WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (59)

Directed by: Todd Solondz

Starring: Heather Matarazzo, Brendan Sexton Jr., Matthew Faber

The Pitch: Eleven-year-old Dawn Wiener - "Wienerdog" to one and all - goes through life constantly belittled, bullied and humiliated.

Theo Sez: A little like listening to your adrenalin-junkie friends talk about their adventure holiday in some deliberately remote and exotic Third World place : fun at first, it becomes repetitive after a while ; occasionally, as the horror stories pile up - how they lost their credit-cards and got food poisoning and almost died whitewater-rafting - you suspect it's all been slightly embellished (though not to troll for sympathy, just to make the joke funnier) ; above all, if you've never actually been to the place in question, you'll probably feel increasingly left out. If nothing else, this well-crafted movie is proof that it's probably impossible to evoke childhood with any accuracy, simply because we weren't sufficiently formed as kids to see the bigger picture, just the everyday details ; all a film-maker can really do is evoke our adult feelings about the loss of childhood, a la STAND BY ME (we know that kind of nostalgic innocence isn't "real", but it's the only kind of childhood we have left). Beyond that it's just pot-luck, a question of how far the details depicted match the details we remember - which, for this viewer in this particular case, is hardly at all (no doubt due to growing up outside the US and its rigid prepubescent caste system) ; though admittedly the issue is complicated by the film's blurry line between farce and satire - about half of it seems to aspire to the latter, the rest (things like the family cooing at home movies of Dawn's sickly-sweet sister, then roaring with laughter at footage of said sis pushing Dawn head-first into a paddling-pool) is so broad it can only be the former. All you can really say is that it speaks powerfully of a cruel, small-minded world without second chances or happy endings - which, if American films weren't so glossy and airbrushed, would be no big deal (after all, it's not necessarily the real world) ; as it is, that alone makes it a considerable achievement.