Alice in Wonderland (2010)

“Go ask Alice; I think she’ll know.  When logic — and proportion — have fallen sloppy dead, and the White Knight is talking backwards, and the Red Queen’s ‘off with her head’… remember what the Dormouse said: Keep your head.  Keep your head.”

So go the immortal lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s song, and they’ve seldom been more appropriate than they are when considering Tim Burton’s latest cinematic effort.  Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a bewildering catastrophe of a movie, but not an entirely disappointing one.  He has wholly failed to make a film that is a faithful adaptation of the works that inspired it, but we might take solace in the fact that this was never really his intention.  He, and screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who necessarily bears a great deal of the blame, have set out to write a sort of pseudo-sequel to the established Aliceian canon, and the results are not perfect.  Not perfect at all.  (5/10)

I review this film not because it was interesting (it wasn’t), nor even interestingly bad (it wasn’t that, either), but rather in fulfillment of this blog’s unspoken mandate, which is apparently “Mostly Victorian, Most of the Time.”

Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska), because she is 19 and pretty and single and living in the Victorian era, Is To Be Married.  She does not want (as her mother informs her) to be like Aunt Imogene, who is a spinster and a deluded, sad old woman.  Rather, she wants (again, as her mother informs her) to be Married To A Lord, and to be a Credit To The Family Name, and to be Proper in all things, whether she likes it or not.

The capitalizations in the previous paragraph should give a sense of the skeptical perspective offered by Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.  They are not my perspective, though; Victorian morality was in fact very good – particularly when compared to the infamy of the age that preceded it and the loose indulgences of the age that now follows it – and, however much the over-fetishized Will of the individual may have been suborned thereto, it is, in the end, far better to be morally right than to be momentarily self-gratified.

Anyway, Alice is supposed to marry Lord Hamish, a chinless youth who suffers from indigestion and a grave lack of social graces.  I should say right now that I did this character a disservice; he was played by the very competent (though underemployed) Leo Bill, who essayed the role of Charles Darwin in The Fall, but I had assumed that he was played by the similar-looking and similarly chinless and equally competent Lee Ingleby, who played Midshipman Hollom in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.  There is a similarity of appearance between the two, and I mistook the one for th’other.  I am sorry.

So, she is supposed to marry this gentleman, but she does not want to.  He’s sort of a pathetic wanker (I wouldn’t marry him), and offers her nothing but financial security, about which she does not care.  She flees from his initial proposal, and ends up falling down the rabbit hole of legend.  The difference, however, may be found in the fact that this is not the first such falling — indeed, Alice has visited Underland (as its inhabitants insistently call it) a number of times before, as a young girl, but does not remember that those visitations were real.  She thinks that they — like her current sojourn — were just extravagant dreams.  Still, the current voyage is quite real, and she is a sexy, willful 19-year-old into the bargain, and every ounce of the implications of those two states of affairs is brought to bear on the narrative that Burton and Woolverton have chosen to present.

In Underland, she finds that the denizens thereof have great expectations of a certain Alice, who (it is foretold) will return on the Frabjous Day to redeem all of Underland from the tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), to slay the Jabberwocky, and to generally kick asses left, right, and centre.  Never mind that this has nothing to do with what Lewis Carroll actually wrote, or that the creature in question is in fact the Jabberwock, and not the Jabberwocky (it’s like saying that Hector fought to defend the city of “Iliad” rather than “Ilium”).  That doesn’t matter; Burton and Woolverton are post-m0derns, and can interpret things however they like, apparently.

Stuff happens; Alice enters Underland and meets the usual cavalcade of crazy characters (the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and so on); the Red Queen is determined to destroy her; the White Queen (a flouncing Anne Hathaway) is determined to help her; the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) are determined to provide ambiguous, problematic advice.  Through it all, Alice is confronted with a world that seems either half completed or partially destroyed – a wonderland without the wonder (or even the Under, by the film’s lights).  It is well-depicted, to be sure – an excellent use of the computer graphics to which we currently have access -  but it is not especially well-realized.

The main trouble with Alice in Wonderland is that it lacks both the heart and the reasoning of the original works – and even of the Disney cartoon from the 1950s.  I suppose there are viewers who would like Wasikowska’s Alice, but I wasn’t one of them; she was anachronistically Feminist and a source of awkward discomfort more than she was a source of genial identification.  I freely admit that I am not — and have never been — an eligible female of the mid- to late Victorian era, and so have no firsthand information about the subjects raised here, but neither am I a sympathetic Modern.  If I identify and sympathize with anyone in the Victorian era, it would probably be Victoria herself.  She was the Iron Lady and the Old Woman and the Grandmother of Europe, and many other epithetic things besides, but she was always at least a practical, dutiful human being who loved people better than they deserved and who was willing to do things for the good of the Empire that might not have been in accordance with the complete actualization of her amorphous Self.

Alice Kingsleigh, on the other hand, before her latest trip to Underland, and more especially after it (this is the only “youth goes on journey to fantastic world” movie I’ve ever seen in which the protagonist comes through the experience having learned literally nothing, and ends up being more herself than ever), will have no part in anything that denies her the chance to do exactly what she wants at all times, no matter the stakes.  Indeed, the great expectation of the Underlanders that she will redeem them from the slavery imposed by the Red Queen — and the terror of her awful pet, the Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee, may God have mercy on him) — is only ever satisfied because Alice is so firmly convinced that everything that is happening to her is “her dream” rather than an external reality in which she is forced to play a part.  While she does sometimes do what’s right for its own sake, she barely connects with any of the people in Underland that hold her in such high esteem.  Her relationship with the Mad Hatter is especially bizarre; while she is sometimes willing to do difficult things to help him, she is so convinced that he is just a figment of her imagination that she doesn’t even say goodbye to him (or to anyone) when she is finally given the means to leave Underland and return to her own world.  She just drinks the substance and leaves.  That’s it.  I don’t really blame her, given what a wearisome nightmare Underland is, but still…

The Hatter is, of course, played by Johnny Depp.  Hell, the Hatter is Johnny Depp, in all of his worst acting habits, and I suppose we should not be surprised that Alice is faintly repelled by him even as she is drawn in.  Far from just being a weirdo at a tea party, Depp’s Hatter has been given a starring role, and an origin story, and a sort of consequential inevitability when it comes to his place in the world.  None of it is really sensible, but it’s there, at least, and he’s certainly more human, as a character, than the smugly authoritative Alice is.  The same goes for the Red Queen’s lieutenant, the Knave (Crispin Glover), but only just; one nevertheless grows tired of him very quickly.  One grows tired of almost all of the characters, actually; only Stephen Fry’s voice work as the Cheshire Cat is great, and he is used more sparingly than one should like.

While the illogic of Carroll’s original stories is notorious (and sort of the point), it has been scrapped, in Burton’s film, for mere confusing irrelevance.  Things happen, one after another, for no discernible reason, and to no discernible purpose; Burton and Woolverton knew that there were certain notes that needed to be hit (a tea party here, a meeting with Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum there, an episode or two of growth and shrinking, and so on), but do not seem to know or care about the order in which those notes might best occur.  There is a definite agenda to be found in the work, but it is scarcely Carroll’s; it is rather the agenda of someone who thought it would be a good idea to make Alice sexy and willful, as noted above, and who couldn’t stand the notion of the Jabberwock having been slain by a mere male — in an essentially unrelated work, at that — and who was uneasy with the very possibility of duties trumping desires, and who recoils from any sense of standards or decorum.  I suspect Woolverton is the problem (Burton has for a long time now been more concerned with his visuals than with his stories), but the blame might fall squarely at any number of feet.

I don’t want to spend any more time dealing with this.  The vignettes in the film are not good, the excellent CGI is used to no great purpose, and the whole of the thing is more a pastiche of than an actual engagement with Carroll’s original works.  I don’t care for them all that much even in their purest form, but I recognize violence being done to an artist’s works when I see it.

There is little in Alice that would be objectionable for younger viewers apart from a lot of stupid, stupid ideas.  It’s also the case that, during Alice’s growing and shrinking episodes, her clothes do not always grow or shrink with her; what might have just presented a funny and slightly embarrassing problem for a younger or more innocent Alice instead serves as yet another venue for this Alice’s sexualization.  There’s nothing explicit — nor even close to it — in any of those episodes, but the implications are there.

There’s also an absurd dance sequence.  You may be thinking, “hey, that could be fun.”  Sometimes dance sequences – especially absurd ones – are fun (see Slumdog Millionaire or Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman or even Spiderman 3 for more).  But you’d be wrong: it isn’t fun.  It’s just stupid and inelegant and out of place.  I curse the name of whoever thought it was a good idea.