|
Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
PHOEBE IN WONDERLAND A positively glowing Elle Fanning is Phoebe in Wonderland, where a trip down the rabbit hole is a clever visual metaphor for a nine-year-old girl’s psychological problems. Her busy academic parents, Hillary and Peter (Felicity Huffman and Bill Pullman), can’t see inside her head (like the audience does), so they are at their talky, self-centered wits’ end dealing with her bouts of bizarre behavior, which includes striking out verbally and physically. Equally perplexed are her satirically exaggerated strait-laced middle-school teachers and conformist principal (Campbell Scott, almost unrecognizable behind big glasses and amusing mannerisms). All except the unconventional drama teacher, Miss Dodger (Patricia Clarkson), who leads the students through auditions and rehearsals for an Alice in Wonderland musical. (Miss Dodger also would seem exaggerated, except that I, too, had one of those once-in-a-lifetime inspiring teachers.) Phoebe allies with the other “weird” kid who doesn’t fit in, Jamie (a charming Ian Colletti), and how he also stands apart is heartwarming and straightforward. Like a younger version of the teens in Tom Gustafson‘s Shakespearean musical Were the World Mine, Jamie is comfortably out and proud to play the Queen of Hearts—Miss Dodger turns his classmates’ taunts into learning opportunities about the theater and the power of words. But debut writer/director Daniel Barnz has instead chosen wide-eyed Phoebe to be the centerpiece of the film, her constant close-ups bathed in a golden aura. Her alarming behavior that outwardly looks self-destructive is seen as logically consistent in an upside-down world where the people in Phoebe’s life, Wizard of Oz-like, populate her interior Wonderland. Barnz demonstrates a marvelous flourish for channeling a child’s frustrations into magic realism. The Wonderland references get a bit heavy-handed for her mother to deal with (she wrote her dissertation on the book), until her painful realization that she can’t sustain being a do-it-all superwoman when her child needs a lot of attention. Huffman is movingly raw as she refuses the doctor’s pharmacological solution and fiercely delves deeply into empathy and love to find answers, seemingly with no meds once there is a correct diagnosis. Despite
slow pacing, stretches of clunky dialogue, and some clichés played for
laughs, the visually imaginative Phoebe in Wonderland is frank
and sensitive as it just about avoids being another tearjerker about
children who are different.
Nora Lee Mandel
|
