Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at Century Stadium 25, Orange County.

I have fallen down the rabbit hole.  Potions don’t shrink me, nor do cats talk.  But something has happened that, if not impossible, never struck me as probable.  Tim Burton has made a boring film.  A dull film.    A dreary, tiresome, lack-luster film.  How on earth did that happen?

Burton’s Alice In Wonderland is a mish-mash of both its namesake and Through the Looking Glass, with additional material from screenwriter Linda Woolverton.  Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19, has forgotten about her childhood adventures.  Destined for an arranged marriage, she runs away from a garden party and, as luck would have it, falls straight down a rabbit hole.  Even there her fate seems out of her hands, as Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and Dormouse (Barbara Windsor) drag her into a war against the tyrannical Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter)

Alice Can’t Have Its Cake and Eat it Too

Things get off to a strong start, with the highly independent Alice trying to make her own way in a world in which the future has been planned out for her.  But the film trips up with her as she takes the plunge into Wonderland, and the problem seems to be Burton.  The film has his footprints all over it, but the man himself is missing.  We have Depp and Bonham Carter bringing the wacky we’ve come to expect, twisted landscapes, haunting forests and gloomy environments.  But all of the actual darkness and humor that Burton usually brings is missing.  Where Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman brought a sense of fear and danger with his decapitation spree, the Red Queen is neutered.  No matter how many times we hear her bark out an order for someone to lose their head, no one’s neck ever feels the sting of the executioner’s axe.  Sure, there’s a moat-full of floating craniums, but they look as though they belong to statues and besides, we don’t know any of their owners.  The film lacks scares, suspense and any sense of threat, and thus the audience has no reason to care.

If you wish to argue that this is a ‘children’s film’, and thus shouldn’t be too scary (though that didn’t stop Burton when directing BeetleJuice or producing The Nightmare Before Christmas), then fair enough.  But what then has happened to the characters?  In particular, Depp’s Hatter has truly embraced madness, to the point where he is now actually schizophrenic.  His accent lurches between firey Scottish and a lisping version of his own voice, both with personalities to match.   This renders him highly disturbing, and makes the suddenly close relationship which springs up between Hatter and Alice all the more unbelievable.  The audience is given no emotional bedrock to cling to.  Burton is also determined to cram in as many characters from the two books as possible, such as the March Hare (Paul Whitehouse), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee) and the Dodo Bird (Michael Gough).  This leaves too little room to get to know them, and they drift in and out of the story without ever feeling part of it.

On the plus side, the voice-cast assembled is spectacular, and many of the performances are superb.  Stephen Fry’s voice oozes from the ever grinning mouth of the Cheshire Cat like rancid corn-syrup and Christopher Lee, though woefully underused, brings his usual gravitas to the giant Jabberwocky.  Wasikowska acquits herself admirably amongst the more experienced cast that (virtually) surrounds her, conjuring up a very straightforward Alice who brooks no nonsense, even when her world has been turned upside down.

Unfortunately, that inverted world is another problem.  Wonderland is a computer generated world.  This should have allowed Burton’s usually hyper-active imagination to run free, conjuring up the wild and fantastic, a realm of dream and nightmare.  Instead we have a few giant toadstools, a couple of castles and a lot of empty space.  Wonderland under Red Queen’s rule is not the exciting, twisted world you expect from Burton.  Rather it is desolate, lifeless and, well, boring.  Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the final battle sequence of the film where, mixing the first and second books in a rather odd manner.  In a succession of long shots monochrome armies clash on a monochrome battlefield, creating what may be the dullest war ever fought on screen.  The visuals, if nowhere else, are where I expect Burton’s creations to shine and to find them so insipid is truly disappointing.

Another problem with the film’s visuals comes from the choice to mix live action and computer generated material on the same screen.  Here the film runs headlong into one of the (many) problems that I had with Avatar.  No matter how convincing the CGI worlds are, introducing a real person into them simply highlights their flaws.  The closer the environments come to appearing real, the less convincing they become when a real person is involved.  While Avatar managed to avoid this problem for most of the film by keeping the humans and the Na-vi separated, Alice is on screen, and therefore out of place, for the majority of this film’s running time.  I confess that I did not see the film in 3D, as until someone convinces me that they have found a way to use it to actually enhance the story telling process you’ll be prying the extra dollars from my cold dead fingers.  However at no point did it feel as though a retro-fitted illusion of depth (the film was created as a 2D experience) would have improved things.

The film is also cursed with a cock-eyed message about self-determination (compare Alice’s decisions in Wonderland with those she makes back in the real world), and its few laughs are mostly to be found in its trailer.  With not enough Tim Burton here to make the film interesting, but too much for the film to be a cute children’s story, Alice in Wonderland digs itself into a hole it just can’t climb out of.

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Published:
04.09.10 / 5pm
Category:
Films