Portrait of the Artisan

By JAY COCKS

Alex is a young and abruptly successful film director whose somewhat desultory wanderings through his subconscious and Hollywood form the core of Alex in Wonderland, a movie that appears to be a looking-glass portrait of its director, Paul Mazursky. Like his protagonist, Mazursky achieved rapid success recently with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and, like Alex again, he was alternately baffled, delighted and finally stymied by his success. Unlike Alex, however, Mazursky found a way out of his creative quandary: he and Co-Author Larry Tucker simply fictionalized and embellished it slightly, then filmed it. The result, although unsuccessful overall, is frequently funny, nasty and telling--better by several light-years than Bob & Carol and a lot more honest in the bargain.

The model for such a cinematic self-portrait, of course, is Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2, and Alex includes an almost obsessional number of homages to the maestro. The best is a meeting between Alex and Fellini. who is working on his new TV film The Clowns, and who politely but firmly excuses himself from Alex's overawed gushings. Fellini, to absolutely no one's surprise, turns out to be quite an actor, and the scene is a gem. But Alex-Mazursky is no Fellini, and Alex is not 8 1/2. Fellini's film was the testament of a frustrated genius; Alex is merely the sketch of a temporarily thwarted artisan.

Mazursky's fantasy sequences--save for a comic nightmare about war on Hollywood Boulevard--are decidedly earthbound. More serously, his attitude toward Hollywood alternates between ridicule and a weird kind of arm's-length respect. He neatly and hilariously skewers one of those groovy new Hollywood studio executives (played and flayed to a turn by Mazursky himself) but his attitude toward Hollywood's pseudo-intellectuals and revolutionary Malibu poseurs is benignly sun-kissed. The film's ending, which features Alex talking over his problems with a tree in back of his newly bought house, is not so much ambiguous as confused.

Donald Sutherland's performance as the bedeviled Alex is his most complex and fully developed to date. He is so shrewdly, quietly excellent that he gives Alex more depth--and certainly a good deal more sympathy--than he might otherwise have had. Ellen Burstyn, as Alex's dedicated but sometimes edgy wife, is lovely and affecting; and there are a lot of good cameo appearances by everyone from Jeanne Moreau to Mazursky's two daughters.

Alex is not the best of the Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies. (Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, made back in 1941, is still the one to beat.) Mazursky can be faulted for pretension and presumption in assuming that an audience would be interested in his creative and familial trials. But he is also a man of talent, shrewd perceptions and a good deal of grating honesty--enough to make Alex an ego trip that is often fun along the way. Jay Cocks

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