A TIME TO FORGET
"Why do you hate me?" quavers Dawn Wiener (Heather
Matarazzo) to a classmate whose favorite sport is tormenting her. "Because
you're ugly," the other says. Welcome to the Dollhouse, a black comedy
of seventh-grade manners which won the Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic
feature at this year's Sundance Film Festival, takes you on a journey into the
heart of geekdom that will have you squirming with memories of the geek you
once were, or the geek you once terrorized, or both. No after- school special
this--Dawn doesn't morph by film's end into a rocket scientist and happily
married mother of four. She goes right on being the awkward, bespectacled kid
whom everyone likes to beat up on or ignore. A middle child in middle
school in middle suburban New Jersey, Dawn is sandwiched uncomfortably between
her brilliant computer-nerd older brother, Mark (Matthew Faber), and her
unbearably well-behaved little sister, Missy (Daria Kalinina), who flits around
in a pink tutu to general adult acclaim. Todd Solondz, who wrote, produced, and
directed the film, achieves perfect pitch in balancing the pain and comedy of
Dawn's so-called life and pulls astonishing performances from his mostly
juvenile actors. If Welcome to the Dollhouse offers any affirmation,
it's in Dawn's indomitable spirit as she pursues a hopeless crush on
her brother's handsome friend, takes vengeance on Missy, and tries to win the
love of friends and family. Brendan Sexton Jr. is outstanding as Dawn's best
friend, who shows his affection by continually threatening to rape her. The
movie is not a coming-of-age story--it's a tale of surviving childhood,
which in Solondz's delightfully warped view is by definition a gruesome
experience. Take that, Dr. Spock!
Suffering through junior high
Photo: Jennifer Carchman
THE MEN BEHIND THE MOVEMENT
One of the most inventive movies to emerge
from the thriving gay film scene,
Stonewall is loosely based on Martin Duberman's book about the 1969
riots that sparked the fledgling gay-rights movement into full action. Although
it opens with newsreel footage, the BBC movie is not the Stonewall story
but a (semi-fictionalized) Stonewall story, about a group of
Greenwich Village homosexuals re-inventing their identities as the politics of
the sixties unfold around them. La Miranda (Guillermo Diaz) is an apolitical
Puerto Rican drag queen who hangs out at the famous Stonewall Inn and resists
emotional involvement until he meets the butch Matty Dean (Frederick Weller), a
rich kid who has recast himself as a backwoods boy. The ups and downs of their
love affair are complicated by Matty's involvement with the Mattachine Society,
a group of buttoned-down homosexuals who pattern their polite activism
after the civil-rights movement. Director Nigel Finch (who died of AIDS in
1995, just before the film was finished) was affectionate in his
treatment of this group, but his loyalty clearly lay with the drag queens, the
pulse of this warmhearted, openly sentimental movie. After suffering a terrible
personal loss, the gentle queen mother (played by the excellent Duane Boutte)
snaps under police brutality, and the repressed outrage that has built
throughout the movie erupts. The movie ends as it began, with a police raid.
Only this time the regulars at the inn are disinclined to take the abuse lying
down--and Stonewall the movie joins forces with Stonewall the history.
Duane Boutte as a regular at the inn
Photo: Courtesy of Strand Releasing
EQUINE EPIC
Jean-Paul Rappeneau's The Horseman on the Roof is stuffed with
back-to-back sword fights, elegantly costumed crowd scenes, chases, piles of
corpses with staring eyes, and bucolic landscaping, so that you have no idea
what's going on except that a cholera epidemic is raging and some Italians are
revolting against their Austrian occupiers. All this action because a Type-A
young blade's mother has told him to "live recklessly." It's 1840, and Angelo
(Olivier Martinez) gallops through Provence saving people and evading assorted
pursuers. This goes on for what seems like years until a French grande dame
(the beautiful and talented Juliette Binoche) shows up to calm Angelo down.
Together they do some more galloping, saving, and evading, while falling in
disappointingly chaste love. Evidently a full half hour of this beautifully
shot muddle was snipped off by scissor-happy Miramax Films. They chopped
either too little or too much. If you want to see a Rappeneau epic that works,
rent Cyrano de Bergerac.
A typically beautiful landscape
Photo: Courtesy of Miramax Zoe
Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly.
