Wendell Oler, the 12-year-old hero of The Wizard of Loneliness, is full of “cantankerous California blood,” according to his grandfather. Little Wendell, who is intelligent and morbid as well as cantankerous, is staying with his grandparents’ family in Vermont because his mother is dead and his father is off fighting World War II.
The title refers to Wendell’s visions of himself. He’s enveloped himself in a shield of his own smarts, and he fancies that he has magical powers that will protect him from other people. But when the lonely wizard moves to Vermont, he discovers a group of people who help bring him out of his protective shell.
At first, he’s an exasperating child, the kind who walks into a group of adult authority figures and announces, “I am in no mood to talk to anybody!”
But his sympathetic, seen-everything grandparents (nicely played by John Randolph and Anne Pitoniak) can put up with him for as long as it takes. Meanwhile, their own grown children, a son (Lance Guest) and daughter (Lea Thompson) regard Wendell with bemusement. All live in a big New England house, with the daughter’s little son.
This little boy (played by newcomer Jeremiah Warner), a “red-headed baboon,” in Wendell’s estimation, becomes Wendell’s first worshiper, even going so far as to repeat Wendell’s swear words over the breakfast table.
The Wizard of Loneliness is based on a novel by John Nichols, whose book The Milagro Beanfield War was also made into a film this year. The script, written by Nancy Larson and Jenny Bowen, has a nice, if predictable, small-town quality, but the crucial plot-point has a contrived air about it; it concerns a shellshocked vet (Dylan Baker) who’s played an important role in the lives of this family. He returns to town surreptitiously and brings about the movie’s violent conclusion.
The more the movie follows this route, the less relevant it seems. Wendell’s inward struggle is much more interesting, especially as acted by Lukas Haas, who has become one of the busiest child actors of the time (the title character in Witness, he was recently seen in Lady in White). Haas has both the wide-eyed childishness and the presumptuous intelligence to bring off the role.
Jenny Bowen, who directed Street Music a few years ago, is better at evoking the time and place than the story really deserves; there’s a giddy July 4th sequence involving a skunk and the disposal thereof that is quite wonderful.
She’s adept at finding the revealing moments of character, such as the scene in which Wendell glimpses his aunt after she’s received the news of her husband’s death: He sees her standing in a doorway, the light shining through her nightgown, and we understand for the first time that Wendell is in love with her – the wizard has found his heart.
First published in The Herald, September 1, 1988
Jenny Bowen’s Street Music caused some stir on the pre-indie circuit circa 1982 or so, and had an especially warm reception from a couple of Seattle newspaper critics. Because of this, Bowen came to town, and because of that, I did my first-ever interview with a filmmaker. I’ve done a few hundred since then, but yet, Jenny Bowen was the first. That was for a short-lived magazine called Seattle Voice; I wrote a couple of things for them. Bowen’s film career ended in 1998, and she founded an international organization to help orphaned and abandoned children.