Wonderland

This film hit home and touched me so deeply on a personal level, its not even funny. And I believe it should have a fairly wide appeal, as well. The main limiting factor is that it may only be fully appreciated by Britons and anglophiles. There are so many specifics of daily working class London life, and the accents are slightly thick, that non-Britons may not be able to connect.

I read a review of this film in the Village Voice (it was very positive, and I rented the title on the strength of the recommendation) and one of the things it said was that this film didn't avert its eyes from the ugly things in life. And that is exactly what give this film is weight and poignancy.

This film even manages to capture one of the most difficult (and therefore least often seen, in films) aspects of modern working class life: the mind numbing crassness, tedium and insignificance. And at the same time, it manages to give dignity to these people's lives and gives them hope for finding threads of meaning in the garbage heap of modern life. The thought that came most forcefully to me at the end of this film was: how many years of suffering do the working class have to endure before their lives are portrayed with dignity and meaning?

One thing about this film that is consistently downbeat, and that the film maker had the good sense not to try and sugar coat, is the awful over crowding in modern Britain. This aspect is truly horrific, suffocating and overwhelming. And maybe this is the most topsy-turvy aspect of this film, that modern Britons are expected to endure this with good grace, but I don't know, I can't say.

The music is lovely as well, very well chosen, very understated. And its all in a minor key, of course.

Its films like this that re-affirm my faith in film as an artistic medium. But, although this film gives a sweet dignity to the recent past, it doesn't seem to hold out any real hope for the future. And it is this sidestepping of facile hopefulness where this movie really hits the deepest. This film says, in my opinion, that any progress towards a livable future is going to take everything we have to struggle to achieve.

This is a very artful piece of work which looks like it was made by the Dogma mob – hand –held camera, minimal lighting, grainy film, but it is actually very well put together by Michael Winterbottom with superior acting, good musical score (by Michael Nyman) and a reasonable amount of dramatic tension. Initially I thought `God this is boring' as three days in the life of three sisters and their family, lovers and friends, all ordinary Londoners, unfolded, but by about a third of the way through it got interesting. By the end I was starting even to care about the characters. It was a little like watching a television series where the fairly ordinary characters unfold slowly, but somehow over time get a hold on your imagination. Except of course this film is just over 100 minutes long.

We see most of the story through Nadia, the middle sister, played by Gina McKee, who last popped up at a dinner party in `Notting Hill'. This time it's inner South London, and Nadia is answering lonely hearts ads without great success. Her older sister Debbie (Shirley Henderson, the tiny diva from `Topsy Turvy') who has an ex husband and a 10 year old son, seems to have no trouble picking up men, while Mollie (Mollie Parker) the youngest, is awaiting the birth of her first child. In a whirl of lights, crowded streets, traffic, noisy bars, cigarette smoke and small ill-lit rooms, their interwoven stories are played out. In the background, but close at hand are Mum and Dad, despising each other but still living in the same house.

All the sisters are well portrayed but Kika Markham and Jack Shepard, trusty old troupers that they are, practically steal the show as the disillusioned parents. The sister's men (and their mostly absent brother) are portrayed as weak, shallow or stupid, but the sisters are a forgiving bunch (unlike their mother).

It really is quite an achievement to make an interesting, honest movie about lives so mundane that they make `This Life' look like `Melrose Place'. If I were such an ordinary Londoner and I saw this film I think I'd experience the shock of recognition. And then consider emigrating. The life of the contemporary ordinary female Londoner is not far removed from quiet desperation, it seems. And perhaps that's so for the men too. It's just that they notice it a bit less.

This isn't a cute film. It's no "Notting Hill", that's for sure. How London has been portrayed in this film is no advert for the place. Cold, nervous, loud, lonely. This is London. Warts and all. Shot in an eerie, lonely manner the film deals with individuals, whose lives have criss-crossed (or ultimately will).

I suppose at the hub of the film is a tired train-wreck of a marriage between two upper middle-aged people. The mother, unable to show affection, unable to give anything at all, and a father who keeps the act up, while hurting deep down. He's popular with the neighbors, his wife is aggressive, spiteful and is in denial of what a couch-potato she has become.

They have four children, all "adults". Three girls and a son, of whom they have very sparse contact (the father dotes, and longs for him). It's in the lives and relationships of the three daughters that the film is centered. All of whom have scars from their up-bringing. I presume the mother's problems have been handed over to the girls. One, a young mother, has difficulty showing affection to her son. Another constantly on the look out for someone to love her. It's very, very agonizing. The third daughter is heavily pregnant, and is in a relationship with a guy who has problems of his own.

Gritty. Scary and ultimately warm. (Well a few degrees above 0 Kelvin, anyway).

I found it very interesting. Makes one think.

"Wonderland" is a well-articulated drama about working people in London going through the emotional chaos of everyday life. What makes it special is that it shows a family with little or no parental support struggling to hold together by the fortitude of its siblings. It is a special film in two other ways: characters act out their roles within unstaged, real world settings and, at the same time, the characters are shown, mostly in isolation, responding to these same settings. By doing so, the film highlights even more the chaotic, transitory, and even aimless behaviors of urban life. We see the mother, Eileen (Kika Markham) relieving her frustrations by playing in an actual bingo hall, the estranged father, Tim (Stuart Townsend) taking his son Jack (Peter Marfleet) to a wildly contested soccer match, an emotionally wounded woman, Nadia (Gina McKee) riding a double-decker bus filled with revelers, and the piece-de-resistance of one of the pregnant characters, Molly (Molly Parker) giving live birth. The film even uses fast forwarding frames in two scenes, one involving Nadia and her lonely-hearts club failures and the other when the dishonest husband James cannot return home to his wife, to illustrate their out of control, misdirected lives. Another treat of this film is that we don't initially know the identity of the characters and their connection to each other until the film slowly unfolds bits and pieces of their story. While that might tax the patience of some people, I became much more alert to the story. What was annoying was the overemphasis on the background nightlife of London and the heavy dramatic score, a score that seemed to tip off in at least two places that the film was prematurely ending. Overall, "Wonderland" is a well-acted, worthwhile film because it successfully portrays real-life situations involving real-life struggles in a unusually candid and poignant way.

Although not classified as a film for TV, `Wonderland' is very much in the style of a production for that media, and indeed might even be classified as `soap-opera'.

But forget anything and everything you have seen of that type of film: `Wonderland' is totally in another sphere, with a well-constructed story of a long-weekend, magnificently natural performances and excellent dialogues. One constantly thinks of the theatre playhouse element as the actors carry forward this sociological document, excellently choreographed by Michael Nyman´s music.

Here indeed is a richly rewarding 100-odd minutes of your time. The characters are immediate and thus so real that you cannot but fail to be swept into the story. Intertwining levels from the elderly couple, down through their daughters to the young grandson, all lends palpable reality to the price of living in the backdrops of a teeming faceless city.

Set over the weekend on which the ever faithful and conservative British continue celebrating `Guy Fawkes Night' commemorating the attempted blowing up of the Houses of Parliament by said Guido Fawkes a few centuries ago, the film cleverly brings together ordinary Londoners at a particular moment which undoubtedly is crucial to each of them. The cast is splendid; the performances are exactly right, natural, and thus so realistic; there is no forced over-the-top stuff here. Whereas I can easily sympathise with the symptomatic causes underlying the nonentity of suburban life in gigantic cities, and therefore can easily feel for these people in Winterbottom's very welcome offering in this film, I can so easily again see why, when barely twenty, I took to my heels and left London for other pastures.

Thanks for reminding me, Mr. Winterbottom. But thanks also for a fascinating insight into fine character-making in a very enjoyable film.