My review, copied from my site.
FarSky wrote:
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Directed by Tim Burton, written by Linda Woolverton
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Isn’t there such a wonderful insanity to the writings of Lewis Carroll? Such a unique texture, so fluid are his words, so obscure the logic behind them. I think his writings make little sense, but it is in their seeming that they captivate us. It’s genius touched by madness, or possibly it’s the other way around.
The world of Carroll’s Wonderland appeared to me a match made in Heaven for Tim Burton, who has made a career of playing in the same kind of world, or at least one residing next door. Burton’s unique sensibilities, his love of overwrought environments that seem to creep in and infect their inhabitants, his marriage of the creepy and the sweet, thrilled me to think that he was going to apply his own unique stamp to what seemed a perfect property. Unfortunately, I don’t think the marriage will work out in the long run.
Let me backtrack for a moment and say that I enjoyed Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. I don’t want to dissuade anyone from viewing it, because I believe it has much to commend it. I don’t, however, believe it to be fully successful as a film, for a number of reasons.
First, to recount, when we join Alice (Mia Wasikowska), she’s 19, and about to be proposed to by a foppish dandy with a witch of a mother. Alice chafes at Victorian attitudes that seem to dictate all aspects of her life; she longs to imagine, to run free, to be silly and serious and above all, herself. In short order, she catches sight of a white rabbit in a wastecoat, and leaves her would-be fiancée in a lurch as she takes off after the besuitted bunny and tumbles down the rabbit hole once more.
Upon arriving in Wonderland, she finds that it’s been ruined by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, sporting a massive CGI noggin). To make a long story short, Alice is prophesized by the inhabitants of Wonderland (called “Underland” here, in an unnecessary bit of creative license) to be the Chosen One, joined by Wonderland inhabitants such as the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), and swept up into a battle to oust the Red Queen from her perch.
Let me first say that Wonderland’s aesthetic is marvelous. It’s rather a given that a film about Wonderland with Burton at the helm will look fantastic, and he’s certainly not rested on his laurels here. The film is screening in 3D, but it’s a post-production trick, and I’d actually suggest seeing it in 2D, to better take in the beauty and awe of the world. Everything from the set designs to the costumes to the CGI enhancement of virtually all of the Wonderland inhabitants (the Red Queen’s outsized head, the Black Knave’s odd body, and fully CGI beasties like the Cheshire Cat and the March Hare were birthed from a computer to populate the land) is possessed of its own unique beauty, and feels a part of this bizarre world.
The performances, too, are uniformly excellent. Some of the film’s stars are mere voices, like Alan Rickman providing the Caterpillar’s dulcet tones, or Michael Sheen and Christopher Lee putting in mere cameos as the White Rabbit and the Jabberwock, respectively, but all perform admirably. The bulk of the acting praise should be directed at Johnny Depp, who overcomes a truly unfortunate makeup job to imbue the Mad Hatter with real pathos and emotion. Playing this kind of nearly-alien character is Depp’s specialty, of course, but it makes it no less an accomplishment to engender empathy for the Hatter, particularly for anyone who’s seen stills of the madman’s outfit. Mia Wasikowska’s Alice is appropriately spunky yet polite (she is a Victorian girl, after all), and Helena Bonham Carter digs her forehead in and plays the Red Queen like a spoiled, wounded child.
No, I can’t fault the aesthetic or the acting. All of the film’s failures can, I believe, be placed at the feet of Linda Woolverton’s script. The film is simply of two minds about everything (thematically appropriate, perhaps, but not a wise choice). It simply can’t decide what it is, or even what it wants to be. A straight take on the source material? A bold reimagining? A remake with an older protagonist? A true sequel to the original books? The film is rather violent, and understandably creepy at times (beheadings, eye punctures, and a tiny Mia Wasikowska’s crossing of a moat by jumping onto the decapitated heads of those who’ve crossed the Red Queen spring to mind). Now, I’ve always believed Wonderland tales should walk that razor’s edge of innocuous and disturbing, but there’s no real emotional maturity to purchase that level of violence, or the creep factor. I’ve not (nor will I ever) complain about their inclusion, but the bottom line is that the film goes too far to really be a children’s movie, but doesn’t go far enough to be an adult film. It wants to straddle this odd middle ground, and doesn’t seem grounded enough, either emotionally or satisfyingly, for either.
Plot threads are brought in and left dangling. Alice doesn’t remember going to Wonderland before. But all this means is that Wonderland inhabitants constantly are asking her “Don’t you remember when you were here before?” The jump in time doesn’t seem to pave the way for any new twists; Wonderlandoners simply act the exact same as they did in the original stories. The Mad Hatter even goes so far as to constantly repeat his famous but well-worn riddle involving ravens and writing desks. The same tea party is still going on, the Red Queen’s still in charge and beheading people, the Caterpillar’s still smoking his hookah…it’s as though the only changes in Wonderland have been the result of some weatherization on the landscape. So what was the point of shunting the chronology along, aside from offering a slightly older protagonist?
I suppose I’m being hard on the film, but it’s only because I’ve seen similar subject matter tackled with much better results. There’s the superlative video game, American McGee’s Alice, wherein Alice has been in a mental institution, taking place after both her trips to Wonderland and her parents’ unfortunate deaths in a house fire, and must once again enter a darker, more reflective Wonderland to reclaim her sanity. Or perhaps take the series of books entitled The Looking Glass Wars, which purport to tell the “true” story of Alyss’s trip to Wonderland and the events there. Both of these would have been much better fodder for the story cannon than the drippy script from Woolverton that we were offered.
At the end of the day, I’m forced to find Tim Burton’s trip through the looking glass a noble failure, with a brain too weak to recommend but a body too pretty to dismiss without a glance. It’s certainly better than Burton’s massive failures, Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it falls far short of top-tier works like Sweeney Todd, and Big Fish. This Wonderland may be an intriguing place to visit, but, much like Alice herself, I doubt you’ll want to live there.
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