plum bananas

My wife and I watched Phoebe in Wonderland Monday night. I don’t want to write a normal, objective film review, because, well, others do it much, much better. Still, I’m driven to write a few words about what stood out to me, including mental illness in children, parental angst, and the performances of Elle Fanning, as 9-year-old Phoebe, and Felicity Huffman, as her mother, Hillary. If you haven’t seen the movie, Phoebe displays symptoms of what had me guessing was OCD, but later turns out to be Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. Phoebe is socially isolated because of her odd behaviors: spitting at kids, cursing uncontrollably, counting her steps, spinning, and washing her hands until they’re bloody.

Since I have a ten-year-old, I was sucked into this story and empathized with Hillary, who refused to acknowledge Phoebe’s self-destructive behavior as anything other than “kids being kids,” refused even the therapist’s diagnosis. “No, she doesn’t have that!” she tell him. We all want healthy, disease-free, kids. We want our kids to be happy. We want our kids to get along with other kids and to make friends easily.

Before Chloe came along, I doubted I would ever have children, feared they would inherit all the unwanted parts of myself: the social fear, the avoidance, the anxiety. Why produce a human being destined for misery? Also–and this turned out to be untrue, thank God–I feared I would be unable to relate to a little baby, a toddler, a young girl. What would I say to this strange little kid? I quickly realized that I could be myself around this little girl, then these two little girls, but no others, without feeling self-conscious.

Hillary also struggles with her identity, her role in the world. She is trying to expand her dissertation into a book, but she’s not currently writing. So is she a writer? She clings to that label and is scared to think of herself as “only” a mother. She blames herself for Phoebe’s unhappiness, feels guilty even attempting to write, because she’s distracted and has less time to give to her two daughters.

The best (and most heartbreaking) scene is where Phoebe tells her mother, through sobs and tears, that she can’t stop the behavior that keeps getting her into trouble. I cried during this scene. During a typical film-induced crying session, a single tear (maybe two) might escape a tear duct, but I remove it before it reaches the middle of my face. Easy! But here I couldn’t keep up with them. Jennifer cried too. On the screen I saw Chloe, in pain, crying to me. And Ainsley: What if some of her “bad” behavior–normal stuff for her age, but behavior I constantly try to stop–is caused by some muted, hidden mental quirk? So I sat there, with fear and misplaced guilt, crying.

I don’t know if the scene would have drained me so if not for Elle Fanning’s performance in it. I just watched the scene again and, again, it tore me up.

Tags: Alice In Wonderland, anxiety, children, Elle Fanning, Film, Health, kids, Life, Love, Movie, Movies, OCD, parenting, People, personal, Review, Reviews, social phobia, Tourette's, writing