Unique Phoebe a Dark Journey in the Divine
Phoebe Lichten (Elle Fanning) says and does exactly what’s on her nine-year-old mind much to the consternation of her teachers and to the perplexed misery of her parents. Mom Hillary (Felicity Huffman) is positive all of this is somehow her fault, the fact she’s stressing so blatantly about the writing of her new book possibly rubbing her eldest the wrong way.
Elle Fanning shines in ThinkFilm's Phoebe in Wonderland
Things change, at least partly, when Phoebe takes an interest in the school’s theatrical production of “Alice in Wonderland.” Here, on the stage, led by her school’s new eccentric and nurturing drama teacher Miss Dodger (Patricia Clarkson), the girl is driven to excel, all the weird behavior and aggressively impolite outbursts fading away into virtual nothingness.
Yet the line between the real world and Lewis Carroll’s magical one is rapidly vanishing, Phoebe retreating deeper and deeper into the latter every day. Is this something to be worried about? Or, is it instead just the whimsical flight of fancy of an astonishingly bright young child coming to a shockingly adult-like plain of self-discovery? Only Phoebe knows for sure, her attempts to figure it all out maybe doing just as much for the well-being of those around her as it helps do the same for herself.
Written and directed by relative newcomer Daniel Barnz, Phoebe in Wonderland is not the quirky, fun-loving comedic melodrama it might appear to be on paper. It is instead a sometimes harrowing and often times painful descent into the mind of a little girl whose troubles are far more expansive then any realize. In many ways, this a darkly unsettling character study about a family dealing with the hurdles of mental illness, its unflinching eye forcing me to squirm quite noticeably in my seat.
Make no mistake, there is a euphoria to Phoebe’s journey, a delicious wonderment to her ability to see the world through a prism entirely her own. Better, while some scenes reek of annoyingly dry maudlin melancholy, the majority of it is so distinct in its originality I don’t think I could have stopped watching the film even had I wanted to try. By the time it was over I had to come to the realization I had fallen in love with our plucky heroine, her dogged determination to overcome enough to make me cry.
Getting there can be pretty rough. I’m happy to see movies that have the strength of their own convictions and the temerity to see things through to their logical ends. Even so, there are some things I just don’t feel the need to watch, and seeing Phoebe fall to pieces because of the hysterias ripping her brain in two was sometimes more than I could bear.
More than that, though, just on a technical front Barnz’s neophyte directorial shortcomings are readily apparent. Some of the transitions from fantasy to reality just don’t work very well, while stilted conversations between Huffman and Bill Pullman (playing Phoebe’s father Peter) are disjointedly hackneyed to the point of unintentional silliness.
At the same time, when the film works it soars straight into the stratosphere. A mid-movie vignette on a precarious catwalk between Miss Dodger and Phoebe went for my jugular with its poignant honesty, while a quiet moment between father and daughter in the cool, austere darkness of an emotionally barren bedroom shot a lump to the very center of my throat. I also found composer Christophe Beck’s (Year of the Dog) simple yet rousing score to be one of the best of his career, while cinematographer Bobby Bukowski’s (Saved!) camerawork has a vivid elegance that’s strikingly one of a kind.
Ultimately, it is the final ten minutes that won me over. The film has been building for quite some time, Fanning, Huffman and especially Clarkson growing their performances so subtlety I began to feel like I’d known the lot of them for years. Never flinching, never compromising, never glossing over the ugly inevitability of what’s to come, Barnz nevertheless manages to bring viewers to a plateau of euphoric grace, Phoebe in Wonderland looking through its protagonist’s plucky prism revealing a resilience everyone can relate to.
- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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