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Far Out Magazine, 2025
After the soaring success of his debut feature Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, marking the existentialist take on the sex comedy, Paul Mazursky immediately became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after emerging directors, ringing in an era of enlightenment and steamy semiotics. Arriving at the end of the 1960s, the film marked the beginning of a particularly tumultuous decade in the industry, with visceral vibrations being felt from the socio-political movements of the time and reflected through a newfound fluidity and sense of curiosity in cinema. Mazursky was, undeniably, one of the key ringleaders of this movement, with a self-reflexive quality to his work that mirrors the cultural upheaval of the 1970s and new world values, something that was explored with wit and sensitivity in his pivotal 1969 film.
He was met with intense adoration after the release of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, as well as intense speculation about his next project. However, many directors have spoken about how easy it is to get swept up in the intoxicating potency of the Hollywood bubble and the negative effect this can have on your creativity, slowly pulling you towards a life of glamour and fame that can corrupt the very process of creation. While many directors struggle to come out of this delusion unscathed, Mazursky channelled his inner conflict over his success and an overwhelming sense of possibility into his second feature, creating a surprisingly personal film about the struggle to maintain authenticity in the wake of newfound celebrity.
Starring Donald Sutherland and Ellen Burstyn, Alex in Wonderland follows a bohemian film director called Alex Morrison, who has just finished his first feature-length film. During its initial screenings, Alex is repeatedly told that he is on the edge of huge commercial and artistic success, and as a result, he will have complete freedom in choosing his next project. However, as he makes his rounds in Hollywood, meeting various studio executives and producers, all of whom offer him ludicrous amounts of money to fund his next film, he struggles to choose his next project and finds himself fantasising about movie sequences that reflect his dilemmas.
Released in 1970, the movie came shortly after Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, with many real-life studios wanting to capitalise on the success of his debut feature. However, Alex in Wonderland was met with a comparatively lukewarm reaction, with many critics expressing confusion at the shift in tone and meandering narrative of the film.
At the beginning, Alex is smugly pleased about his imminent success, relishing in the glittering compliments and seemingly endless possibilities. He and his wife toy with the idea of buying a new house, considering splashing out on a more expensive property to reflect their newfound status within the Hollywood elite. On the outside, it seems as though he has a perfect life—his career is taking off, and he has a wife, two children and a nice car. What more could he want?
However, through his newfound triumph, Mazursky poses the idea that success, fame and financial freedom corrupt our ability to be creative. Alex begins his foray into Hollywood with his wits about him, seemingly content with less and unperturbed by the enticing offers being dangled in front of him. But as time goes on, we begin to see his frustrations over an abundance of opportunities taking its toll on him, with the director snapping at his wife and children, acting indecisively over the decision of where to live and eventually, losing his mind entirely.
Mazursky largely shows this through these long and confusing dream sequences in which Alex fantasises about all the different movie scripts he is being presented with, merging into one disjointed blob as his waking life is punctuated by dreams of gory battles, wars, love scenes and other unidentifiable moments. With the promise of plenty, he cannot latch onto any one thing, slowly becoming intoxicated by the ludicrous offers and power of Hollywood.
While the film has been criticised for being muddled and unmotivated, and I certainly felt this during many scenes, this choice feels intentional from Mazursky, with Alex’s blossoming ego slowly distorting his grasp on reality and creative identity, leading to a permanent state of disorientation as he tries to hold himself together in the quest of his discovery of power. In many ways, the meandering state of the narrative can be seen as a reflection of Mazursky’s own attempt to process his personal position in Hollywood after the success of his debut, over-saturated with so many possibilities that it became damaging to his process.
People cannot create without restrictions or when tasked with making something purely for the sake of making something. Creativity has to come from the heart, and it seems as though Mazursky’s experience of being encouraged to create in order for studios to capitalise on his previous success led to his deeply personal tale of disenchanted despair and overwhelming freedom.
When comparing this movie to the rest of his filmography, it stands out in how it cannot be detached from the director’s own life, existing as a surrealist expression of his personal dilemmas in the industry and a take on the Fellini strand of filmmaking. Fellini himself even appears in the film, with Alex stumbling over his words as he tries to capture his attention during a conversation.
Eventually, he resorts to asking him a question that becomes a recurring motif throughout the film—what he would eat if he could only eat three foods for the rest of his life. For someone presented as an intellectual and ‘new-age thinker’, Mazursky highlights Alex’s disillusionment and aimlessness through his inability to grasp even the smallest of ideas, wasting an opportunity to speak to his ultimate filmmaking hero by asking a pointless and inconsequential question, reflecting his own floundering position in the industry.
Alex in Wonderland is not an easy film to enjoy, with Mazursky blurring the line between his personal and creative life by processing both through the movie, exploring his own struggles with maintaining his creative identity when faced with the land of plenty. Perhaps his choice to explore his own experiences was a last resort for the director, unable to latch onto a project himself. So, when faced with the pressure of having to create something, he used the film to process his own existential crisis. Or perhaps the director had already come out of the other side and wanted to critique the very industry that was forcing his creative expression for profit.
While certainly messy in places, Alex in Wonderland is a disorienting yet deeply grounded film about the promise of having everything from a corrosive source, leading to one man slowly losing his mind and disappearing into nothing as he fails to keep sight of what truly matters.