Small Wonder

I recently saw Alex In Wonderland (1970), the film Paul Mazursky made after he broke through with his directorial debut Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969).  My main reaction was only in that era would anyone be allowed to make something so self-indulgent. Not that self-indulgence has to be bad.  Just usually.

The plot, as it were, is about Alex Morrison (Donald Sutherland), a director who's just made his first film.  He flies to Hollywood and we get, essentially, a bunch of disconnected scenes (including some fantasy or surrealistic sequences) where he ponders what his next film should be.

He meets a neo-hippie producer (played by Mazursky) who offers him absurd scripts.  He talks about certain biopics that may have seemed wild then, but actually got made--Malcolm X, Lenny Bruce. He interacts withi his wife (played by Ellen Burstyn), his two daughters (one played by Mazursky's daughter) and his mother (played by famed improv teacher Viola Spolin).  He hangs with his entourage on the beach and discusses revolutionary filmmaking. He meets two of his idols, Federico Fellini and Jeanne Moreau, and the movie stops dead (not that it was too alive to begin with) as he tells them how much he admires them.  And so on.

The film is clearly inspired by Fellini's 8 1/2 (considered a classic, though not by me), another film about a blocked director, and, in fact, references it directly.  But really, why should we care about Alex and his problems?

Some of the scenes by themselves aren't bad, and comment with sympathy and satire on the world Mazursky was living in.  But as a whole it has no drive.  This is the kind of film that would work best in excerpts. (It is fascinating to see Hollywood Boulevard in 1970--it's changed a lot, but some things remain.)