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Wonderland (R) (99 min.) - One of the most unpleasant movie experiences of 2003 is James Cox's Wonderland, based on the downfall of John Holmes, the first porn movie king. The story is nasty enough: Holmes became a raving drug addict, living with a teenage girl and clinging to his estranged wife, got involved with friends in very low places, then possibly contributed to the grisly deaths of four of them.
Cox makes matters more unbearable with a frenetic cinematic style that never lets up, full of needless editing tricks as if editor Jeff McEvoy were being paid by the splice. Sometimes the camera gives three or more points of view of the same sights in the time it takes for an actor to slur one sentence. A soundtrack of overly ironic 1980s rock tunes comments unnecessarily on the action, capped by the ridiculous placement of a Gordon Lightfoot groaner, possibly to make viewers sympathetic to a character who, for the past hour and a half, has been painted as thoroughly undeserving.
This movie is annoying, like being locked in a tiny room with speed freaks. The actors have a heyday playing pharma-psychotic, but there's no arc to anyone's role: just a procession of sordid behaviors and deluded optimism with nowhere to go but down, just like the movie.
Val Kilmer plays Holmes as more unstable than he did Jim Morrison in The Doors. Hazy, crazy and gone to seed after such a sexy career, Kilmer's Holmes is a completely disgusting character with no redeeming qualities. Perhaps that portrayal is accurate, but it doesn't lend itself to any degree of entertainment. Holmes' story inspired the Dirk Diggler role in Boogie Nights that at least had some measure of sadness about a promising soul gone sour. Here it's curdled from the start, tossed into Cox's whirring blender with a lot of other unsavory characters.
Josh Lucas (Sweet Home Alabama) offers the best, or at least the most interesting, support as Ron Launius, a wild-eyed drug-party maestro who doesn't give Holmes what he wants, whatever that is besides an endless supply of controlled substances. As a result he gets his skull bashed in, a crime shown from three perspectives in Rashomon style. One is Holmes' self-serving confession, another is the possible coverup of biker David Lind (Dylan McDermott) and the third is probably something approaching the truth.
Cox's arty touches, the desaturation of color and flash paper optical tricks, can't disguise the fact that this story was told more grippingly on E! True Hollywood Story. When television does something better than the movies, that's a problem. Wonderland may hold some interest for people who gawk at auto accidents, but overall it's just an irritating piece of celluloid trash. D-
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic
Out-of-place happy ending
Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (R) (104 min.) - The title and musical choices are intended to evoke memories of a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western or crime drama, but the mood of Shane Meadows' movie is decidedly lighter in tone. This sporadically amusing film is more like The Full Monty, especially with that film's star, Robert Carlyle, front and center.
Carlyle plays Jimmy, a small-time crook hiding out after a recent robbery. He sees his former lover Shirley (Shirley Henderson) on a Jerry Springer-style talk show turning down a marriage proposal from her new companion Dek (Rhys Ifans, Notting Hill). Tired of crime and longing for love, Jimmy returns to Nottingham in England's midlands region to reclaim Shirley and the daughter they share.
Meadows leaves no quirk unnoticed, from one character's seemingly out-of-place infatuation with country music to bingo parlors, a pink three-wheeled car and Jimmy's strong-arm robbery of clowns in full makeup. It doesn't take long for the filmmaker to establish a sense of movies-only "realism," yet Once Upon a Time in the Midlands never quite makes the leap to outrageousness, where these circumstances should be heading. One problem is Ifans, usually a reliable joker, whose simpering character pales next to the rolling boil of Carlyle's Jimmy. Viewers quickly know which man would be best for Shirley, tempering the tension and therefore the comedy.
The musical allusions to Leone, all harmonicas and twanging guitars, get stale after a while. Occasionally a visual reminder of that director's style generates a laugh - Dek posed as a gunfighter holding a power drill is a neat image - but homage becomes the entire reason for the movie as the plot moves toward an inevitable feel-good ending. The lone consistently endearing feature is Henderson, whose working class beauty - think Demi Moore on the dole - and helium voice are special enough to survive such trite material. She's good, the movie's not bad, but it might be more interesting if someone turned ugly. C+
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic