Dreamchild (1985)

[DB7]

Lizzie Francke on Dreamchild



If the definition of underrated is that the only copy I could find of this particular film was a snarled-up VHS tape recorded from Channel 5, then Dreamchild is that. Penned by Dennis Potter and directed by Gavin Millar in 1985, it's an elegantly conceived idea that follows the elderly Alice Liddell – she of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland – as she chases down the fleeting memories of the 1860s Oxford summer that inspired the childhood classic.



It is quintessential Potter in its preoccupations with memory and imagination, and the powerful, troubling emotions that are consummated in sublime artistic creation. It opens with the 80-year-old Alice (Coral Browne) arriving in New York in 1932, prompted by the centenary celebrations of Carroll/Rev Charles Dodgson. Peter Gallagher plays a huckster hack who charms his way into Alice's entourage of two, her and her put-upon young companion, Lucy (Nicola Cowper), and ends up acting as her agent, helping the elderly widow navigate the modern world of commercial opportunity.



While a coy and somewhat predictable romance develops between the brash journo and the meek Lucy, the love affair at the heart of Dreamchild is far more complex, as Alice's rediscovered celebrity prompts her to return to the childhood that gave her her fame. The Victorian summer in which she and her sisters were enchanted by the amazing stories from their doting neighbour Dodgson is at first presented as a brightly lit idyll. Crowding into it, however, are also the fantastical creatures of the Reverend's invention, but the great eccentricities of the Mock Turtle, Griffin and Co are now presented as somewhat unnerving and sinister: the Mad Hatter's teeth are yellowing with age, the dormouse's fur matted and lacklustre. In this deranged dream space, the elderly woman comes to an epiphany, understanding at last the nature of the succinctly repressed adoration that her personal fabulist had for her 10-year-old self.



What is magnificent about Dreamchild is that it neither sensationalises nor sentimentalises what is at stake. Exquisitely cast as Dodgson, Ian Holm plays him as a gentle, stuttering man, cocooned in collar and black serge. Crucially, it is not him who is disturbing in the grown-up Alice's recollections, more the unspoken feelings made manifest in the imaginary and channelled into his stories for her. The result is a film with a powerful undertow that believes in the fantastical to explore the chaos of love, an emotion that disturbs as much as delights.



One hopes that with the release of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland someone might see an opportunity for a DVD re-release tie-in. It is a film that deserves to be restored in our collective film psyche – we need our dreams and make-believe.

[TimR]

I saw this with friends when it was released in a small theatre in Boston. The theatre was almost empty, but it continued its run after that for several months based on word of mouth as the audience grew.



It is a very well made and unusual drama that is well worth seeing. The great success of this film is that the journey into the past is presented in a way that is genuinely convincng and haunting. Alice's memories come to life the way real memories do: they are complex and disturbing. Since those memories are of the original model for Alice in the Carroll books, they are even more complex and disturbing with shifts of time and place and character coming unexpectedly.



Coral Browne is outstandingly good as Alice. She is not especially likeable or sensitive, but she is interesting and straightforward.