The trick of making a movie about a troubled little girl is not coming off like a sappy TV movie. Phoebe, a bright ten-year-old, is troubled by the rituals that take up so much of her time, the persistent thoughts and imagined conversations that take up so much of her mind, and the classmates’ torments that take away her confidence. Her parents (Felicity Huffman and Bill Pullman), academic types with their own issues, fail to help.
Elle Fanning is captivating as Phoebe, and Patricia Clarkson is reliably sympathetic as an eccentric drama teacher whose staging of Alice in Wonderland provides a refuge for Phoebe and a motif for the film. (Phoebe fantasizes the adults in her life as figures from the Lewis Carroll classic, a slightly precious conceit.) But the reason the feature debut of writer-director Daniel Barnz compels is because it works her obsessions into a broader story. That is, Phoebe’s condition blends into her personality, and her specific family, including a younger sister who resents the attention she gets. True, Mom’s state of denial is tedious. Phoebe’s troubles are so obvious that I wanted to slap her parents upside the head and tell them to get Phoebe on some meds. But on the whole, Barnz has a made a touching movie that avoids disease-of-the-week clichés.
IMDB link
viewed 3/11/09 at Ritz Five and reviewed 3/16/09
No comments:
Post a Comment