After
Jude and Welcome to
Sarajevo,
a person might have certain preconceptions about director
Michael Winterbottom.
To call them both both dark films is a bit of an
understatement.
I was actually smacked in the head after letting a
female co-worker borrow my copy of Jude. All
of this makes Winterbottom’s latest - Wonderland
- even more of a surprise.
And when I say “surprise,” I don’t mean it in a
good way.
An
unwelcome change of pace for Winterbottom, Wonderland
follows three generations of a South London family through a
tumultuous November weekend.
Each family member has their own story line, and they
frequently intersect with each other.
Their stories are almost all boring, particularly
coming on the heels of Paul Thomas Anderson’s far superior
film Magnolia. In
fact, Wonderland will really make you appreciate how
good Magnolia was, even for you dicks that walked out
after the first hour.
It’s not
all bad. The
acting is solid, showing that Winterbottom is, if nothing
else, routinely capable of eliciting great performances from
his casts. The
problem is with the script, written by debut screenwriter
Laurence Coriat. Winterbottom’s
two previous gems were adapted from novels (Jude from
Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” and Sarajevo
from Michael Nicholson’s “Natasha’s Story”).
Dude, find some more messed-up books and direct them
instead of stories from first-time writers.
Here a
breakdown of the characters:
Mum
- Eileen (Kika Markham) hates her husband Bill (Jack
Shepherd), constantly badgering him and calling him
“pathetic.” Their
relationship started to crumble when their youngest child and
only son ran away from home, apparently so he could have sex
with his girlfriend. Oh,
yeah – Bill seems to have a thing for his black neighbor, as
well. Eileen and
Bill also spawned three daughters, including:
Debbie
(Shirley Henderson, Topsy-Turvy), a divorced
hairdresser (with bad hair, no less) that loves penis almost
as much as her only child, eleven-year-old soccer fan Jack
(Peter Marfleet). Her
ex-husband Dan (Ian Hart, The End of the Affair) is an
irresponsible lout.
Molly (Molly
Parker, Dean Koontz's Intensity) is about to have her
first child and is happily married to a kitchen remodeling
salesman named Eddie (John
Simm, Cracker), who hates his job, wants to quit and
doesn’t so much want a wife or kid.
Nadia
(Gina McKee, Notting Hill) a gangly waitress that
hopelessly looks for love in the personal ads, but has yet to
manage a third date with any of them.
Did I miss
something here? Did
Winterbottom wake up and find a vagina between his legs?
Although I don’t have an inherent problem with
chick-flicks, I do have a problem with a guy that’s made two
strong, masculine films making a wimpy flick where all of the
male characters are deplorable.
The women in Wonderland aren’t much better
than the men, but it is definitely told from a female
perspective. On
the plus side, each character is miserable in their own way.
The only person that seems remotely happy is little
Jack when he sneaks out of his house to go to the Bonfire
Night festival, but then he gets mugged.
Just to
keep things interesting, Winterbottom employed several kooky
techniques to Wonderland.
He used only hand-held cameras and hidden microphones.
There were no extras, no lights and no clapperboard was
used during filming. Winterbottom
also chose to use 16mm film, which was later blown up to 35mm.
The result, as you can imagine, is very grainy and
looks a bit like a documentary. While attempting a sort of cinematic freedom, Winterbottom
readily denies the fact that he tried to copy the Dogme
aesthetic. In
fact, Wonderland was in pre-production when the first
two Dogme films (The Celebration and The Idiots)
screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, where the director
sat on the jury. But
despite not trying to achieve results like his Danish
counterparts, the hospital scenes at the end of Wonderland
look very Kingdom-esque.
1:48
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but includes adult language, implied violence and brief nudity
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