Alice in Wonderland

A few weeks ago I reviewed The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, by one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Terry Gilliam. I commented that while the movie did contain some cool set pieces, overall I found it mildly disappointing. Now arrives Alice in Wonderland, by Tim Burton, another favorite director — and again, I left it feeling mildly disappointed. I don’t like this trend!

The dodo, doormouse, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and the White Rabbit confront Alice upon her arrival in Underland. ©Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved

1) Tim Burton, 2) the story of Alice in Wonderland, and 3) 3D — these three things led me to believe that Alice in Wonderland would be transfixing entertainment. I was revved up the instant I heard, probably a couple years ago, that Burton was going to tackle this tale. To say I’ve been looking forward to the movie is an understatement. Fueling my anticipation were the photos and trailers that began appearing toward the end of last year, especially those of the latest Burton grotesquerie being portrayed by Johnny Depp, the Mad Hatter. Everything looked great, but we all know that if you get your hopes up too high you may be in for disappointment.

I thought the movie was only OK. There wasn’t much I found particularly thrilling, beginning with the story. We’re introduced to young Alice telling her sympathetic father about a frightening dream she had during which she met a variety of bizarre characters in an equally bizarre world. Then we flash forward 13 years. Her father is dead and her mother wants her to accept a marriage proposal from a snooty young lord. Wandering among the grounds of a fancy English estate during a garden party, she spots the waistcoated White Rabbit dashing through some shrubbery and follows him to a hole at the base of a tree. In she goes, and off to Wonderland she falls.

Only it’s not Wonderland anymore, it’s now called Underland and has fallen under the threatening, oppressive rule of the Red Queen. This brings up a primary gripe I have with the movie: the whole thing is fairly oppressive. Tim Burton is famous for his dark sense of humor, but this movie is mostly dark without much humor. Sure, there are some funny moments – the Red Queen’s interrogation of some guilty-looking frog footmen in the wake of a tart theft was hilarious – but the humor, not to mention the wonder, was lacking. Alice, played by Mia Wasikowska, is mostly low-key, and she barely reacts to anything. The thrill of discovery inherent in the book and previous movie versions of Alice in Wonderland is mostly tossed out in favor of a sense of foreboding in this version.

Once she arrives in Underland Alice meets up with the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen, who played David Frost in Frost/Nixon), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (consistently amusing, both are portrayed by CG-ified comedian Matt Lucas), a dodo and a feisty dormouse. They take her to talk with Abosolom, the hookah-smoking caterpillar (Alan Rickman).

Here I must comment upon something within the film industry that I find wholly ridiculous: the “reason box” that accompanies a movie’s rating. Do you ever read the reason box? It appears beneath a movie’s rating (G, PG, R, etc.), and contains reasons why the movie was slapped with that rating, under the auspices of guiding parents in deciding whether a movie contains scenes they may find objectionable, and that they may not want their children to see. For instance, for the Saw movies, it might say, “VIOLENT IMAGES, TORTURE.” Sometimes the reasons will be a little murky, such as “ADULT SITUATIONS” or one of the more stupid ones, “THEMATIC ELEMENTS.” I’ve noticed in recent years that some will mention smoking, which is pretty dopey in itself, but I saw one reason box on a television commercial for Alice in Wonderland that reached a new level of idiocy: It read “SMOKING CATERPILLAR.” I suppose I can see why the reason box may be helpful to some especially worrisome parents, but if the information being presented has to be so specific that it has to point out it’s a caterpillar that’s smoking, the whole situation is getting increasingly ludicrous. Maybe I’d feel differently if I were a parent, but I doubt it.

Anyway, back to Alice. Abosolom shows them a scroll that reveals the history, past and present, of Wonderland. Pictured upon it are images of Alice’s first visit to Wonderland, though she never does offer much recognition to that fact, and even denies it at times. Also pictured is the “Frabbulous Day” in which Alice kills the Jabberwocky, a dragonlike creature that the Red Queen employs to keep Underland’s inhabitants ground firmly beneath her boot. The Underland inhabitants rejoice that Alice has arrived to slay the monster, but Alice denies that she’s the Alice portrayed in the scroll, and she refuses to be their long-awaited champion.

Soon the movie become a cat-and-mouse game between the Red Queen and her minions’ efforts to capture Alice, preventing her from fulfilling the scroll’s prophecy, and the good guys, as represented by the Mad Hatter, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and other assorted characters, including the Cheshire Cat, whose appearances took full advantage of being in 3D. They have their hands full keeping Alice out of the Red Queen’s clutches while also convincing her to recognize the role she must play as Wonderland’s savior.

For me, the most memorable character was not Depp’s orange-haired Mad Hatter, but Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. Though she doesn’t have much more to do than shout, “Off with his head!” she cuts a strikingly bizarre and comic figure with her oversized head and garish makeup. Of course, Depp is plenty bizarre, too. I can appreciate that he chooses not to cash in on his good looks and enjoys burying them beneath the wacked-out characters he plays in Burton’s films, starting with Edward Scissorhands all the way through to Sweeney Todd. This is admirable, and I have found it funny, but it’s also getting a bit old. His Burton roles are beginning to have a bit of a “been there, done that” feel to them. In Alice he spouts gibberish with a sort-of Scottish accent. He frowns, he grins a gap-toothed grin, and he acts plenty nutty. Occasionally an attempt is made to make him a sympathetic character, but these fall flat. It seemed to me that the movie was striving to convey a connection between the Mad Hatter and Alice that harkened back to the one between the Scarecrow and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. It didn’t work for me because the Alice characters had nowhere near the emotional complexity or development of the Oz characters.

The Mad Hatter occasionally tangles with Stayne, the Red Queen’s menacing Knave of Hearts, played by Crispin Glover’s head on an oddly elongated, armor-clad CGI body. It’s always good to see Glover, and it would be nice to see more of him. He gained immediate fame as the hilariously nerdy dad in Back to the Future, and he played a memorable teenaged loon in The River’s Edge. He eventually earned a reputation as an upstart and a weirdo, reinforced by his infamous appearance on David Letterman, when he came close to kicking Letterman in the head while demonstrating some karate moves (the YouTube clip showing this can be seen at the end of this blog). Since then, Glover’s film appearances have mostly been in low-budget, little-seen movies. Before Alice, his highest-profile movie in recent memory was probably the Willard remake in 2003, starring as the title character opposite hordes of rats – unless you count his voice as Grendel in the CGI version of Beowulf in 2007 (which was great in IMAX 3D).

Burton’s unique artistic vision is on view throughout Alice in Wonderland, but it’s muted. Maybe the projector in the theater where I saw it needed a new bulb, but the movie was rather dim. You would expect increasingly bizarre landscapes awash in vibrant color. In Underland we get a taste of that here and there, but much of the landscape is brown, desolate and populated by dead trees. It’s not a good movie for very young children, despite the fact that it’s a Disney movie. The action sequences are few and far between, and there’s a lot of talking that will bore young viewers. Very young viewers may find some of the sequences scary. A little boy behind me was terrified of the Bandersnatch, and he cried when this gallumping, snorting monster with a huge mouth full of jagged teeth made its initial appearance. Another particularly icky moment finds Alice crossing a castle’s moat by stepping on a series of severed heads that are floating within it.

I saw the 3D IMAX version of Alice in Wonderland. It was nowhere near as crisp as the 3D IMAX of Avatar. Part of the reason is probably because I ended up sitting quite close to the gigantic IMAX screen. During extreme closeups of the characters I found myself pressing my head against my seat, trying to get a little more distance between me and the screen. I was also off to the side of the theater, which makes 3D viewing problematic. I had to keep moving my head and eyes around to find the best position to see the 3D to best effect. Another reason for the less-than-stellar 3D was, I think, that large portions of the movie were converted to 3D after filming had been completed. This doesn’t usually result in the best-quality 3D. Avatar was made wholly in 3D, which provides a superior 3D experience in the theater.

I would have preferred Burton’s take on the straight-up original tale of little Alice in Wonderland to this gloomier version of Alice. But even though this new Alice in Wonderland lacked whimsy, because of the bizarros on parade and the Burtonesque flourishes, I would still give it a B-. It wasn’t boring, and I would recommend it to fellow Burton fans. With that recommendation, though, I would include the confession that it’s not my favorite Tim Burton movie. Actually, I’m not entirely sure which one is, but Ed Wood remains way up there, as well as his first and the one that put him on the map, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.