This is an excellent satire of middle class America, where the protagonist experiences alienation from peers and family alike. Dawn rarely has meaningful moments or bonds, and when she does, it is transient. The fact that she ends up spurning her only friend is a cutting, realistic portrayal of the food chain - being picked on, and doing it to someone else. Yet this film is not deeply depressing. Dawn never gives up in a way, she keeps going despite the jeers. Todd Solondz shows no mercy in his portrayal of parenting, childhood and bullies. Interactions with people are often an irritation, something to be tolerated but is not particularly pleasant. This is a movie that shows what it's like when your loved ones apparently don't give a s*** about you.

The thing about watching a film like this at a time when the American high school genre has moved on to the much rosier visions of Napoleon Dynamite and Glee is that it strikes you how almost every character is a flawed, unlikeable person. Sure, you feel sorry and empathise with Dawn, the main character, but she's equally willing to bully, and doesn't have saving graces like the standard US school film geek - she's no brainbox.The guys in the film are portrayed as far less vindictive than the girls - bad boy Brandon has a sort of rogue honour, and the main fault of the other males in Dawn's life is that they are obsessed with doing their own thing or else following expectations laid down for them.It's a very watchable film - more so than Todd Solondz's later works. It looks like the work of an embittered outsider, but at least an outsider who, like the main character, tries to do their own thing against the odds.

Like Woody Allen, Todd Solondz spends his time poking fun at man's foibles, whilst perhaps simultaneously wishing he weren't part of the very social fabric he condemns. It's your classic ego trap: "I'm better and above you, but worthless and wish I were with you." Solondz made "Fear, Anxiety and Depression" in 1989. He wrote and directed that film and, like Woody Allen, also cast himself as the film's neurotic hero. Like Allen's alter ego in "Annie Hall", the geeky looking Solondz spent the entire film bumbling about, venting his various dissaffections.Solondz was never happy with "Fear", however, and promptly disowned the film when his producers re-edited it behind his back. Burnt by the film industry, Solondz slipped into depression. He withdrew into isolation and became a teacher and writer. During these years his approach to art changed drastically. His screenplays became more formal, more precise, more caustic, and his visual style became cold. Ice cold.Solondz's first film when he emerged from his depression was "Welcome to the Dollhouse". Drawing upon his own unhappy school years, "Dollhouse" is about Dawn Weiner, a girl whom the universe seems to have condemned. More sinister than similar teen movies, "Dollhouse's" Dawn is so insecure she's happy to let a kid at school rape her if it means validating her own self worth. This would be rapist is himself marginalized, insecure and so reliant on sexual threats for self validation. Dawn is so filled with rage she even saws off the heads of her sister's dolls, fantasises about bashing people with a hammer and deliberately causes her sibling to be kidnapped by a local paedophile. Meanwhile, all the abuses people hurl at the geeky Dawn, Dawn hurls down at her little sister, a girl whom she unfairly despises. The result is that Dawn is shown to be capable of the same kind of brutality that she's subjected to. Social bullying is internalised, becomes self-hatred, and is then redirected violently back out at others."Dollhouse" was a cosy film compared to Solondz's next three flicks. In "Happiness" he portrays a web of characters, all of whom harbour different problems and neuroses, and all of whom are linked by their desire for absolute contentment. And so we have a paedophile who is only happy around kids, a successful writer who is only happy if she writes something of substance, a musician (who ironically writes songs of substance) who can't find success and is so discontent, an elderly couple who no longer have the will to live, a fat man who fantasises about raping women, a fat woman who is disgusted by sex and a dopey housewife who is blissfully unaware of the disturbing truths that exist beneath her sweet suburban facade. Forget "American Beauty" and "Blue Velvet". Solondz ends his film with a Norman Rockwell kid ejaculating on his front balcony. Solondz's point is almost classically psychoanalytic: Lack breeds Desire breeds Suffering. Peel away the emotional baggage and happiness is a stain that oft amounts to nothing more than a fleeting moment of biological bliss."Happiness" doesn't broadening its horizons to tackle the wider social and structural issues that better directors align to their existential musings, but it does offer more than Sam Mendes' "American Beauty". Indeed, Solondz's next film, "Storytelling", seemed designed to address those critics who pointed out the similarities between "Happiness" and "American Beauty". Mendes has himself slammed Solondz on numerous occasions, and so perhaps "Storytelling" is best viewed as a sort of intellectual assault on Solondz's critics."Storytelling" is divided into two segments, the first called "fiction" the second called "non-fiction". "Fiction" is about a creative writing student who has "sympathy sex" with a mentally disabled kid and later lets her African American teacher "rape" her. She then turns her experiences into a work of fiction which purports to be "truthfully" based on these factual encounters."Storytelling's" second segment then focuses on a documentary director who makes a documentary called "American Scooby" (a parody of "American Beauty") in which he follows a high school student around campus. The documentary director hopes to uncover the "truth" of growing up in suburbia, but in reality is merely transposing his own "deep thoughts", self-analysis and existential hang-ups onto a modern teen who is actually a dopey airhead. The end result is that film-maker and child enter a sort of exploitative relationship. The kid gets fame and is portrayed as being "deeper" than he is, while the film-maker gets prestige for nothing. End result: Solondz essentially advocates the sort of "truthful" sensationalism present in the non-fiction segment of the film, whilst aligning human delusions (love, romantic illusions, family etc) with the fictions of the second half. Other themes abound - the power games and domination/exploitatin reversals of "Dollhouse" are reworked here with subplots about a vengeful maid and a black teacher - but it's the "American Beauty" angle that's most interesting."Palindromes" is thus far the weakest of Solondz's films. The first and last words in the movie are "Mom", a pair of palindromes through which Solondz implies that "nothing ever changes". Indeed, Solondz makes the film a palindrome at every level, his Schopenhaueran point being that we are paradoxically always changing and never changing (hence different actors play the same character), every desire and addiction merely supplanting another. It's an extremely bleak film, depending how much trust the audience puts in its final monologue. This bleakness has led to critics labelling Solondz a misanthrope, but he's no more colder than both Allen and the Coens, two other contemporary critical darlings who've spent their careers reworking similar material.7.9/10 – "Welcome to the Dollhouse", "Palindromes" 8/10 – "Storytelling", "Happiness"

If you've never heard of Todd Solondz, then I should explain that "Welcome to the Dollhouse" is probably the most watchable. His movies - at least the few that I've seen - are always complete downers, containing characters who are either sickos, helpless, or something similar. His first notable movie concerns Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), a New Jersey middle school girl ostracized by everyone around her. The only boy who gives her any good advice is totally pitiful himself. Dawn's entire life is one big FML.I recommend "WTTD", but with the caution that it IS a total downer. Hell, you might not even end up liking it. But it is worth seeing.