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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 borrower 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 – not yet rated, but includes adult language, implied violence and brief nudity
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