Review of Alice in Wonderland (2010) by Jerry R — 14 Apr 2013

The world inside Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" is populated by angular characters who only exist to display their oddities. You never feel that they exist before Alice gets there. The challenge for Tim Burton is to open up that great book and extend its very limited characters into a story that we care about. That challenge comes from the nature of Carroll's writing. The most charming thing about Alice in Wonderland were the songs, the poems and the dances of lyrical nonsense. Those things are difficult to bring off the page, so what we are left with, in almost every version of this story, is a circus of odd creatures who are little more than irritations for Alice.

In the new film version, director Tim Burton has done himself a favor by progressing the story a decade and allowing characters that we are already familiar with to tell a new story. Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland is, in effect, a sequel. It picks up 13 years later, when Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) is now 19 and flowering into young womanhood. She lives within the 19th century Victorian society but not of it. That is why she is about to be engaged to a hook-nosed stiff named Hamish (Leo Bill) who wouldn't know a knock-knock joke if it fell on him.

Alice has been convinced since childhood that her adventures in Wonderland were all a bizarre dream. Yet, it has left her with an abstract mind. She has no use for the stiff-upper class social demands that surround her. We can see in her eyes that the so-called dreams still consume her.

At her engagement party, she follows a familiar white rabbit a long, long, long way down a very long hole until she lands smack-dab in the middle of Wonderland. Yet, Wonderland isn't all that we imagined it to be. It is drab, dreary with rundown buildings and an overcast sky. That has to do with a change in the seat of power. The Red Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham-Carter, sporting an over-sized head) has taken over and all life and color have been sucked out of the land.

The familiar occupants of Wonderland are there. There's the feisty door mouse (voice of Barbara Windsor); The avuncular Caterpillar (voice of Alan Rickman); The March Hare (voice of Paul Whitehouse); The perfectly pleasant Tweedle Twins (Matt Lucas). The movie does not waste a lot of time introducing these characters because, based on the nature of the script, it assumes that we already know who they are. They enlist Alice's help to slay the evil Jabberwocky (voice of Christopher Lee) and knock the queen off her throne. The problem is, Alice doesn't remember having ever been in Wonderland the first time. She is still convinced that this is all nightmare, and expects to simply wake up at any moment.

Burton, working from a screenplay by Linda Wooverton (who also contributed to Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King), tightens down the plot which, I think, keeps the characters from really coming to life. They all have their eccentricities but they form a collective, and no one ever really has a moment to shine. The charm of the book was that the plot was loose enough to allow these characters room to play.

The exception is Johnny Depp, who occupies the role of The Mad Hatter from head to toe. Most actors would have played this as a costume role but Depp - as he always does - dives headfirst into this material, and takes it as seriously as the character will allow. With his deathly white skin, his frightful frizz on red hair and his unhealthy green eyes, he resembles a character who looks sick beyond repair - kind of a radioactive Ronald McDonald. Yet, Depp's rendition of The Hatter is slightly more sympathetic then I remember from the book and it is a nice turn.

I was also impressed by Mia Wasikowska, as Alice. She takes the role seriously, but wears just enough amusement on her face to be in Wonderland but not of it. She thinks it is all a dream and accepts it at face value. She is an expressive actress who plays Alice with a note of irritation. She convinces herself that this Wonderland business is all a dream and seems frustrated that it is taking so long to wake up. Trapped in a power struggle between The Red Queen, and her sister, the fluttery White Queen (Ann Hathaway) there are enough sights and sounds to keep her in therapy for years but she takes it all in stride.

That power struggle, by the way, gives us the film's weak point. While the early scenes examine Wonderland in all its eccentric fun, the third is a let-down. It turns into a standard battle between good and evil that only achieves the goal of wrapping up the story. Burton doesn't even take advantage of the fact that the battle between the armies of Red and White are taking place on a chess board - it looks like a grey-coaled version of Braveheart. Ho hum.

My problem with Burton's films always lie at the screenplay level. He is a visual master and here he creates Wonderland under siege. The outlying regions look drab and grey while the Red Queen's castle is a masterwork of reds and whites and lush greens. By comparison, it is far more appealing than the castle of the white queen which is washed out in white as if the place is waiting for the painters to arrive. Yet his screenplay suffers by tying up its plot in a standard action story. Surely there must be far more craziness to run these characters through than a battle to the death with a deck of cards.