Word: solondz
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...American dysfunction again, the spilled Slurpee on our nylon carpet of dreams. The difference between Welcome to the Dollhouse and other recent explorations of middle-class desperation is that writer-director Todd Solondz doesn't think it's funny. Neither does he think it's tragic. His Dawn holds no promise. She's not particularly bright nor more than usually sensitive. You don't think her misery is grist for some novelistic or poetic gift that will one day provide her with sweet revenge on her tormentors. It is, at best, material for some future psychiatric monologue wherein...
...Solondz observes all this activity from an objectifying distance, very much the anthropologist trekking through the heart of darkness. He is, perhaps, too relentless in his grimness, too unforgiving. But there is a certain perverse integrity in his depressive's gaze, something weirdly compelling in his refusal to ingratiate himself with his audience. You keep waiting for him to crack a smile, offer a consoling gesture, express some softening sentiment. He does not. And if there is much that is withering in his contempt, there is also something bracing in the loony tunelessness of this hymn to human dispirit...
Looking like a thin, penurious Bill Gates, Todd Solondz, 36, pretty much fits the adult profile of a guy who got called names in junior high. He nevertheless claims the funny-grim Welcome to the Dollhouse isn't autobiographical. "The story of the bleakness and misery of my adolescence is a different movie," says the second-time director (he also made 1989's barely seen Fear, Anxiety and Depression...