Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland

A film directed by Tim Burton is presented by Disney. Linda Woolverton adapted it based on Lewis Carroll’s books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Its running time is 108 minutes. It is rated PG (for fantasy action involving scary images and situations, and violence, along with a smoking caterpillar).

Alice in Wonderland was creepy and distasteful to me when I was a young reader. It seemed like Alice’s adventures were nothing more than her being teased, puzzled, and tormented by different characters she met along the way. No child would want to go to wonderland let alone stay there, but then maybe that’s because I read it too young or was scared off by John Tenniel’s alarming illustrations why did alice have such deep dark sockets? Why couldn’t wonderland be cozy like pooh’s world? Watching the 1951 disney film version made me fear the Cheshire Cat was about to tell me something I didn’t want to know.

Tim Burton’s new 3-D “Alice in Wonderland” answers all of my childish questions; this never was meant for children after all Carroll’s fantasy has always had a touch of sadism about it that reminds one of uncles tickling their nieces until they scream bloody murder! “Alice” works best as an adult hallucination brought on by drugs or booze which is exactly how burton serves it up until act three goes off the rails into pointless CGI overload territory.

It was smart of burton and screenwriter linda Woolverton to make Alice (Mia Wasikowska) a grown girl now in her late teens who comes back through the looking glass into still very much same old same old wonderland where everything always remains just as fantastic worlds should do forever.

Burton is above all things a great visual artist so his movie looks good even if its harder to see some stuff through those glasses; i look forward to viewing it in 2-D where it will be brighter and more colorful as intended by all creators of these images who never wanted them stuck behind a silly third dimension. But that’s neither here nor there.

What he does with carroll’s characters is give them an appearance as distinctive and original from tenniel’s classic illustrations as the latter artist did from sir john tenniels own retreads of familiar cartoon figures for his day job at punch magazine. These are not your father’s wonderland grotesques but burton’s own, which means they’re even more grotesque than ever before! The red queen (helena bonham carter) sports a hydrocephalic forehead while tweedledee and tweedledum (matt lucas) appear to have been stepped on.

As for wonderland itself, why should we limit its boundaries to mere scenery such as a tree limb for the cheshire cat or a hookah pipe for caterpillar when there could be no end of alarming undergrowth beneath lowering skies stretching out forever? No fair asking why you can see below ground up into the sky either. (The landscape was designed by robert stromberg, who also worked on “avatar.”)

When she re-encounters it, alice has mixed feelings about her first trip down the rabbit hole but starts looking back on wonderland more kindly once she is threatened with being married off to hamish ascot (leo bill), a conceited snot-nose twit if ever there were one. In the middle of the wedding ceremony she impulsively scampers away after another rabbit down another rabbit hole only to find out down there that people remember having seen her before or do they?

Burton lets us see Wonderland as a disturbing place in which most of the inhabitants appear to have no other reason for being than to be strange and annoying. Do they reproduce? Many of the species seem to possess only one member, as though nature had taken an early retirement. The chief is the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), who is that rare actor who can play the most bizarre characters with perfect seriousness. Whoever he plays (Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, Ichabod Crane), he is that person entirely.

This Wonderland poses dangers for Alice (Wasikowska), who brings beauty and spunk to her role. The Red Queen wants her dead, and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) wants her alive maybe because both are typical of Wonderland queens. To be sure, the insecure White Queen doesn’t exactly wear herself out making Alice feel welcome.

The Queens, the Mad Hatter, Alice, the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) and perhaps Tweedledee and Tweedledum are variations on human beings; all others are animated, voiced with great energy by such as Stephen Fry (Cheshire), Alan Rickman (Absolem the Caterpillar), Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky), Timothy Spall (Bayard) and Barbara Windsor (Dormouse).

The film enchants in its morose way until alas! it arrives at its third act. Here I must apologize to my faithful readers for repeating myself so often. Time after time I complain when a movie establishes an intriguing situation and then resolves it into routine action and boring chases. We’ve seen every conceivable battle sequence; every duel; all carnage; countless showdowns; far too many fights to the finish.

Why must “Alice in Wonderland” conclude with an action sequence? Are the characters not rich enough? Has the story run out? Might little minds, jazzed by sugar from the candy counter, get overexcited without it? Or is it that executives, distrusting their artists and fearful in the face of genuine stories, insist upon an action climax as insurance? Insurance against what? That the story will have a beginning and a middle but nothing so dreadfully tedious as an end?

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