Burton’s Alice a Mechanical Bore
Over a decade after her first visit to Wonderland, a 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns with absolutely no recollection of ever being there before. During her travels she meets up with an extremely Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) who’s pleased as tea to see her again, a bobble-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) with a nasty temper and a White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) in a waistcoat constantly complaining about being perpetually late.
Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska and Anne Hathaway in Walt Disney Pictures' Alice in Wonderland
Thinking this is all nothing more than a dream Alice is perplexed that the inhabitants of Wonderland expect her to pick up the Vorpal Sword and slay the Jabberwocky. All she knows is that she’s made friends with some of the kookier residents of this odd world, and not even the directives of the ethereal White Queen (Anne Hathaway) can stop her from making up her own mind as to the best course of action.
It isn’t a dream, of course, but it takes the heroine ages to realize that in Tim Burton’s (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) mechanical and not very appealing reworking of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Linda Woolverton’s (The Lion King) rather pedestrian screenplay feels as if it were constructed in committee, the whole thing having a paint-by-numbers feel to it that grew increasingly tiresome as the film progressed.
Not that it was all a total waste. There are certainly plenty of moments of enjoyment to be found, not the least of which is Bonham Carter’s supercilious Red Queen whose tantrums and idiosyncrasies couldn’t help but make me smile. The actress taps right into the Loony Tunes-inspired lunacy of all of this and then some so that even a scene of her trying on a never-ending series of increasingly silly hats couldn’t help but make me giggle, every move she made one I quite liked keeping track of.
I also think newcomer Wasikowska, who first made an impression on me in last year’s That Evening Sun, is just divine in the title role. While there’s little to nothing of Carroll to be found in events happening onscreen the young actress still made me believe the spirit of the acclaimed author was still, if only slightly, hovering over the proceedings. She’s definitely the real-deal and I can’t wait to see what the youngster is going to do next, her Alice a delightful mixture of youth and maturity deserving of a better film to surround it.
Really, though, that’s about it as far as my superlatives go. Sure Depp is fine as the Mad Hatter, and yes the vocal work by the all-star cast, most noticeably Alan Rickman’s hookah-addicted Caterpillar and Stephen Fry’s ghostly Cheshire Cat, is relatively outstanding, but none of it connected on any more than a purely superficial level. This is Carroll re-imagined as a Lord of the Rings-style action movie, everything building to a checkerboard face-off with the Jabberwocky that’s more perfunctory than it is thrilling.
What’s really odd is that, like Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory there is no heart and soul in any of this. The director’s most personal works like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Big Fish wear their emotions as if they were overcoats, and while each has his trademark gothically inspired visual signature they also connect on a human level most of his other films do not. This is the director going through the motions, and while sometimes his doing this can be more than enough to satisfy (think Sleepy Hollow) sadly this time around that frustratingly isn’t the case.
I’m not sure what I would have wanted instead of this. All I do know is that this version of Alice and Wonderland, for all its razzle and its dazzle, left me feeling decidedly unmoved. The film moved its pieces around the board as if by remote control, and just as events were supposed to go from curious to curiouser I found myself almost wishing I could curl up and take a catnap instead of see how they would play themselves out. For me Burton’s version brought no wonder to this strange land of tweedles Dee and Dum, and as the frumious Bandersnatch rampaged and Jujub Bird soared all I wanted to do was return to slithy toves to mimsy with the borogoves and watch the mome raths outgrabe.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
