Alex in Wonderlandat the Astor

THERE are moments when it almost all comes together:

Donald Sutherland talks of doing a film in which he could play Christ as a social revolutionary.

Donald Sutherland is currently starring as Paul Mazurky's alter ego in Alex in Wonderland, a film directed by Mazursky. Alex tells of its director's efforts to come to grips with a second film after his premiere success in last year's Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. In Alex's best scene, Alex Sutherland-playing-Mazurky) visits a producer (actually played by Mazurky) who tries, with the aid of wines, a proferred trip to Paris, and a Chagall off his office wall, to encourage Alex in a couple of hot, new properties.

"How about a new version of Huckleberry Finn? " he presses enthusiastically. "It's got everything. Racism, fascism, police brutality. And it's got the shore. The shore is a symbol. The shore stands for everything that's crap. " But Alex rejects the idea.

And then, there is the case of another filmmaker, a generally unknown AIP director by the name of Larry Buchanan. Mostly Buchanan's directed bike pictures-thinks called Hell-Raiders -and crime stories-like A Bullet for Pretty Boy. But after a long lunch, he will take you back to his office-cutting room and ask your opinion of his dream project, a film tentatively called The Rebel Jesus .

"I've gleaned a lot of material about the Nazarene's hidden years-from 13 to 30-that should surprise a lot of people," he explains. "For instance, Jesus may not have smoked hashish, but at least it was offered to him. He was conversant with it. Why not show the kids a Jesus they can identify with?" And while he speaks, he forgets the present-full of Hell-Raiders as it is-and his voice drifts back into the accents of an orphan raised by Baptists in the growing young city of Dallas?

HOW DO YOU separate all the threads? On one hand it all appears so calculated-and, for the many Easterners, often writers, who have sold themselves to Hollywood during its more prosperous history, that's been the dominant theme-while at the same time, for the majority of the participants, it is also naive and guileless.

Alex in Wonderland is a film that tries to deal with the corruption as well as the naivete of modern Hollywood-and, as if to take life from its own text-a film that ultimately fails just because it shares so many of the confusions of which it speaks.

For example, although Alex can see through the surface exploitation of the venal producer's scenarios, he fails to perceive his own desires to inject issues like the war, racism and pollution into his own film as critically. And Mazurky merely corroborates Alex's myopic vision.

For bits of the war, racism and pollution do creep into Alex , but in a manner so fraudulent that the words are reduced to mere shells. Mazurky shows us Alex fantasizing a guerrilla attack on Hollywood Boulevard during the filming of a Doris Day musical. And Mazurky shows us a surreal vision of a polluted LA airport as well as a tribe of dancing blacks descending upon a colony of Jewish intellectuals. But, never, never, is he able to give either Alex or his film any deeper method of understanding the phenomenon they want so badly to discuss.

Mazurky is simply too close to his subject. While he could laugh, with some hints of sympathy, at Bob's strained attempts to find equanimity through Esalen encounters, he treats Alex's abortive struggles to come to grips with his "art" all too seriously.

And Alex is a character for whom seriousness is deathly. He demands that his family treat him as a genius; he methodically probes the emotions of his 13-year-old daughter ( O Daddy, she repeatedly cries in exasperation, for, in truth, she is much more mature than he); he regards life as a treatment from which he hopes to crib his next movie.

In his search to extract meanings from life, he abandons life altogether. Walking along a beach, he begins to question his friends about masturbation. When one or two admit to it, he cuts them short. "It's very healthy to talk about it," he says, "but to do it, is sick."

He even makes a pilgrimage to visit Fellini-whose 81/2 he toys with emulating-only to discover the director eschews his emulation and-more devotedly to his art than his self-wants simply to return to his editing machine.

In the end, Alex is left talking to the trees-a proposition that Tommy Smothers has quite famously ridiculed-all visions having failed to materialize. For Alex-and Mazurky-simply takes himself too seriously, and, although that is just the reason why this somewhat fraudulent and boring, often interesting and amusing film never comes together, it's also exactly why, in the future, Alex should be Mazurky's own best teacher.