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Alice In Wonderland Theatrical Review

Marco Chacon Tim Burton was probably the guy to make it!  In in his prime, he created fiercely creative works that mixed a somewhat grim vision with fairy-tale sensibilities.  His artistic vision that is available in released stills made this apparent.  Burton's Wonderland was dark, tangled, and still clearly a fairy-tale, nonsense land.  I am  something of a Lewis Carroll aficionado, so I should probably use his real name -- Charles Dodgson; and I suppose that makes me a tough target audience for the movie.  I want to see it 'done right'. and I am  probably possessed with ideas about what that should be.

The original two books (there is no book "Alice In Wonderland") are interesting artifacts.  They are some of the most heavily adapted books of all time.  They are also some of the most widely translated.  To say they have had a meteoric impact on western culture and western language is no understatement.  The books are some of the most important and yet enigmatic works of literature of all time.

Both books provide a narrative about a young girl by the name of Alice -- most likely Alice Lidell, a name which was changed for the film to Kingsley.  The change was probably because Lidell will lead modern audiences to think of the UFC who falls or crawls into an imaginary wonderland.  There she meets various talking animals, members of royalty from common games, and at least one character from children's books, Humpty Dumpty. She was placed in some mild danger, but the real story is one of her wandering about and giving somewhat amusing commentary.

In the new movie of Alice in Wonderland (as opposed to the original Alice in Wonderland Disney animation), a girl, Alice (Mia Wasikowska), returns to the Underland.  It is interesting that the original draft of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was titled Alice's Adventures Underground, where she is recruited by a group of recognizable characters -- most notably, the Mad Hatter, played unsurprisingly, and with flair by Johnny Depp -- to battle against the tyrannical Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).

Analyzing the movie in terms of an adaptation of the book is largely pointless.  It does what most modern adaptations of the material do -- it takes the fairly ordinary Victorian phrase, "More of a muchness", which was not nonsense in the book, and interprets it in the modern context where there are all kinds of words that make no sense; so 'muchness' becomes the movie's term for Alice's guts.  None of this matters, though, because while the movie hits its key points, we get asked, repeatedly, why a raven is like a writing desk.  Of course, the Hatter doesn't know because Carroll never told us*; it isn't any kind of post-modern deconstruction of the book.  It isn't commentary on it at any level I could see.

The narrative structure of the movie is entirely straight forward.  Burton noted that the books felt like a series of separate encounters, and they sure do; so he wanted an over-arching story to weave it together.  This isn't 'Alice', but it is something that likely had to happen for the movie to get made.  The depth of the story is pretty thin.  We get to meet a bunch of the famous characters, and we get to see some of the most fantastical settings put to film.  We also get to follow Mia Wasikowska around as she goes from being almost entirely passive to simply being mostly passive.

By the time we get to the ending, we have been told in painstaking detail what will happen; and by the time the credits have rolled it has happened.  If this sounds disappointing, it was for me.  My eight-year-old daughter wasn't upset in the slightest, and I think that is who we need to remember the movie was made for.  The story that Burton and company have created is straightforward and rarely becomes clever.  I don't think it ever reaches what could be called sophistication.

It is modestly satisfying, but outside of the art direction, there is barely a spark of creativity to be found.  The characters are not 'updated' or 'interpreted', and while we get to see what a bander-snatch and a jub-jub bird look like, there is not much that Burton had to do to put these guys on screen.  Visually it is a marvel: the Red Queen's castle is lush and ornate.  Plot-wise it is a brick.

Ultimately, I was disappointed. I have seen modern looks at the material that I found dark and resonant.  In this case, it is visually stunning, but the story itself is more worthy of a TV show than a film; and it wouldn't even rate that highly as a TV show.  The pacing is not too slow so much as it is utterly flat.  Alice in Wonderland rolls along with obvious cues about how we are supposed to react.  There is no real tension.  There is no shocks; there is literally nothing that made me sit up and go "wow", other than, once again, the visuals.

Depp is good, but he is always good.  His Hatter isn't so much mad as a bit flamboyant.  The Queen is nice and nasty and her fate at the end qualified for a smile on my part...but it was a long time to wait. 

* The answer should be "Because neither has an 'n' and both has a 'b'"

-- Marco Chacon

Cast: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Sheen, Mia Wasikowska, Matt Lucas
Directed by: Tim Burton
MPAA Rating: PG
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Animation/Family
Running Time: 109 minutes
Distributed by: Walt Disney Pictures

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