the usual mean cheerleaders. Her parents flat out hate her, and hide this behind big, fake smiles. Even her little sister is some conniving little evil genius, undermining her in the background then putting on a angelic, beaming look of love. Ugh. It is to no surprise that its best moments are the ones that surprise Dawn, and the ones that are low key. In these brief scenes Slondz shows an actually understanding of the 11 year old besides a potty mouthed bully. Brandon lashes out in anger at her, and tells her to not be late for her 'rape', but at this age it is suggested that he does possess that kind of malice, nevertheless know what rape is. So he tries to get out of it, but still maintain his outward persona - oh you might be late to get home, so I won't rape you just yet. These are just kids, and they barely understand sexuality, but can feel it blossoming in spades and tug at their heartstrings. There's a certain sweetness in the way Dawn fawns over the older, handsomer version of Brandon, Steve, and how she attempts to impress him by feeding him jello and playing a piano piece. And Mark may the only family member who does not treat Dawn like a little pest; there's no malice or intent to intimidate as he tells his little sister that high school is just more of the same. He simply presents it as a fact of life. For all its mess, the ending is a quiet, unassuming one - there's no moment of inspired change, no resolve to fight back, but just an acceptance that things will go on their way. Unfortunately these moments of quiet contemplation are far and few. Solondz throws challenge after challenge at young Dawn; to the point that any 11 year old would collapse and rage, and then expects her to behave, to take it on the chin, to put down the hammer, because its just another day in the life of kid. Paradoxically he expects the subject matter to be taken seriously - for abuse, for drugs, for kidnappings to ring hard and true. But they don't, they hide behind a layer of comedy. Oh, he was just videotaping her doing pirouettes. The movie is funny, of course. But it goes beyond and above until it becomes absurdly dark and it becomes uncomfortable to laugh. The sneering Lolita, wearing a choker and a nasty glare, traps Dawn and waits for her to sh*t right there in the moment. The dialogue is filled to the brim with uncharacteristic profanity, as if Solondz wants to be hard hitting and genuine. "I didn't mean to be a c*nt", murmurs Dawn. This is supposed to be a sweet, subverted moment of naivety for her, a genuine instance of her attempting to act older than her age suggests. But it seems so facile.

Adam Thirwell The thing about watching a film like this at a time when the American high school genre has moved on to the much rosier visions of Napoleon Dynamite and Glee is that it strikes you how almost every character is a flawed, unlikeable person. Sure, you feel sorry and empathise with Dawn, the main character, but she's equally willing to bully, and doesn't have saving graces like the standard US school film geek - she's no brainbox.The guys in the film are portrayed as far less vindictive than the girls - bad boy Brandon has a sort of rogue honour, and the main fault of the other males in Dawn's life is that they are obsessed with doing their own thing or else following expectations laid down for them.It's a very watchable film - more so than Todd Solondz's later works. It looks like the work of an embittered outsider, but at least an outsider who, like the main character, tries to do their own thing against the odds.

tieman64 Like Woody Allen, Todd Solondz spends his time poking fun at man's foibles, whilst perhaps simultaneously wishing he weren't part of the very social fabric he condemns. It's your classic ego trap: "I'm better and above you, but worthless and wish I were with you." Solondz made "Fear, Anxiety and Depression" in 1989. He wrote and directed that film and, like Woody Allen, also cast himself as the film's neurotic hero. Like Allen's alter ego in "Annie Hall", the geeky looking Solondz spent the entire film bumbling about, venting his various dissaffections.Solondz was never happy with "Fear", however, and promptly disowned the film when his producers re-edited it behind his back. Burnt by the film industry, Solondz slipped into depression. He withdrew into isolation and became a teacher and writer. During these years his approach to art changed drastically. His screenplays became more formal, more precise, more caustic, and his visual style became cold. Ice cold.Solondz's first film when he emerged from his depression was "Welcome to the Dollhouse". Drawing upon his own unhappy school years, "Dollhouse" is about Dawn Weiner, a girl whom the universe seems to have condemned. More sinister than similar teen movies, "Dollhouse's" Dawn is so insecure she's happy to let a kid at school rape her if it means validating her own self worth. This would be rapist is himself marginalized, insecure and so reliant on sexual threats for self validation. Dawn is so filled with rage she even saws off the heads of her sister's dolls, fantasises about bashing people with a hammer and deliberately causes her sibling to be kidnapped by a local paedophile. Meanwhile, all the abuses people hurl at the geeky Dawn, Dawn hurls down at her little sister, a girl whom she unfairly despises. The result is that Dawn is shown to be capable of the same kind of brutality that she's subjected to. Social bullying is internalised, becomes self-hatred, and is then redirected violently back out at others."Dollhouse" was a cosy film compared to Solondz's next three flicks. In "Happiness" he portrays a web of characters, all of whom harbour different problems and neuroses, and all of whom are linked by their desire for absolute contentment. And so we have a paedophile who is only happy around kids, a successful writer who is only happy if she writes something of substance, a musician (who ironically writes songs of substance) who can't find success and is so discontent, an elderly couple who no longer have the will to live, a fat man who fantasises about raping women, a fat woman who is disgusted by sex and a dopey housewife who is blissfully unaware of the disturbing truths that exist beneath her sweet suburban facade. Forget "American Beauty" and "Blue Velvet". Solondz ends his film with a Norman Rockwell kid ejaculating on his front balcony. Solondz's point is almost classically psychoanalytic: Lack breeds Desire breeds Suffering. Peel away the emotional baggage and happiness is a stain that oft amounts to nothing more than a fleeting moment of biological bliss."Happiness" doesn't broadening its horizons to tackle the wider social and structural issues that better directors align to their existential musings, but it does offer more than Sam Mendes' "American Beauty". Indeed, Solondz's next film, "Storytelling", seemed designed to address those critics who pointed out the similarities between "Happiness" and "American Beauty". Mendes has himself slammed Solondz on numerous occasions, and so perhaps "Storytelling" is best viewed as a sort of intellectual assault on Solondz's critics."Storytelling" is divided into two segments, the first called "fiction" the second called "non-fiction". "Fiction" is about a creative writing student who has "sympathy sex" with a mentally disabled kid and later lets her African American teacher "rape" her. She then turns her experiences into a work of fiction which purports to be "truthfully" based on these factual encounters."Storytelling's" second segment then focuses on a documentary director who makes a documentary called "American Scooby" (a parody of "American Beauty") in which he follows a high school student around campus. The documentary director hopes to uncover the "truth" of growing up in suburbia, but in reality is merely transposing his own "deep thoughts", self-analysis and existential hang-ups onto a modern teen who is actually a dopey airhead. The end result is that film-maker and child enter a sort of exploitative relationship. The kid gets fame and is portrayed as being "deeper" than he is, while the film-maker gets prestige for nothing. End result: Solondz essentially advocates the sort of "truthful" sensationalism present in the non-fiction segment of the film, whilst aligning human delusions (love, romantic illusions, family etc) with the fictions of the second half. Other themes abound - the power games and domination/exploitatin reversals of "Dollhouse" are reworked here with subplots about a vengeful maid and a black teacher - but it's the "American Beauty" angle that's most interesting."Palindromes" is thus far the weakest of Solondz's films. The first and last words in the movie are "Mom", a pair of palindromes through which Solondz implies that "nothing ever changes". Indeed, Solondz makes the film a palindrome at every level, his Schopenhaueran point being that we are paradoxically always changing and never changing (hence different actors play the same character), every desire and addiction merely supplanting another. It's an extremely bleak film, depending how much trust the audience puts in its final monologue. This bleakness has led to critics labelling Solondz a misanthrope, but he's no more colder than both Allen and the Coens, two other contemporary critical darlings who've spent their careers reworking similar material.7.9/10 – "Welcome to the Dollhouse", "Palindromes" 8/10 – "Storytelling", "Happiness"

timmy_501 Welcome to the Dollhouse is about a girl named Dawn who fails to find a place anywhere in society. She seems to be the victim of middle child syndrome as her parents are too worried about their other two children to bother much with her. Dawn's brother is already established as the brainy oldest child and her sister is the cute one, leaving her without an easy way to establish her own identity. At school she is is unable to fit in at least partially because her parents don't care enough about her to help her dress normally for her age. Because she isn't nurtured at home, she also fails to develop socially and her personality is too thin to make her sympathetic to the other students. Predictably, she is treated as poorly at school as she is at home.Welcome to the Dollhouse is full of these devastating scenes in which Dawn get her hopes up only to have them knocked down again. Her parents and classmates are oblivious to her suffering; no matter how bad things are for her nobody ever seems to think about her feelings. Things also tend to go against her as a matter of course. She is frequently unlucky as when she attempts to get revenge on her tormentors and accidentally targets an unsuspecting adult.Welcome to the Dollhouse does a fairly good job of capturing an unfortunate girl at a particularly awkward time of life. It suffers from a lack of realism at times, however, since it's unlikely that every teacher and student would hate a person that is more bland than offensive. Even more detrimental than the film's lack of realism in establishing Dawn's situation is the film's lack of style. The visuals are unremarkable and the only memorable aesthetic choice is the tacky design in Dawn's home. The plot takes a detour into absurdity when Dawn's sister is kidnapped but surprisingly this isn't really played for laughs in spite of some humorous elements.I was surprised to learn that this wasn't director Todd Solondz's first feature as it felt like the work of a film-maker looking to gain enough confidence to do the things he really wanted to. Welcome to the Dollhouse does an adequate job of establishing a single character but it feels like it's missing some crucial elements that could have made it truly memorable.