LYT review: TIM BURTON'S DISNEY'S ALICE IN WONDERLAND

I am not being facetious, nor, in my own opinion, excessively dickish in using the two possessives to describe the new cinematic ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It certainly isn’t Lewis Carroll’s, so we might as well point out where the credit belongs. Less a sequel to the original book than a sequel to the Disney animated version of the book, this movie is a wonder to look at, but a chore to sit through.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska), who has here been given the surname of “Kingsley” despite the fact that the real girl Alice was based on bore the family name of Liddell (and since the name Liddell is nowadays associated with kicking ass, it would totally be appropriate here, more now than ever), is 19 and about to be proposed to by a rich, red-headed dork (no, not Johnny Depp...he shows up later, though I assume the red hair on both characters is not a coincidence. It is also, alas, not especially significant either). Before she can give an answer, Alice sees the old familiar White Rabbit and goes running after him, though it isn’t clear why, since we are told she actually has no memory of him or Wonderland. It’s one thing for a kid to imagine a rabbit in a waistcoat...with a 19 year-old, one would suspect the involvement of certain chemicals, not that Disney is going to admit to any drug subtext.

Down the rabbit hole she falls, to Wonderland, which the inhabitants call “Underland.” It surely has not escaped any fans of the book that, as often happens in ALICE adaptations, “Wonderland” and “Looking-Glass World,” both distinct realms in the books, are mixed and matched (the former was based on a card game; the latter on a chessboard), even more so than in the cartoon predecessor. In that one, the Duchess and the Queen of Hearts were amalgamated to create a more menacing villainess; here, the Red Queen from Looking-Glass World is also added to that blender, as the big-noggined, Sid-Haig-from-House-of-1000-Corpses face-painted despot Irascibeth (Helena Bonham-Carter). It’d be nice if they’d just leave Looking-Glass World out of it completely, but no, Tim Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton also have to go and utterly ruin the character of the White Queen. In the book, she was what the English might charitably call a dotty old bat, so why, here, is she Anne Hathaway as a frail avatar of goodness and sanity? Everyone in Wonderland should be mad; the book’s subtext plays as a primer for children on how to deal with unrestrainedly eccentric adults out in the real world, while being bound by different rules from them. Some are dangerous, others more friendly, but none are champions of purity.

This Alice, however, is yet another Chosen One, who must slay a dragon and restore balance to the Force, er, Wonderland, er, I mean Underland, whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Tim Burton has never even read the books. Burton and Woolverton have insisted that the Carroll originals are too episodic, lacking dramatic thrust, etc., but I’ll gladly take “avoiding the menace of the Queen of Hearts as much as possible, until forced to confront her” (the first book) or “travel to the end of the chessboard to become a Queen” (the second) to “put on your suit of armor, brandish a sword, and slay the dragon” (this movie, and many others like it). The dragon in question, Jabberwocky, isn’t even as cool in 3-D CGI as he was in one original drawing. As far as being “voiced” by Christopher Lee, I seem to recall one line of dialogue only. Might have been two. I was nearly asleep with boredom by then.

A word or two about the 3-D: I am not a 3-D basher, and find those who are tedious, yet I must say it adds nothing in this instance. No sense of immersion like in AVATAR, no shit flying out into your face like THE FINAL DESTINATION. They did it because they felt they had to, I would guess, and not because anyone on the creative side wanted it.

And make no mistake, when I talk about the creative side, I refer almost entirely to the art direction. All the wacky denizens of down below look like they should, for the most part, with the ever-evaporating Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen’s soldiers earning particular high marks, along with the Alan Rickman-voiced “Absalom,” a.k.a. the Blue Catterpillar. (it seems they must all have proper names now – even the Knave of Hearts, played by Crispin Glover, is now addressed as “Stayne.”)

I single out the art directors in part to highlight how uncreative the other relevant players are – Johnny Depp is amusing primarily to himself as a Mad Hatter who goes back and forth between an English and Scottish accent for no apparent reason. Always thought the Hatter was supposed to be quite rude, rather than a trusty sidekick who’ll wield a sword side-by-side with Alice in battle; but hey, GRRRL POWER and all that. If this were set in modern-day, that’d be just peachy with me...but it ain’t. And Alice doing a hip-hop dance when she returns from “Underland” is a bridge too far.

Tom Petty would have been a better Mad Hatter. Because he was. In a music video that was truer to the tale than this entire feature.

I won’t go so far as to say this is on the level of a Friedberg/Seltzer movie (y’know, the EPIC MOVIE, DATE MOVIE, DISASTER MOVIE guys), but it has to be said that it follows their m.o. slightly. Like them, Burton has taken familiar icons and put them onscreen primarily so people in the audience can say to themselves, “Hey, I remember that!” And then he does nothing with them. Tweedledum and Tweedledee appear to say “Nohow” and “Contrariwise,” yet add nothing to the story. Ditto the March Hare, Doormouse, Dodo, Hedgehog, and almost every other character. You might get a kick out of seeing a rocking-horse fly, but the narrative doesn’t.

If you can manage to simply “turn your brain off” and enjoy the cool designs, you will enjoy it far more than I. The books are too dear to me for me to able to do that, and yes, I know a movie is a different animal...Jan Svankmajer’s ALICE is extremely faithful and highly tedious, due primarily to the director’s overreliance on redundant narration. But couldn’t Burton and Woolverton (and Depp) have at least pretended to care about the source?

 

 

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.