It’s a grim comedy about a girl in a middle-class Jewish family in New Jersey and her difficult life. Ebert’s review said “Her parents say they love all their children equally. They’re lying.” Her nickname at junior high is Wiener Dog, and her experience there is as painful as mine was. The movie is a comedy about the painful experiences some of us go through in our youth.
I met a guy once who’d interviewed a lot of Hollywood people, and he said his hardest interviews were Steve Martin and Todd Solondz. I imagine Solondz has Asperger’s Syndrome like me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Martin does too. (I think the interviewer was an Aspie too, but that’s another story.) I saw a photo of him once and he looked like a stereotypical geek. And his movies are definitely geeky!
One critic, in The Globe and Mail, complained that this movie lacks that adult perspective where you can forgive others, and forgive yourself. To tell the truth, that’s actually what I liked about it. It’s the strong people who forgive, but I have to admit I’m one of the weak people. If you knock me down, I can forgive that because it’s just violence. But if you judge me, I promise, I will judge you too. If you treat me as “the weak link” and I don’t do my best to make consequences for you, that means I am the weak link!
Compare Welcome to the Dollhouse to The Man in the Moon, a movie with some similarities. That movie takes a more forgiving approach, but to me that makes it a lesser achievement. I think of the scene where young Reese Witherspoon unilaterally forgives her father for beating her. To me this felt like an uneven reconciliation, with the daughter doing all the “work.” I prefer the honestly unforgiving.
There’s one scene where the girl gets a bad grade on something, knows her parents won’t like it, and begs the teacher to improve it a little. But the teacher is intolerant of grade-grubbing and says “Don’t you have any dignity?” What it’s really about, of course, is that an insecure teacher takes grade-grubbing as a challenge to her authority. Then the teacher makes her write an essay about the evils of grade-grubbing and recite it in front of the whole class. As she does so, the teacher keeps saying “Speak up!” but she can’t. (In the movie Clueless there’s a scene where high-schooler Alicia Silverstone tells her lawyer father how she improved a poor grade with some shameless grade-grubbing and he says “What did I tell you, that’s what I want you to be doing!”)
There’s also a scene where she gets in trouble while the nasty boys who started it escape blame, and her parents get called into school. She says “I was fighting back,” but her mother just says “Who taught you to fight back?” (She should have answered “Hitler!” This is a Jewish family, remember.)
There’s also a subplot about the older brother having a combo band where he plays a clarinet, giving it an odd klezmer sound! Another player is thin-skinned and quits the band in a huff, then later he’s asked to come back so they can play at the parents’ wedding anniversary, but he only does so after the brother agrees to pay him $200! In one sense this guy’s being childish, but in another sense he knew what he could get!
Of course the movie isn’t to everyone’s taste, and there’s quite a bit of stuff you can object to, like when the spoiled younger daughter gets kidnapped (don’t ask) and the mother’s grief gets shown in a ridiculing way. This was also the case with Happiness, Solondz’ follow-up and his most popular movie. Overall, I found it creepy and off-putting. But it did have some moments of bracing, hilarious honesty that appealed to me.
One is the movie’s opening sequence where the heroine dumps her boyfriend John Lovitz, and he takes it hard. He asks “Is it another man?” and she answers “No, it’s just you.” (Some women would pretend it was another man just to ease his hurt, but she clearly isn’t smart enough to do that.) Her next boyfriend is a Russian immigrant. She asks “What did you do in Russia?” and he answers “I was a thief.” There’s a scene where a baseball coach father says to his player son “Don’t fuck this up!” And there’s also this moment when a father comes clean with his son, but it’s too tasteless to talk about here. See the movie and you’ll know which scene I’m talking about…
Solondz’ movies after Happiness haven’t been as popular. (One of them, Palindromes, got a Salon magazine review with this palindromic headline: “God! A ‘No sir, prefer prison!’ A dog.”) I must mention that he made a sequel to Happiness titled Life During Wartime, in which all the original movie’s characters are played by different actors! For example, the John Lovitz character becomes a ghost played by Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-Wee Herman. I liked the line where a Jewish woman says about herself and her husband, “We voted for Bush and Cheney because it was good for Israel, even though we know they’re both total idiots!” Actually, Jewish-Americans tend to be loyal Democrats…
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