Spoilers. You've been warned.
Towards the end of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, our now nineteen year old Alice realizes that her childhood dream of visiting Wonderland is really a suppressed memory, and we are given a candy-colored montage of flashbacks to that first trip. It's in this moment that it becomes clear that we are seeing a tantalizing glimpse of a vastly superior film that will never be made. What we do get is a rather crudely written, mostly muddled, and often ugly looking film that makes no attempt to capture the wonder of an imagination-driven realm. Even the name Wonderland is replaced with Underland (something Venture Bros. fans should get a kick out of). Alice just remembered it wrong, and it's the perfect metaphor for the experience as a whole. Imagination is replaced with a by-the-numbers action/ quest story and charming insanity is replaced with dreary backstory and rambling exposition.
I'd put off seeing Alice for a few weeks now, partly because I wanted to see it in 3D and I knew that it would cost me an arm and a leg, but mostly because I had a feeling that it just wouldn't be any good. I was right on both counts. Even ignoring the grossly trite and illiterate "dark" take on Wonderland that has been done at least as well or better in dozens of poorly written, often pornographic comics and novels over the last decade, the basic quality of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is rather low. Almost all of the characters show up as soon as Alice had gotten herself down the rabbit hole, and they all more or less stand around spouting exposition and bickering. There's some nonsense about a prophecy, because that's never been used as crutch for bad story telling before, and Alice is now the central figure in an over-explained and under-written legend involving the killing of the Jaberwok, here mis-called the "Jaberwocky". The name mix up is a common one in Alice re-tellings. Jaberwocky is the name of the poem it appears in. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice only ever reads that poem and spends some time trying to decipher is crazy language. Here it is a prophecy telling of how Alice will return to slay the beast freeing all of Wonderland. em Underland. For the purposes of this story the "Jaberwocky" serves as the Queen of Hearts' Death Star, the ultimate power in Underland that her power flows from. To paraphrase Grand Moff Tarkin- Fear keeps the people in line. Fear of this lightning-breathing dragon monster. Only our heroine, Alice can slay the Jaberwocky with her magic sword and liberate the people of Underland. Still awake?
Because it's a Tim Burton film, Johnny Depp is front and center, and because the studio wouldn't let Tim put a wig on him and stuff him into a Victorian play dress and apron, he's been cast as the Mad Hatter. Luckily he is identified as such by name, because from his promotional shots, I was under the misapprehension that Cindy Lauper had come out of retirement to do her Baby Jane impression. There are a lot of visual mistakes in Alice' but I cannot under-state this. Johnny looks horrible. He doesn't look like anything that should be in Wonderland, Looking Glass Land or anything in their farthest suburbs. He looks like he should be hanging out with the Misfits plotting how to bring down Jem and the Holligrams. The promotional stills and advertizing do nothing to express how awful his digitally enlarged, out-of-synch eyes look on screen. Compounding matters is the fact that considering how much FX wizardry was focused onto his face, it occurred to no one to do something about cleaning up the edges of his contacts or the state fair-quality eyelashes brazenly drawn onto his lower lids. It's the little things like that that really bother me in these latter day Tim Burton Films. I've just about given up on his storytelling. The least he can do is make it look good.
Musically, Danny Elfman phones it in again. Not having written anything new in over a decade. he is still recycling the good scores that he wrote for the first half of Tim Burton's carer and is now flat out stealing from the lifeless re-arrangements that he did for Sweeny Todd. I defy anyone to compare the opening musics for Alice and Todd and tell me that it isn't the same damn song.
The single most defining element of Wonderland is certainly it's cast of obsessive, mentally ill characters. They are present for the most part and mostly somewhat accurate to their origins. The White Rabbit is a nervous fusspot. The March Hare is a raving lunatic. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are bickering siblings, even if they are way too low-key and not nearly irrational enough.
The most reinvented character is probably the Mad Hatter. Here he is a lonely boarderline transvestite who is not so much mad as suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. He's saddled with a dreary backstory and is over-complicated to death. At no point is he the rude, self important nutter that he's supposed to be, but since he's one of the few humans that Alice meets that isn't a complete monster or an authority figure he's teamed up with her as a sort of sidekick and sage. He's also a People's Revolution leader which really marks what's wrong with trying to take the story of Alice in Wonderland too seriously. Does anybody really want to see these characters organize? Che Guevera was a lot of things, but he was not fun to spend time with. Compounding matters is Johnny Depp's performance. It's obvious that Tim Burton lets his golden boy do whatever the hell he wants to do on set. The issues were best expressed by my girlfriend when she said aloud in the theater, "Pick an accent and stick with it!"
The Dormouse has also been given a rather drastic makeover. The Dormouse of the book is a sardonic narcoleptic who tells tales of girls who live in a treacle well and dryly observes that they were "very ill indeed" before falling asleep and being stuffed into the teapot by his mates. The Dormouse of this film is a wired-up, eye gouging, spitfire. He's also, most alarmingly, a girl. The Dormouse serves as something of a literacy test for those making Alice movies. He is most often depicted as a common mouse, whereas a dormouse is actually a distinct animal, similar to a gerbil. The "dor" in it's name is from the french word for sleep, and it is so named because it hibernates. He is most certainly not a cheap knock off of Reepicheep.
Worth noting is that it isn't just the Dormouse who goes for the eyes. Eye gouging forms a freaky, off-putting pattern throughout the whole film. I found it even more alarming then the Red Queen's head-filled moat. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
Adding to the general level of laziness of the script, is the Red Queen/ White Queen dynamic. The so-called "Red Queen" is clearly the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" while the White Queen (along with her here absent husband the White King) is from the distinct Looking Glass Land of Through The Looking Glass. I was entirely game for a confrontation between Wonderland and Looking Glass land. It is, in fact the basis of the much, much worse Looking Glass Wars series of books and comics. All we're given here is a random and annoying jumble of characters thrown together with little thought or motivation. If I'm coming off as being too literally for my own good, try to imagine a retelling of Star Wars with Darth Vader being lumped together into the same person as Darth Maul. Not the same person is not the same person.
What's almost unfortunate is that Helena Bohnam Carter gives a really good performance as the so-called Red Queen. She brings a surprising amount of nuance to what could have easily been yet another lifeless, one-note character. Helping matters is that her giant digital head looks a lot better than I feared it would. There is some size inconsistency from shot to shot, but it doesn't float much and it generally marries up pretty well to her body.
Hands down, the best thing about this movie is the Cheshire Cat. He floats, purrs and vanishes in such a pleasing way that every problem I had with the film vanished whenever he popped onto the screen. Stephes Fry voices him to perfection, and his blue on gray design is just delightful. I can't remember when I was more in love with a floating, grinning head.
There are several strong contenders for worst effect in the movie, but Crispin Glover's Nave of Hearts is foremost in my mind. His live-action head sits atop a freaky, haphazardly animated CGI body and never seems to line up quite right. I guess Burton was trying to force the character into the bizarre proportions that an animation model would have effortlessly pulled off, but here it's just jarring and gross looking. "But isn't that the point?" some might ask. I don't care. I don't want to look at it. So much of the film suffers from this. Intentionality doesn't excuse ugly design. This is Wonderland, no matter what you retcon it into. The real world of the film is shown as a breathtakingly beautiful Victorian estate with topiary sculptures and hedge mazes. Wonderland is garish, dark and sticky. Obviously the difficulties of real life will always seem trivial as compared to any hero, or heroine's quest, but here that quest culminates with Alice, dressed in armor like a Jungian Joan of Arc drinking the blood of her slain enemy. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable extension of the Alice story to me.
Perhaps most disappointing and alarmingly, the epilogue of this Alice in Wonderland. it involves our Alice taking control of her late father's trading business and sailing off to explore new financial opportunities in China. If only Alice and her new business partners were better informed, they might have known that by the late Victorian period England had already been trading with China for hundreds of years and only recently incited the Opium Wars.
Taken as a whole Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is misnamed but good enough for what it is. ("Return to Wonderland" or something similar was almost certainly shot down by the studio for marketing reasons.) What drives me crazy is the same thing that drove me crazy about Tim Burton's Sweeny Todd- the missed opportunities that are caused by a basic misunderstanding of the subject matter. The Alice of the books navigates her dream- yes, in the book it is a dream- by using reason and keeping a cool head. The Alice of the movie is manipulated into being a warrior who employs the methods of her enemy- lopping off heads. That seems to me to be a very lazy idea of empowerment.
One of the most over looked lines from the book comes from the Gryphon on the subject of the Queen's declarations of "Off with his/ her head".
"It's all her fancy that: They never executes nobody, you know." In other words, the Queen's not a real threat. Like everyone else in Wonderland, she's just crazy- the way that all grown ups seem crazy to children. I can't think of anything that better exemplifies how silly it is to make Alice's story "Dark" and "grown up". The whole point of the story is to poke fun at how silly grown-ups are. Ultimately, that's this film's biggest problem. Like hysterical parents who see devil worship in Harry Potter, writers who insist on seeing simmering psychosis in Alice in Wonderland are just being silly, mad adults. And not terribly original ones at that.
<message edited by Tom Servo on Thursday, March 25, 2010 4:41 AM>