Phoebe in Wonderland Reviews

Dakota Fanning gets all the accolades, but her younger sister, Elle, may be the true natural in the family. While Dakota often comes across as a miniature adult in a child's body, Elle Fanning effortlessly captures childhood in all its glorious emotional messiness in the excellent family drama Phoebe in Wonderland. Fanning plays the title character, a challenging nine-year-old whose erratic, obsessive behavior worries and exhausts her parents (Bill Pullman and Felicity Huffman). In Phoebe, writer-director Daniel Barnz sees a textbook example of how the world wants to diagnose and label children who show the slightest aberration from "normal" behavior. While Phoebe does indeed have a clinically classifiable disorder, that's not Barnz' point. He's more interested in the positive sides of being different, in how a unique personality can produce greatness if it isn't smothered by an over-eager medical community. Phoebe's pairing with an equally quirky drama teacher (Patricia Clarkson) helps draw out these positives, even as she's becoming a more toxic presence in the lives of her family members and classmates. Barnz gets great performances across the board, starting with Fanning -- she's twitchy and abrupt one minute, delightfully fantasy-oriented the next. Fanning plays this emotional roller coaster with a veteran ease that belies her age -- amazingly, she's only a year older than her character -- and she hits both the highs and lows with a brilliant truthfulness. The movie wouldn't have such depth if it weren't for Clarkson and Huffman, the former nearly inaccessible in her commitment to emotional honesty, the latter wearing the stresses of her life in every bedraggled facial expression. As heavy as it can be, however, Phoebe in Wonderland also operates as colorful escapism, giving us a glimpse into the perspective of a child with a boundless imagination, and convincing us of the value of such individuality.