Welcome to the Dollhouse, which airs Sept. 29, is the second installment of a special eight-week cult classics series at The Athena Cinema. Each movie will run on Thursdays at 7 p.m. For a full schedule, click here.
Coming-of-age high school dramas are quite common in the film industry and with good reason. The melodrama is ripe for satire, the characters radiate enviable levels of coolness and personality and the presence of social cliques and relatable angst makes it a gold mine of meaningful thematic storytelling. Middle school, on the other hand, offers none of what makes the aforementioned genre so popular, replacing nostalgia with nightmares and lovable nerds with socially inept creeps. That is exactly what makes Todd Solondz’s irreverent yet ultimately thought-provoking look at the least endearing age group of our society such a brilliant film. Rather than writing off these unlikeable and terribly awkward kids as mere sources of deadpan comedy, he fearlessly looks into every aspect of their lives and forces viewers to accept them as they are, warts and all.
Over the 90-minute runtime of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Mr. Solondz — who both wrote and directed the film — establishes a consistent tone that fits perfectly into the disconnected reality of an average middle schooler. Much like our often-bullied central character, Dawn, and the misunderstood perpetrator of her misery, Brandon, the film approaches borderline taboo subjects, such as rape and kidnapping, with a general lack of understanding for their serious nature. Solondz’s fixation on the middle school psyche extends to the camerawork as well, as his focus on the most minute and trivial of details reflects the single-minded and egocentric nature of the characters. His portrayal of the preteen struggle truly pulls no punches, each and every passing homophobic slur further grounding the film in its childish reality and reminding us of a time most of us would like to forget altogether.
Beyond the movie’s overarching tone, its thematically powerful yet also understated conclusion places a deliberately unsatisfactory cap on the middle school experience. Rather than resorting to a cheap storybook ending that many lesser films tend to fall back on unnecessarily, Solondz elects for a much more restrained approach, finishing with an almost nihilistic lack of resolution in which life continues on in uneventful mediocrity. No matter how much his characters seek out long-term solutions to their temporary plights, he refuses to give them a forced and contrived sense of conclusion.
Cloaked in the awkward narcissism that characterizes the sixth through eighth grade, Welcome to the Dollhouse is a cringey, imperfect, unsentimental masterpiece. Perhaps it will not evoke the heart-warming emotions of a film like Breakfast Club or Superbad, but it achieves its initial goal — and then some — of telling an honest and thoughtful story about an entirely apathetic and unlikeable demographic. And maybe, afterwards, we’ll even feel a little bit better about the collective worst years of our lives, knowing we weren’t alone in the fleeting struggle for meaningless attention.
Four and a half stars (out of five).
