October
17, 2003 | Consumer alert: Don't mistake Wonderland for family-friendly
fare about Mad Hatters, Red Queens and White Rabbits. This aggressively
grungy drama actually is a bad-time story, a sensationally stylish mosaic
of low life and bloody death in the drug-dealing demimonde of early
'80s L.A.
At
the center of the sound and fury is John Holmes - a.k.a. Johnny Wadd
- a notorious '70s porn star who exploited his near-legendary "talent"
to finance a lifestyle of hedonistic excess. (His misadventures inspired
the "Dirk Diggler" character in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie
Nights.) Throughout the Me Decade, John went too far, and then a
lot further, getting high and burning bridges while depleting his bank
account. He had already outlived his novelty value by 1981, the year
Wonderland begins.
And
yet, as the movie cunningly demonstrates, when you lack all semblance
of shame, you can parlay any kind of celebrity into sustenance. Even
as a pathetic parody of a burnt-out superstar, John still can worm his
way into the homes and parties of small-time dealers, where he begs,
borrows or steals scraps from their tables. The dealers treat him with
bemused contempt - but they also provide him with drugs. Wonderland
suggests that, in the lower depths, it's always a treat to be able to
look down on someone, anyone.
Los
Angeles police deemed John a prime suspect when a few of his condescending
enablers wound up on the wrong end of blunt instruments. On July 1,
1981, at a Wonderland Avenue abode in a quiet corner of Laurel Canyon,
five people were bludgeoned - four of them fatally - by intruders wielding
lead pipes. The sole survivor was too traumatized to identify her attackers.
Cops tied John to the crime - he knew the victims, scammed drugs from
them, and left an incriminating handprint at the crime scene - but he
was eventually acquitted of all charges relating to the slaughter.
Wonderland
poses the question: What, if anything, did a gone-to-seed ex-porn player
have to do with one of L.A.'s most infamous murders? Director James
Cox, working from an intricately structured screenplay he co-wrote with
Captain Mauzner, Todd Samovitz and D. Loriston Scott, isn't content
to provide a single answer. Taking his cue from Akira Kurosawa's classic
Rashomon - and, perhaps inadvertently, recalling the structural
stratagems employed in first-season episodes of TV's Boomtown
- he offers multiple points of view, conflicting accounts of crime,
in an attention-grabbing crazy-quilt of variegated film stocks, swooping
camera movements, split-screen montages, animated transitions and shock-cut
editing. It's up to the audience to decide which of the self-serving
testimonies, each offered by an unreliable witness, comes closest to
the truth - assuming, of course, that any of the stories can be believed.
Val
Kilmer does an excellent job of allowing for all possibilities while
playing John Holmes as a self-destructive and self-pitying sleaze who's
occasionally capable of seeming personable and charismatic. He commands
the passionate fealty of a drug-addled teen-age girlfriend (Kate Bosworth),
even as he plays on the reluctantly maternal instincts of his estranged
and incredulous wife (Lisa Kudrow). But he cowers before the threats
of small-time dealers (including Josh Lucas, Dylan McDermott and Tim
Blake Nelson) who join him in an ill-conceived plot to rip off a vicious
nightclub owner named Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian).
We
never discover whether John - who died of an AIDS-related illness in
1988 - was a guilty bystander or an unwilling participant during the
murders that likely were ordered by a vengeful Nash. (We don't even
know for certain that [he] [John] actually was present during the killings.)
But we learn more than enough about him, and about the sordid milieu
in which he operated, to be genuinely fascinated by the unsolved mysteries
of Wonderland.