HELL IS FOR ZEROS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Of the many cruel cusps atop which life obliges us to teeter, none is more razor-sharp than the one separating childhood and adolescence. Just ask Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), better known to her fellow students at Benjamin Franklin Junior High as "Wiener Dog." Built like a badly packed shipping carton, afflicted with thick, round glasses and tightly skinned-back hair, she was born to be shunned and taunted in approximately equal measure.

The girls call her Lesbo, and Brandon (Brendan Sexton Jr.), the juvenile delinquent who is the only boy with an interest in her, demonstrates it by threatening rape. When she responds in kind to a spitball attack, she almost puts a teacher's eye out. Things are scarcely better at home: Dad is passive, Mom is aggressive; her elder brother is a computer nerd and the leader of a hopeless garage band; her little sister is a tattletale in a tutu, meanly waltzing off with such love as can survive in the cold climate of split-level suburbia.

Uh-oh. 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 she can blame her unhappiness on Brandon. Or on Steve (Eric Mabius), the high school hunk she hopelessly moons after. Or even, conceivably, on her little sister, whose kidnapping turns into the kind of attention-getting device Dawn can only envy.

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.

--By Richard Schickel