USA,
1995, 87 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Todd Solondz
- prod
-
Todd Solondz, Donna Bascom, Ted Skillman
- scr
-
Todd Solondz
- cam
-
Randy Drummond
- editor
-
Alan Oxman
- cast
-
Heather Matarazzo, Brendan Sexton Jr., Daria Kalinina, Matthew Faber
-
COMMENTS
Todd Solondz in person.
Dawn Wiener is a middle child in middle school in the middle of New Jersey. She is known to her friends as “wiener dog” but, then again, she really doesn’t have any friends. It is just a nickname she endures, and enduring is what she does most of the time. She is in limbo—that place between childhood and adulthood known as puberty. Welcome to the Dollhouse is a stark suburban comedy that takes you back to a time when your life didn’t make sense—not that it ever does—but this is that awful time when you still believed it should. Todd Solondz has created a neoclassic protagonist, an 11-year-old girl who fits in neither at home nor at school. She’s the type you hoped would not sit next to you in the lunchroom. She is not a character in a TV sitcom where everything comes out all right in the end or who takes off her glasses and is suddenly beautiful. Welcome to the Dollhouse is neither sentimental nor condescending and because of that, Dawn’s journey remains poignant. So then how can her plight be funny? Those of us who were more of a “wiener dog” than a football captain or head cheerleader will understand the pain, but hopefully enough time has passed so we can laugh as well. Winner of the Dramatic Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
—John Cooper, Sundance Film Festival
FACTOID #80
Irving ’Bud’ Levin, owner of San Francisco’s Metro Theatre, founded the SFIFF in 1957. However, Levin credited the idea for creating the Festival to the Italian consul general at the time, Pierluigi Alvera, who became one of its staunchest supporters.
