I had sought out a DVD copy of this wonderful film on Amazon, and was informed that it was un-released; therefore I was surprised one Saturday evening a couple weeks ago, while rooting through a bin of budget DVDs at a local supermarket, to find a copy of "Dreamchild" -- and for $1, no less! The reproduction quality is very poor, but the gist of this remarkable film is still there.
One can read the plot synopsis on other postings -- in 1932, the aged Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (nee Alice Liddell)(played by Coral Browne), has been invited from England to Columbia University to participate in the celebration of the centenary of a friend from her childhood, Rev. Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll). She doesn't quite understand why all the fuss about "Queer Mr. Dodgson, who told such amusing tales," nor is she comfortable with the New World of New York, and the New Age of the twentieth century, and the threat they present to her Victorain mind and morality. (The use of names here is very important: she insists on being referred to as Mrs. Hargreaves, and he as Mr. Dodgson, while the world at large thinks on them as Alice and Lewis Carroll.) As she contemplate the passing of her world, and her own impending mortality, we are given flashbacks to her youth -- boating parties on the Thames with her family and their friends, including Lewis Carroll, who regales them with the stories and poems that will become "Alice in Wonderland" -- and dreams and hallucinations that take the form of scenes from that book.
There is a sub-plot which consists of Mrs. Hargreaves relations and attitudes towards her traveling companion, a young woman named Lucy (Nicola Cowper), and her budding romance with a pushy New York reporter (Peter Gallagher).
However, it's the memory and dream scenes that really propel this movie forwards. The subject of the adult Carroll's relationship with pre-pubescent girls is a tricky one -- whether it was pure platonic friendship or sexual paedophilia, repressed or expressed, is a question whose answer is lost in the discrete mists of history, and is less important in the long run than the great and enduring work of literature which it produced. This film treats the matter with a subtlety unmatched by any other film on so delicate a topic. The charisma between Ian Holm's besmitten, uncomfortable, stuttering Carroll, and Amelia Shankley's almost unconsciously flirtatious Child Alice, is astounding.
In the "Wonderland" hallucination scenes, the various characters Alice (represented by the adult Mrs. Hargreaves) meets -- the March-hare, the Mad Hatter, et al. -- are created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop; but get all notion of cute, funny muppets out of your head: these are horrific apparitions, having aged like Alice herself, and grown mangy, snaggle-toothed, and surly (or surlier: they're pretty surly in Carroll's original story) -- in fact, the manifestations of those emotions and memories from her youth which Mrs. Hargreaves has so long repressed, and which, at the touching final scenes of the film, she learns to acknowledge and accept.
One can read the plot synopsis on other postings -- in 1932, the aged Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (nee Alice Liddell)(played by Coral Browne), has been invited from England to Columbia University to participate in the celebration of the centenary of a friend from her childhood, Rev. Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll). She doesn't quite understand why all the fuss about "Queer Mr. Dodgson, who told such amusing tales," nor is she comfortable with the New World of New York, and the New Age of the twentieth century, and the threat they present to her Victorain mind and morality. (The use of names here is very important: she insists on being referred to as Mrs. Hargreaves, and he as Mr. Dodgson, while the world at large thinks on them as Alice and Lewis Carroll.) As she contemplate the passing of her world, and her own impending mortality, we are given flashbacks to her youth -- boating parties on the Thames with her family and their friends, including Lewis Carroll, who regales them with the stories and poems that will become "Alice in Wonderland" -- and dreams and hallucinations that take the form of scenes from that book.
There is a sub-plot which consists of Mrs. Hargreaves relations and attitudes towards her traveling companion, a young woman named Lucy (Nicola Cowper), and her budding romance with a pushy New York reporter (Peter Gallagher).
However, it's the memory and dream scenes that really propel this movie forwards. The subject of the adult Carroll's relationship with pre-pubescent girls is a tricky one -- whether it was pure platonic friendship or sexual paedophilia, repressed or expressed, is a question whose answer is lost in the discrete mists of history, and is less important in the long run than the great and enduring work of literature which it produced. This film treats the matter with a subtlety unmatched by any other film on so delicate a topic. The charisma between Ian Holm's besmitten, uncomfortable, stuttering Carroll, and Amelia Shankley's almost unconsciously flirtatious Child Alice, is astounding.
In the "Wonderland" hallucination scenes, the various characters Alice (represented by the adult Mrs. Hargreaves) meets -- the March-hare, the Mad Hatter, et al. -- are created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop; but get all notion of cute, funny muppets out of your head: these are horrific apparitions, having aged like Alice herself, and grown mangy, snaggle-toothed, and surly (or surlier: they're pretty surly in Carroll's original story) -- in fact, the manifestations of those emotions and memories from her youth which Mrs. Hargreaves has so long repressed, and which, at the touching final scenes of the film, she learns to acknowledge and accept.