I saw Phoebe in Wonderland at the 2008 Philadelphia Film festival, shortly after the movie premiered at Sundance earlier in the year. I was slightly wary of seeing yet another cushy fairytale film starring a Fanning sister, but since the movie promised some dysfunctional preadolescent preoccupations, I though it might be worth watching Elle enact Alice. I tried very hard to get in to the right mindset for this movie; I suspended my belief that it is wrong for Hollywood/ the Fanning family to herd the girls through a series of Blockbusters hits, plugging one or both in any movie according to age appropriateness. I also tried to separate the younger Fanning from her elder Fanning counterpart, even though the two are rather like the Olsen twins: hard to tell apart and not really worth the trouble.

Turns out I was right about the noxious effect of Phoebe in Wonderland, but for very altogether different reasons than I anticipated. The story surrounds, of course, little nine year old Phoebe who is obsessed with the fairy tale Alice in Wonderland; her intense love of the fantasy only deepens as her mother writes a book about it and Phoebe herself is cast to star in the play at her school. As she bonds with her eccentric drama teacher and fends off taunting classmates, Phoebe starts to exhibit bad behavior that seems to have come out of the blue. Turns out the (terrible) plot twist is that Phoebe has Tourette’s syndrome, an uncontrollable reality that pushes her deeper than most into the world of make believe. If only all Tourette’s was as adorable and easily sugar coated as Phoebe’s conveniently benign case, the disease would hardly be worth making a movie about.

Phoebe in Wonderland is nothing but a mockery of mental illness. Though Elle Fanning does deliver convincing emotion, her character is not nearly immersed in the typical turmoil of such a serious and devastating disease. Phoebe’s behavior is always provoked (she spits at her classmates only when they torture her); she exhibits no spontaneous tics (the hallmark of the disease) at all. Sure, Phoebe has impulse control and a touch of (terribly portrayed) OCD (Phoebe’s hands are raw, very suddenly, at the dinner table one night and fine the next day.) But I think it is highly irresponsibly filmmaking to tailor a serious disease to suit such a silly script.

Felicity Huffman is horribly annoying as Phoebe’s mother, but this, I suppose, is the writer’s doing and not the actress’s fault alone. Phoebe’s mother Hillary is a ‘writer’ and so she spends the entire duration of the movie moaning that motherhood affords her no time to write; if this isn’t a completely overused, unoriginal stock character, I don’t know what is. Hillary moves through the whole film talking about how ‘special’ her daughter is and blaming the teachers and the ‘prick-cipal’ for Phoebe’s disruptive behavior; the worst part of this is that the script suggests that we, the audience, should be enthused about her parent power. There is a ridiculous scene at the end of the movie where Hillary diagnoses Phoebe herself after firing a psychologist; the whole thing is too much to handle. In the end, Phoebe is a flop; nothing wondrous about it.

Liz Licorish
LizFlix@ElitesTV.com