PHOEBE IN WONDERLAND

Phoebe in Wonderland (2008)
Directed and written by Daniel Barnz
96 minutes
* * * *

Nine-year-old Phoebe Lichten (Elle Fanning) desperately wants to be good. So much so that when she blurts out hurtful remarks or spits at her classmates, she devises cantrips and rituals she hopes will keep her on an even keel. When these fail—as of course they will—she resorts to sterner measures: self-punishment, bouts of sarcasm, escapes into fantasy…. The latter route makes a lot of sense given that she’s been cast as the lead in the school play, “Alice in Wonderland.” The adults around her—parents, principal, and a child psychologist—mean well, but they haven’t done much to help Phoebe, and the one person who “gets her,” drama teacher Miss Dodger (Patricia Clarkson) is deemed a dangerous influence. We watch as Phoebe’s control erodes incident by incident, and we soon realize what the adults do not: their prescriptions won’t fix what’s wrong with Phoebe.

This small gem of a film debuted at Sundance in 2008 and went into (very) limited theatrical release in 2009. It’s not hard to fathom why this wasn’t mall fare—there are no chase sequences, Phoebe is the only thing that blows up, it was director Daniel Barnz’s first feature film, the biggest star in the cast is Felicity Huffman, and the theme of a small child in distress is challenging for today’s nostrum-fed theater-goers. Allow us to be emphatic: Rent this film on DVD. Now! Phoebe in Wonderland is not a perfect film, but it is nonetheless a transcendent one and Elle Fanning is a revelation unto herself.

There are holes in the film. Believability gets stretched on occasion, starting with the film’s mise en scène. Phoebe’s family is pretentiously haute bourgeois, the kind of no-real-dialogue ensemble that might populate a Woody Allen film. It is also the sort that dons fancy clothes to dine at home with friends, sips expensive wines, and engages in philosophical (but contrived) discussions of what defines a “good mother.” Phoebe and younger sister, Olivia (Bailee Madison), have all manner of expensive playthings and reside in a lovely house. We wonder how this is bankrolled, given that paterfamilias Peter (Bill Pullman) is a writer and his wife Hillary (Huffman) is avoiding her dissertation. And we certainly wonder how they pay the tuition at what is obviously a private school for gifted children (and normal ones whose Yuppie parents insist are special).

There are also times in which the adult acting is (mildly) stilted and the children way too precocious. Campbell Scott plays Principal Davis as if he prepared for the role by reading Nerds for Dummies, and Pullman is, as usual, milquetoast mediocre. (Pullman is the previous generation’s Matthew McConaughey, a bland non-entity endlessly pushed into roles for which he lacks the range, depth, and ability to make memorable.) For her part, Felicity Huffman plays the clenched-teeth mom well, but too often. Barnz shows her excessive momism as a mirror to Phoebe’s own compulsive behavior, but after a while it’s hard to see Huffman as an aspirant doctoral candidate.

All of this would sink most films. So why four stars? There is, first of all, Patricia Clarkson’s superbly nuanced turn as Miss Dodger. She is, at once, the calm center of Phoebe’s storms and a simmering volcano in her own right. She does not suffer fools gladly, be they peers or children. Clarkson communicates all her emotions with icy control—a sideways glance or raised eyebrow expressing annoyance of frightening proportions, or a Mona Lisa-like smile bestowing unconditional acceptance. And lord help the child who is on the receiving end of one of her curt “thank you” this-encounter-is-over remarks.

The children are wonderful in this film, starting with Jamie (Ian Colletti), a gender-confused child who wants to play the Red Queen in “Alice.” Bailee Madison deftly plays the role of the younger sister whose own attention cravings are hijacked by Phoebe. All of the kids speak above their years, but they are so good at it that after a while we suspend skepticism, just as we forget the fact that a movie-within-a-movie paralleling “Alice in Wonderland” is a fairly shopworn idea. All flaws are more than covered by the astonishing Elle Fanning. Her older sister Dakota (Secret Life of Bees, Sweet Home Alabama) gets more press, but Elle is even more talented. She is a luminous presence each time she is on the screen, and the raw and honest emotions she exudes overcome script problems. Watching her is akin to looking at a small child and seeing a bodhisattva. We can but hope that she, unlike Phoebe, stays on path. If she does, Elle Fanning has the chops to be the next Meryl Streep. Yep! She’s that good.