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Credits

Director: James Cox Starring: Val Kilmer, Kate Bosworth, Lisa Kudrow, Dylan McDermott, Josh Lucas, Christina Applegate, Eric Bogosian, Tim Blake Nelson, Carrie Fisher Screenplay: James Cox, Captain Mauzner, Todd Samovitz, D. Loriston Scott Country: USA

The year is 1981. Los Angeles is populated by a colourful cast of the seedy and the wasted; refugees and cast-offs from the sixties waking up from the summer of love ten years later and discovering that the party's moved on without them; a hangover of nostalgia and disillusionment. Desperate times make desperate men. An underbelly of sleaze congeals with the hardcore criminal: hippie burnouts, cocaine cowboys, canon-packing crazies and smack-eyed starlets - all beyond salvation. The sixties have left them dried up and burnt out, the party's over but no one told them. Where did the good times go? And when will they come again? Hunter S Thompson summed it up best: "There was a fantastic universal sense that what we were doing was right, that we were winning…our energy would simply prevail…we had the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…You can almost see the high water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Fear and loathing has become entrenched in sun-bleached California under a moral eclipse.

Wonderland lays bare all the damaged romanticism of the American road movie; speed and tears; break-ups and break-downs; fast cars, hard drugs, doomed lovers; Bonnie and Clyde meets Trainspotting. Every car trip feels like a getaway, an escape to "anywhere…everywhere". John Holmes (Kilmer) and his underage girlfriend, Dawn (Bosworth) are on the run, holed up in a hotel room and desperate for cash, when news of the murders on Wonderland Avenue come onto the television. The police, who question his involvement in the homicides, soon pick up Holmes. The conflicting accounts of the murders are recollected in flashbacks, both subjective and objective, and only serve to confuse the already muddled events. Who killed who? Who betrayed who? Who do we believe? What emerges is a tale of a man desperately living on the edge, standing on the brink of some horrible void, a living nightmare; drug fucked and covered in somebody else's blood, on the run from himself, his legend, his enemies and his family.

It is impossible to feel pity for Holmes, to paint him as the victim of circumstance and misfortune. Holmes was the architect of his own demise, the bringer of his own personal apocalypse, a vagrant, a freak show, a coke fiend, a pervert. Life slips through his fingers, love deserts him, and he taints everything with betrayal. His tender relationship with Dawn is sapped of its innocence when she becomes a useable, abuseable and expendable commodity whose body he can sell in place of his own. Holmes is an infantile character who constantly repents but is unable to control himself, his actions and his addictions. In the end he reveals that self-preservation, base survival instinct, is now the only human impulse not destroyed by drug abuse: "I'm scum, I'm filth…I'm alive!" Kilmer totally inhabits Holmes' psyche, stripping away any of his star persona and driving his character further and further into the depths of despair and addiction. In one of the films more unnerving scenes, Holmes kneels in front of a coffee table smothered in cocaine, arching his back and inhaling in a manner that suggests compulsion rather than greed: a human vacuum. This is the best I have ever seen Kilmer act – it's a shame he doesn't do roles like this more often. The most intriguing relationship is between Dawn and Sharon – estranged wife and underage lover, one fighting to stand by her man, the other desperate to push him away. Their mutual affection is baffling as it is touching; these women should be tearing each other apart. What's worse is that Holmes can never seem to decide which he wants; at one point he has the two women sharing the same bed, Holmes having moments before begged his wife to join him in witness protection, now cuddling up to his teenaged sweetheart. Lisa Kudrow delivers a compelling performance that is a million miles away from her usual moronic screen persona. The cast drive a wedge between their off-screen and on-screen personas, delivering confrontational character depictions that are monstrous.

Cox confronts his audience with a psycho-hallucinatory visual aesthetic (a less pompous Natural Born Killers), that's firmly grounded in a claustrophobic universe and isn't too impressed with itself. Multiple colour tones and sunburnt tints capture the endless Californian summer; verite hand-held moments are impressively controlled to minimise nausea; choreographed camera trickery responds to the character's motions; hyperactive editing and split screens distort points of view. Much of the film's visual virtuosity is dedicated to reanimating Holmes' precarious mental state, but there are many other impressive touches. Overlong flashback sequences play with narrative chronology and the cause/effect chain, creating an enigmatic shroud over the truth. The film expertly leads up to a gruesome climax. The murders are relayed in shadows; flickers of movement and lurid gushes of gore, chunky sounds of skulls caving in, men and women screaming – sick and harrowing.