FILM REVIEW – ALICE IN WONDERLAND (TIM BURTON 2010 VERSION)
Mixed reactions to this, as not sure how much I hated it given my love of the Lewis Carroll stories and the film’s many contradictions and it’s general lack of direction.
There is much to commend, with fine performances, mostly by actors representing CGI’d Wonderland figures, Alan Rickman’s Absolem, Matt Lucas’s Tweedledee & Tweedledum, & Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen. (Modelled on the Queen Elizabeth depicted in the 2cd Blackadder TV series0. Stephen Fry is particularly outstanding in the Cheshire cat’s role.
As humans, Mia Wasikowowska is rather dull as the 19 year old Alice, with most of her family looking like extras from Brideshead Revisited. There are tantalizing flashbacks featuring the younger Alice so a straight re-make of the story might have worked well for Burton.
Frances De-La Tour, best known as Miss Jones in Rising Damp plays a silly old spinster waiting for a lover who is never going to come for her.
Alice, haunted by her childhood dreams, and quoting her adventures verbatim, sees reflections of Wonderland characters in the people around her, as she learns she is expected to marry the local upper class twit who is about to propose to her publicly. Much of the story is about her choices between social acceptance and individuality in both our World and Wonderland, to which she returns while deciding whether or not to accept the marriage.
The problems really kick in as Alice returns to Wonderland, for the third time, with a convenient state of amnesia kicking in regarding the previous two visits though she had recalled them so well prior to going. Also, as she struggles afresh with the Eat me / drink me substances and both grows & shrinks, other characters watch her and clearly seem to be testing her to see if she is going to perform the quests before her. Yes, the sequel is immediately turned into a bog standard fantasy quest incorporating elements of Narnia & Middle Earth stories. The nonsense verse gives way to characters driving Alice to accepting her duty and so the mad topsy turvy logic is often missing. The Queen is a spoilt brat tyrant with the Mad Hatter as a Leninist revolutionary, shocked by the scale of her oppression and willingness to kill. Depp plays the role as a fusion of his other characters, Willy Wonka & Jack Sparrow.
Depp’s performance as The Hatter is a mess. He seems unsure of the accent to use and often simply seems incomprehensible. Paul Whitehouse’s Mad Hater seems to be an impersonation of Scottish Willie, the janitor in The Simpsons cartoons.
The White Queen, (Ann Hathaway) is a weak but wise alternative ruler, a pacifist who is not averse to sending others to fight for her cause, namely overthrowing her sister, the Red Queen, and her chief henchman, Stayne, played like Travis in Blake’s 7 by Crispin Glover.
Injured in an attack by the Bandersnatch, who is in turn blinded by the Dormouse (Barbara Windsor impersonating Puss In Boots from Shrek) Alice befriends the Bandersnatch by restoring its sight, accepts her destiny as having to kill the Jabberwock, (voiced by Christopher Lee) and restores Wonderland to its former glory and goes home to reject the marriage proposal. Her reward is to become her father’s astute business partner and Alice sails for China in a ship called Wonder.
The amnesia plot is a staple of sequels for people who can’t be bothered watching or reading the originals. Spielberg’s Hook had Robin Williams in the same state of mind, equally unconvincingly, and the lovely land suffering in the absence of the hero is another staple ingredient. The story still sadly plays out previous visit situations as if new, drawing on Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass as if at random, with the big chessboard battle drawn from the latter. Though pretty looking, especially in 3D it remains an incoherent mess overall. Burton’s worse film since the dreadful Planet Of The Apes.
Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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