Phoebe in Wonderland (1/30/10)

This movie was very well done. It was believable from the very beginning.  It's hard to watch Phoebe go through all the hard times and to see how it was affecting the family.  The little blurb on the movie didn't really prepare me for what I watched, but I'm okay with that since it turned out to be much more then I was expecting.

I didn't realize that Dakota Fanning had a little sister (and I have loved just about everything Dakota Fanning is in).  It wasn't until the very end of the movie that I saw that Phoebe was played by Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sister.  I don't know where their parents took them for acting classes but they both are superb actors at such a young age.  Elle plays a very convincing roll of a young girl that is developing Tourette's syndome, how she deals with it and how the other little kids treat her is all to believable.

The mother was played wonderfully by Felicity Huffman, I never could have told you her name and chances are I won't be able to in the future.  But she did a masterful job of bringing to life a mother who wants nothing more then to be a good mother.  You get to go through her struggle with realizing that her daughter really does have a problem and isn't just an imaginative little girl (though she is that as well).  I think watching the mom go through this brings forward some of my own fears that I won't be a good mother when the time comes about.  That struggle to feel like you're really doing a good job even when things aren't necessarily going right is always a difficult one and I can only imagine how that would increase when you have children that rely upon you.

Yes I liked this movie, I liked how it progress, I liked watching Phoebe find something she loved to do.  I liked watching the family slowly understand the difficulty that they were dealing with.  And I loved watching the parents try to deal with something that is so difficult and yet make it through together in the end.  It seems in real life the parents don't always make it through these things and that is very very sad.