Alice in Wonderland

(2010) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 03/07/10 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

There are a lot of “Alices” out there and a lot of “Wonderlands” too.  My personal favorite has tended to be Jan Svankmejer’s 1988 Alice, which is largely stop-motion animated and not exactly true to the source material, so I’m not a purist when it comes to adaptations.  But it should be noted that this is not your classic Alice in Wonderland.  Far from it.  Alice winds up in a suit of armor slaying a dragon.

You know, if you take the story and go off the road with it, that’s one thing, but when you take a story that is off the roadway to begin with and pick it up and put it onto a much more commonly trodden path, you end up with a real irony.  It’s ironic that a work that appeals to Surrealist sensibilities, fantasy, and subversion is adapted by a director known for visual style and a gleamingly dark eye and it ends up being far more conventional in the end.

I mean, it looks fantastic.  But the story is a weakness, unimaginative, derivative, and not really too clever.

Tim Burton is a director that I’ve long had a like/dislike relationship with (not strong enough for love/hate).  He’s got a fantastic eye for design, whether it’s his own or it’s the other collaborators with whom he works.  He’s attracted, largely, to pretty interesting material, but really most frequently comes across as a great visual stylist, with occasional flairs for highly appealing stuff, but one whose weakness is in the level of story and ultimately originality, as he is also most often “re-booting” old ideas or adapting pre-existing popular stories or characters.

That said, I had quite enjoyed his last two films more than I had anticipated, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), so I’d had a growing hope that this film might wind up on the more positive side of the fence, too.  I’d been quite attracted by the trailers and the designs and aesthetics of the world of Wonderland.

Did I mention that it’s also in Disney Digital 3-D?

In the opening and closing parts of the story, which place Alice in her Victorian world, initially the child of the classic version, but now a 20 year old, an independent girl, who doesn’t want to wear a corset or marry a dullard Lord.  She’s a proto-feminist, you see.   The film doesn’t really matter a whole lot in those segments.  It’s really tiresome.

It only gets fun the moment she falls down the rabbit hole and the vision becomes that of a hyper-hallucination, depicted through the latest in digital animation/effects.  And it’s something.  The talking flowers, the Cheshire cat, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the queen of hearts (Helena Bonham Carter with an enlarged cranium), each figure as it emerges is highly pleasurable and vivid.  There is a point as this segment begins, that you almost think to yourself, “Wow, this could be awesome!”  And that feeling carries on for a while. 

Up through her meeting with the Mad Hatter, Johnny Depp in a bright red wig, whitened face, and glowing googly eyes, varying between yellow and green, depending on his mood.  His face alone is almost worth the price of admission.  But his performance is not.  Depp may well be one the most appealing leading men in Hollywood, with a litany of entertaining if not very entertaining films to his name, but how many “characters” can you come up with that are just “so unusual”.  And beyond that, his character, the Mad Hatter, is not as mad as he could be.  He’s quite likeable, fun while he’s there, but like the rest of the film, largely a visual pleasure.

Ultimately there is this, well, feminist would be too strong of a word, but this aim at female empowerment.  Give Alice the sword, the role so often handed to the young boy who needs to become a man.  Clad her in shining armor and have her slice the dragon’s head off.  It’s not hard to get the point, nor is the point deep enough to really cut.  The whole film is just a beautifully rendered, visually enthralling, yet flaccid effort, not unworthy of seeing, but a squandered opportunity at least.

There are a lot of Alice’s out there, and doubtlessly, this will not the the end of the list.  I loved the character designs.  But give me the far more bizarre and creepy Svankmejer Alice.  Maybe it’s not half so colorful, but it’s a lot more complex.