May 24, 1996

WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE was a big deal at the time. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance with its brutally relatable, darkly funny portrait of the cruelty of children and the pain of not fitting in. It became a surprise hit and introduced moviegoers to an exciting new voice, writer/director Todd Solondz. Luckily nobody knew about his more Woody-Allen-like 1989 debut FEAR, ANXIETY & DEPRESSION, in which he starred as a neurotic playwright.

This is the story of Dawn Wiener (rookie Heather Matarazzo), a friendless seventh grader in suburban New Jersey. I love the opening scene, which vividly captures the terror of being an awkward kid in a noisy middle school cafeteria trying to find somewhere to sit. There’s a diabolical spin on a trope because she finds gloomy burnout Lolita (Victoria Davis) all alone and joins her, though their interaction is cold. When a group of giggly cheerleaders come over to ask, “Hi Dawn, sorry to bother you but we were just wondering, are you a lesbian?” we know in our bones that this freak is supposed to defend this geek. She’d rather stay out of it but she feels bad enough for Dawn or just has enough disdain for the cheerleaders to step in, tell off the bullies and become Dawn’s unlikely friend and protector. And it will be so moving. Except that doesn’t happen at all. Lolita joins in with the taunting and goes on to become Dawn’s worst bully.

In the next scene Dawn hears three boys in backwards baseball hats picking on a dork named Troy (Scott Coogan), trying to force him to say “I’m a faggot,” so Dawn decides to be that kind and courageous person Lolita wasn’t. “Why don’t you guys just leave him alone?” she yells, and it does seem to make them leave (after they punch him in the gut). But when she checks to make sure Troy is all right he grunts, “Leave me alone, Wiener Dog!” and runs away.

But Dawn’s not that different from Troy either. Shortly after that, when her little sister Missy (Daria Kalinina) tells her she’s not supposed to drink juice in the TV room, Dawn says, “Drop dead, lesbo!” So this it’s now triple underlined that this is not some revenge of the nerds empowerment fantasy. This is a pretty blunt depiction of people being treated like shit and then not necessarily being the good guy who knows better and breaks the chain. They lash out. They’re sick of being on the bottom and they’re willing to throw somebody else under them to get a little step up.

Dawn also gets no sympathy from her older brother Mark (Matthew Faber, also in THE PALLBEARER), who’s maybe even more of a nerd than her, but more self-assured, even cocky. Posters on his bedroom wall include Albert Einstein, a chart of different types of fish, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He plays clarinet in a garage band called The Quadratics (or at least that’s the name on the drum set), but before you go thinking that makes him kind of cool and quirky you should know that he talks about it as something to put on his college resume. This is also why he’s not interested in girls. “What are you kidding? I want to get into a good school. My future’s like important.”

(I was thrilled to realize that Barry, the keyboardist of The Quadratics, is a young Ken Leung, soon to be a henchman in RUSH HOUR.)

I usually avoid repeating slurs in my reviews, and I’m sorry if it bothers anyone that I’m quoting some here. I feel like it’s needed to capture the movie because part of why the it works for me, and possibly why it caught on, is that kids really did say this kind of horrible shit to each other, but it was always toned down in movies and television. There’s a familiar version of bullying in entertainment that we know is bad but it’s clean and inoffensive and doesn’t really capture the feeling of it. Here it’s horrifying but also a little darkly funny because it’s clear they often don’t even know the meaning of the words they’re using, they’ve just learned it’s what you say to somebody when you want to hurt them. Solondz is surely trying to provoke a reaction out of us, but also we recognize that it’s the truth. He wanted to call the movie FAGGOTS & RETARDS, and I understand both why he’d want to and why they were right not to let him.

Maybe I’m being naive about how kids are now – I’m sure they’re still mean little bastards – but I imagine some things in this movie would be pretty shocking to younger generations. Even worse than the gauntlet of homophobia, there’s the subplot that juvenile delinquent Brandon McCarthy (Brendan Sexton III) harasses Dawn with rape threats, and she reacts with sort of a naive curiosity. They start to meet up and spend time together, both playing along that it’s under threat even though he doesn’t actually do anything to her. It’s messed up but also sad if you can manage any empathy for Brandon. Imagine how much better his life would be if he could just admit to liking someone and be nice to them.

She’s open to him partly because she’s been striking out with Steve Rodgers (Eric Mabius), the hunky, long-haired high school boy who becomes the frontman for Mark’s band in exchange for computer science tutoring. Dawn gets an obvious crush on him, and he’s nice to her sometimes, but clearly just sees her as a kid sister, doesn’t pick up on her interest, and mostly ignores her. That’s good, though. It’s refreshing to have at least one subplot that doesn’t get as mean as it could.

Matarazzo is perfect in this, so funny and so affecting with her sweet innocent voice, her comical gape-mouthed stares and stern “I’m not going to let them make me cry” face, as well as the occasional true-to-life brattiness like when she gets in trouble for what she called her sister and keeps screaming “But she was bothering me!”

I don’t know if this was the reason Solondz chose him, but director of photography Randy Drummond had worked primarily in children’s television: Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, live action segments for The Magic School Bus. Editor Alan Oxman had only done the Isaac Mizrahi documentary UNZIPPED. Seems like a good combination for the very specific brand of dry-as-a-bone quirk here. I think Solondz manages a delicate tonal balance where my sympathy and identification is absolutely with Dawn, but also I can laugh at her repeatedly stumbling into situations where I know she’s gonna eat shit. It feels like laughing at myself more than laughing at someone else. I wince as she raises her hand to tell on Brandon for copying her test, and then wince in a different way when the teacher gives both of them detention for some reason. I laugh at the boys flipping her off through the window while the principal chews her out, and at the cruel graffiti on her locker that spills over onto bordering lockers and even the ceiling, with a huge “WIENER DOG” spray painted above like a marquee. When boys fill her hair with spitballs during an assembly and she turns around to fire back one time she takes out a teacher’s eye and becomes the bad guy. Everything goes so impossibly bad for Dawn and she doesn’t know what to do but try to hold her head up, and that seems so clueless that I love her for it. And when she does find moments to un-self-consciously be her weird self (like sitting on the hood of a car watching Steve sing and doing her weird moves) it feels triumphant.

I should mention that the poster kind of makes her looks like she has a cool retro sense of style, and some of the fashion may come off like that 30 years later, but from my memory the outfits at that time were perfectly tuned to be what people considered actually hideous and not ironically cool. The things you ended up wearing if your parents were a certain way and you didn’t know better. But there are times when it seems like she’s dressed up extra and wants it to look good and maybe she was just decades ahead of her time. Good for her.

The story gets darker – Missy is kidnapped, and it’s basically Dawn’s fault, but she never tells anyone. She does go to New York City and wander outside the peep show booths asking people if they’ve seen her sister. I think Solondz makes this funny too. Some may disagree. I think at the time, when I wasn’t as much older than Dawn as it felt, this might’ve been a bit grueling. Now, somehow, it feels like a fun time, not dwelling on life’s ugliness but being able to poke fun at it.

One of the funniest and most random jokes is when Dawn doesn’t want to smoke a cigarette with Brandon and after a long pause says, “But I think marijuana should be legalized.” He looks flabbergasted and asks, “Why do you always have to be such a cunt?” This is an inappropriate response; she was correct and,  once again, way ahead of her time.

WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, which had been founded in 1992 to release international, independent and arthouse type movies starting with HOWARD’S END. Some other ones they’d done by this point include MI VIDA LOCA, CRUMB, MUTE WITNESS and THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN. Prestigious and shit.

The main cast here are all first-timers, and several of them have gone on to long careers. Matarazzo won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance, previously won by Sean Nelson (FRESH) and Justin Pierce (KIDS). Generally the actors who win this don’t go on to become big stars, with the exception of Aaron Eckhart (IN THE COMPANY OF MEN), Michelle Rodriguez (GIRLFIGHT) and Paul Dano (L.I.E.). Matarazzo will always be remembered for this, but she has also had a solid character actor sort of career, appearing in 54, SCREAM 3, the PRINCESS DIARY movies, and I thought she was really great in HOSTEL PART II.

Sexton did EMPIRE RECORDS right after this, and had enough of a late ‘90s indie run (HURRICANE STREETS, PECKER, BOYS DON’T CRY) that he got to be one of the it boys cast in BLACK HAWK DOWN. In recent years he was in EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE, DON’T BREATHE 2 and even SNIPER: ROGUE MISSION.

Mabius’ indie streak included I SHOT ANDY WARHOL and SPLENDOR, but he’s better known for a bunch of genre movies including BLACK CIRCLE BOYS, THE CROW: SALVATION, RESIDENT EVIL and REEKER. He’s also worked steadily in a bunch of tv shows including Ugly Betty and The L Word, and now he does Hallmark movies.

There’s only one other IMDb credit for Daria Kalinina, and it’s a 2020 Cirque du Soleil short. As Missy she’s always doing ballet, so she must’ve stuck with it. I think that’s cool.

This was not the end of the Wiener family saga. Solondz has sort of a shared universe between his movies, so PALINDROMES (2004) opens with a funeral for Dawn, who we learned committed suicide at age 20 after becoming pregnant from a date rape. Mark, Marj and Harvey Wiener are all in the scene. The main character Aviva (initially played by Emani Sledge, and then by seven other actors including Jennifer Jason Leigh) is supposed to be Dawn’s cousin. Mark and Harvey also return in LIFE DURING WARTIME (2009), now played by Rich Pecci and Michael Lerner.

Thankfully we don’t have to consider that horrible thing I just said canon, because Dawn is alive again in WIENER-DOG (2016), now played by Greta Gerwig. She’s working as a veterinary nurse, which is how she encounters the titular animal that was coincientally what bullies nicknamed her during childhood. She runs into Brandon (now played by Kieran Culkin) and goes on a road trip with him.

But that may be the last of her. Solondz has only made eight movies, and none in the last decade. I’d say his popularity peaked with his followup to this, HAPPINESS, which the Letterboxd generation may even know about since it’s in the Criterion Collection. I don’t know, maybe he’s too obsessed with bluntly introducing child molesters and other rapists into darkly comic scenarios. The discomfort is a feature not a bug but I guess it makes it harder to be excited for his next movie when you know that’s what you’re in for.

I admire his purity, though. He has stayed true to his own thing, only getting weirder, never reaching for the mainstream. That was more of a possible career path back then, I guess. I can’t picture somebody trying to hire him for THE THUNDERBOLTS anyway, but he never softened even to the extent of, like, John Waters doing HAIRSPRAY.

Or at least he never succeeded at it. Since at least 2017 he’s been trying to make a movie called LOVE CHILD that he told Variety would be “my first movie with a plot… It’s fun and it’s sexy and it’s shaped by the Hollywood movies that made me want to become a filmmaker.” That was in 2021 when it was set to star Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell. In 2024 it almost started shooting with Charles Melton and Elizabeth Olsen, but the funding fell through.

I don’t hear WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE mentioned as much as I used to, but I bet I’m not the only one who still enjoys it. At the very least it lives on in its influences. Off the top of my head I can see its DNA in GHOST WORLD, NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, Freaks and Geeks, maybe even RUSHMORE, and those each made their own mark. Dawn Wiener, you changed the world, and you are not forgotten.

‘90s shit: Mark gets a letter from a girlfriend/penpal and it mentions “I’m getting hooked up to e-mail for my birthday”