Alice in Wonderland

Reviewed by Marc Glassman

Alice in Wonderland
Tim Burton, director
Linda Woolverton, script based on the books by Lewis Carroll
Starring: Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia Wasikowska (Alice), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Anne Hathaway (White Queen), Crispin Glover (Stayne--Knave of Hearts) and the voices of Stephen Fry (Cheshire Cat), Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Alan Rickman (Blue Carterpillar), Barbara Windsor (Doormouse), Matt Lucas (Tweedledum/Tweedledee), Paul Whitehouse (March Hare), Timothy Spall (Bayard), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky)

It should have been a dream project for Tim Burton—freely adapting Alice in Wonderland in 3D, with animation, special f/x and a great cast. But something has gone missing: the story’s heart. Lewis Carroll’s enduring fantasies Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are bright, nimble and poetic. They’re pure nonsense, filled with logical illogic. Burton, of all people, has taken this gorgeous piece of whimsy and turned it into a dull mechanical exercise.

Dull! How can Burton’s Alice be dull? Blame it on Harry Potter, AK Rowling’s franchise, which knocked Lewis Carroll and AA Milne off the top of the best selling children’s book lists. The first book aside, Rowling’s Potter series is H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs material, full of big battles and endless plot twists. Fantasy elements are there, of course, but, more and more, they’re in the service of the kind of action-based melodramas that literary critics used to call “page turners.”

As films, that’s what happened to the Potter series and, quite frankly, to much of the Lord of the Ring trilogy as well. And those films sold very, very well, as we all know. So did the books. Those two series have influenced every major new fantasy film (and book) that’s come out in the past half-decade or more.

The formula is clear. Use great art directors and animators to make your films look visionary. Create huge, dangerous beasts. Put your main character in dangerous situations. Build up for big fight scenes and then let them rage.

How does all this fit in Alice in Wonderland? The books were crazy travelogues into a world of brilliant make-believe. Plots, such as they are, refer to chess games (Through the Looking Glass) and a vague notion that one can wake from a dream (the original Wonderland).

In Burton’s film, it’s all rush, rush, rush. A not so young Alice, played by 20-something Mia Wasikowska, is, indeed, late, late, late for a very important date. She’s about to be engaged to a wildly inappropriate man, when she falls down the proverbial rabbit hole. All too quickly, she’s on the Red Queen’s enemy’s list and Stayne, her scar-faced henchman is racing around Underland trying to capture her.

The wonderfully crazy Mad Tea Party has been truncated and turned into a set piece where Alice escapes capture by the Red Queen’s forces. When the Mad Hatter is arrested instead of her, Alice pretends to be the Queen’s ally until she and her friends can escape to the White Queen’s castle. Pushing that storyline as hard as can reasonably be imagined, our Alice has to fight the Jabberwocky to turn Underland into Wonderland.

Johnny Depp is wonderful as the Mad Hatter, of course. He seems to have read Carroll and loved it. Anne Hathaway offers a surprisingly neurotic White Queen and Helena Bonham Carter is a properly villainous Red Queen. Proper British actors produce proper voices for all the animated parts, from Tweeledum to the White Rabbit.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland looks lovely. But where’s its soul? Maybe Disney can hire detectives to find it.