August 10–17, 2000

movie shorts

Wonderland

Loneliness ought to be as great a subject as love, but it’s rare that the theme is developed beyond the vague, sophomoric indignation that the world isn’t as it ought to be. At first, Wonderland seems to be just the latest entry in the ain’t-life-sad canon, following a handful of variously bedraggled characters through the streets of London. There’s Nadia (Gina McKee), with sad eyes and a club-kid haircut, reduced to trolling the personals for companionship; Molly (Molly Parker), whose pregnancy may spell the end of her marriage to Eddie (John Simm); and Eileen (Kika Markham), the desperate, bitter grandmother who has nothing but scorn for her long-suffering husband (Jack Shepherd). Wonderland makes the point that they’re all miserable, and for a while, it seems unlikely that the film will develop any further; what started badly will end badly, with nothing but badness in between.

Despite my initial skepticism, though, I found that Wonderland cuts surprisingly deep, perhaps it’s because of Michael Winterbottom’s documentary-style direction — the film was shot on digital video, sometimes using hidden cameras, and in public, with ordinary Londoners instead of paid extras in the background. Again, the vogue for digital video and "real" situations which has lead to such exploitative mixtures of avant-garde cinema and reality TV as julien donkey-boy more often results in a mess than an insightful movie, but Winterbottom (unlike, say, Timecode’s Mike Figgis) isn’t out to advertise his forward-looking techniques. (In all honesty, I didn’t even know about the use of "real people" until after I’d seen the movie.) It’s naïve and simplistic to think including people who aren’t professional actors in a movie automatically makes it more "real," but it’s a safe bet their non-studio surroundings inspired the actors’ unselfconscious performances. Even Ian Hart, who plays Shirley Henderson’s no-account ex-husband, disappears into his role, despite the fact that he’s played a good-sized handful of similarly loutish types.

Like any lightly structured ensemble piece, Wonderland finds its own center, and that center ends up being Nadia, whose dark, sad eyes emerge as the focal point for the other characters’ longings. At one point, she steps out in London’s nighttime streets, and Sean Bobbitt’s camera follows her aimless wandering. Then, suddenly, the camera shifts into fast motion, and what’s usually a device best left to silent two-reelers becomes a expression of her quiet desperation, as the lights on London’s streets blur into a watery rush.

For a visually naturalistic film, Wonderland’s structure can be fairly manipulative; it’s so intent on proving its point about alienation that it withholds until the very end the fact that nearly all the characters in its disparate stories are connected by blood or marriage. And Michael Nyman’s sweeping score often tends towards the operatic, an odd contrast with Wonderland’s grainy, washed-out visuals. But perhaps that’s the point, not to lean too emphatically on vérité, to stress that art, like life, is about pursuing connections that may never truly take hold.

Wonderland seems too offhand to be a great film, too sketchy and undeveloped. But it stays with you in ways that are hard to explain. Perhaps it only starts working the minute you walk out the door, and become one of Wonderland’s characters yourself, walking the streets, looking for something.