Wonderland

I caught this on TV without knowing who it was by and I was instantly captivated. The first thing is that it's filmed and set where I live, around the Elephant and Castle, as well as in Soho, and it's about the people I see every day. It's absolutely spot on about the kind of lives people around here lead and the way individuals and different social groups interact.

What lifts it above the sort of social realism common in British cinema is the cutting, the cinematography and Michael Nyman's lovely music, which must be his best work post-Greenaway. While I've never been a big fan of the 'poetry of degradation' school of art, somehow the ugliness and squalor of South East London are transformed by this film and the lives of the characters are invested with real dignity.

Though it may deal with the same sort of subject matter as Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, the style and approach are very different - the difference between a great piece of prose and a poem. I guess you could say Winterbottom and Nyman do for London what Scorsese and Herrmann did for New York in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

This is a beautiful film and I feel real gratitude to Michael Winterbottom for bringing our lives to the screen in such a way.

This movie has only just come out on DVD in Britain, that is a shamefully long time for a film to reach the country it was made in. But now it is here, and possibly finding a new audience, I thought I'd write a quick review. If you have read some of the other reviews, you will no doubt be aware of the 'kitchen sink' factor in this film. Well, I'm not going to deny that, the subject matter would not look out of place in a soap opera. . . .however it is the performances, the script and the fantastic style of this movie which pulls it out of the mundane and into the cinematic. Michael Winterbottom is clearly a director who like several of his British contemporaries such as Mike Leigh and Shane Meadows, believes that the drama around us in everyday life is worthy of the big screen. The film has a fine ensemble of characters, three very different sisters, their estranged brother and squabbling parents. The performances are brave and heartfelt in all cases, and even though the drama takes place over one weekend, the characters really do evolve. The most enticing thing about the film is the way it is shot and scored. Sean Bobbitt's time lapse photography and dogma style 16mm cinematography combined with Michael Nyman's emotive music is a really fantastic combination. This film shows London how the people who live there see it, namely from the ground. Nearly every film set in London now seems to have to include the Gherkin, the Tate modern and the Millennium wheel, what Winterbottom presents us with is something simultaneously far less and far more remarkable.

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.

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.

"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.