By Thomas Leupp
Nearly a century and a half after
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland first acquainted readers with the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the rest of the peculiar inhabitants of author Lewis Carroll’s fertile imagination, filmmaking technology has finally developed the tools capable of properly rendering Carroll's exquisitely twisted world on the big screen. And who better to oversee the translation than
Tim Burton, Hollywood’s foremost mass-market purveyor of dark, quirky fantasy? If there’s any director working today who can lay claim to Carroll’s creative inheritance, surely it is him.
His creation,
Alice in Wonderland, is fashioned not as an adaptation of Carroll’s two Alice-centered books but rather a kind of sequel to them, its titular heroine (
Mia Wasikowska) redrawn as the mischievous 19-year-old daughter of English aristocrats. Given more to chasing small animals than attending society functions, Alice is the kind of adventurous, free-thinking Victorian renegade who thinks nothing of drinking suspicious beverages found at the bottom of rabbit holes.
If only she were more interesting. Burton’s Alice isn’t so much a character as she is a tour guide, leading us through the director’s $150 million museum of digital delights. Virtually everything on display in the film, from the giant mushrooms of the Underland forest to the bulging eyes of
Johnny Depp’s (literally) mercurial Hatter, was either created or enhanced inside a computer, presumably one with a direct connection to Burton’s cerebral cortex. (Interestingly, the enhanced Depp bears a more than passing resemblance to
Elijah Wood, who the producers could have gotten for a lot less money.) Much like Alice herself, it’s gorgeous to look at but never particularly engaging.
Were he alive today — and reasonably coherent — Carroll himself would no doubt marvel at the visual grandeur of
Alice in Wonderland, its CGI world as detailed and immersive as the most vivid of his migraine-induced hallucinations. But he might frown at the short thrift given to his characters. Esteemed cast members like
Anne Hathaway (The White Queen),
Crispin Glover (The Knave of Hearts), and even the mighty Depp can’t hope to compete with the beauty of their surroundings — instead of actors chewing the scenery, the scenery devours the actors. (A notable exception is
Helena Bonham Carter, the cast’s lone standout as the screeching, acerbic Red Queen.)
Alice in Wonderland is really designed to function as an inoffensive family flick, and in that regard, it boasts more than enough pretty fluff to keep the minds of most pre-teens occupied for the duration of a Saturday matinee. But afterward they might be hard-pressed to recount details of the story, which involves Alice having to find a magic sword so she can slay a giant dragon and unlock the Legend of Zelda. Or something like that.
Filled with moments of fleeting exhilaration and empty whimsy,
Alice in Wonderland never really grabs the viewer in any meaningful way, its overall experience more akin to that of a theme park ride than a movie. Which I half suspect was Disney’s intention all along.