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.
