When it was announced that Tim Burton’s next project was going to be a live action version of Alice in Wonderland, I’m sure it came as a surprise to no one. The surreal, mind bending scenery as described by the original Lewis Carroll story and as depicted in the Disney cartoon that this works as a pseudo sequel to seem right in Burton’s visually extravagant wheelhouse. The fact that he would re-team with long time acting staple Johnny Depp to fill the role of the mischievous Mad Hatter seemed to be a no brainer. As a matter of fact, it almost feels like we’ve seen Depp play this role before. Like, a lot. And thus, we have my first complaint about Burton’s new version of Alice: it feels like we’ve seen it all before.
The story starts off, interestingly enough, with the promise of something new. Rather than being another retelling of Carroll’s original stories, Burton’s film is actually a sequel dealing with an older Alice who is ready to be married off by her mother and start her adult life. The conflict for her is that she’s a bit of a free spirit and doesn’t want to be tied down by the stuffy social conventions of the time, not to mention the fact that the highborn husband that’s been chosen for her is a real window licker. During her moment of conflict she begins to see a familiar image, that of a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and carrying a clock running around in the hedge garden. Here’s where the promise of something new proves to just be false hope. Alice, deciding to ditch her betrothed and run after the rabbit falls down his hole, just like in the original story, goes through a series of growings and shrinkings in order to gain entrance into a mystical world, just like in the original story, meets a smoked out caterpillar and a grinning trickster cat, just like in the original story, etcetera, etcetera, until she has robotically walked through all the same story beats of the Disney cartoon of the same name. Somewhere going into the second act I was having flashbacks to Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, where instead of rebooting a franchise completely he opted to make a sequel to a pre-existing product (in that case Richard Donner’s Superman films), and then stuck to the themes and plots of the original so canonically that he ended up making more of a remake than a sequel anyways.
To be fair to Burton, he did manage to take things in a new direction for the Alice characters in the third act, but the direction he took them in was a too typically Hollywood one; ditching all of the original source material’s logic bending nonsense and wrapping everything neatly together with a derivative fantasy film sword battle complete with the Alice character being very awkwardly and unnaturally shoe horned into battle armor and made into a fighter. It’s not to say that the story of the film was bad, per se, but mostly just confounding as the first half of the film stuck so concretely to things we’ve already seen in Alice stories before, and then the ending pulled a total 180 and went in a direction that doesn’t jive with what the source material was about. I have to wonder if Burton had any real interest in the Alice stories at all, or if he was merely cashing a Disney paycheck to brush the dust off one of their old franchises. One of the weaknesses of the Alice stories is that they are so nonsensical that they become a bit frustrating and pointless to follow along with. Perhaps by leading things down such a typical three act structured path Burton was trying to alleviate this issue, but he then consequently robbed his Alice universe of a bit of it’s inherent uniqueness and made it look more like Narnia, Middle Earth, and other fairy tale worlds that we have become all too familiar with.
What most Burton fans are worried about, I would imagine, is not so much these questions of plot, but more so the visuals of the film. You can rest assured that everything here is pure Burton. From Alice’s pale faced and hollow socketed countenance, to the Mad Hatter’s fright wig and kabucki makeup, to the gnarled treescape look of Wonderland itself it all looks and feels exactly like you would imagine a Tim Burton helmed Alice story to. But is that enough? Burton has become such a distinct, specific kind of filmmaker that it’s becoming practically unnecessary to see his films. If you were to just imagine what a Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland would be like, you would get exactly what he made. No surprises, no disappointments, just middle of the road Burton faire. The same wacky Johnny Depp performance, the same gothic inspired production sign, the same Danny Elfman score. I wasn’t the biggest fan in the world of Big Fish, but at least there he stepped a bit out of this Tim Burton box that he’s created for himself and tried something new.
When discussing the look of this film it’s almost impossible not to look at it in the context of Avatar. Just a couple of months ago James Cameron shattered all preconceived notions of what a 3D film could be with his creation of the rich, immersive, alien world of Pandora. Alice in Wonderland is the first 3D film to be released since that groundbreaking work, and perhaps unfortunately, it’s going to suffer from being compared to it. Is Wonderland as revelatory an experience as Pandora? No. While Avatar fully used the possibilities of 3D technology to create a layered, complex image the likes of which haven’t been seen before, Alice uses it as little more than a ticket-selling gimmick. It’s unfortunate for Burton that he had to make this film right before our perception of 3D was changed, as I’m sure future 3D works will take many more cues from what Cameron and his crew did to further advance the technique. Here, somewhere around the middle of the film, I forgot that I was even watching it in 3D. That’s not to say that the world Burton and his art team created wasn’t beautiful, it was; it just wasn’t the same experience as watching Avatar and I argue that the film is probably just as effective when viewed in it’s standard format. This whole 3D movement leaves me in a bit of a mental pickle as to the process of movie reviewing as well. Should I even be mentioning the 3D aspects of the movie? In Avatar it would have been insane not to, as the 3D was the whole show. Here, and elsewhere, it’s not so much of an issue. Do we have to see both the 3D and regular versions of a film to properly review them now? If, as in Avatar, the 3D compositions are used to artistic effect are we even really seeing the film if we don’t see it in 3D? I suppose, going forward, I will just fess up to which version I saw in my reviews and do my best to focus on it as an individual entity, but it really plays havoc with the OCD part of my brain that wants to have everything ranked and rated.
Going into the film, I suppose I was most excited about the prospect of seeing Johnny Depp and Crispin Glover trade eccentric performance ticks, but coming out of it I was left pretty cold by their performances and highly appreciative of everyone else in the film. Depp is good enough at playing the Hatter and is able to make him a sympathetic character rather than the creepy oddity that many a lesser actor might have played him as, but I missed the magnetic charisma and visceral vulnerability that many of his past “out there” roles like Edward Scissorhands and Captain Jack Sparrow had. Here he felt like he was just sticking to the standard routine while trading between a Scottish accent and a lisp. The effect was acceptable enough, but fell a bit flat in my eyes. Glover, as the Knave of Hearts, had an unnaturally stretched out body and not knowing exactly how the effect was achieved I have to wonder if digital rendering robbed us a bit of his physical performance. I was expecting more mad cap, unexpected body language choices and unnervingly realistic, sadistic line delivery and what I got from him was closer to a standard turn as a movie’s antagonist hired muscle goon.
Mia Wasikowska, conversely, surprised me with her performance as Alice. Her character was a bit of a humdrum sounding board that was just there to let the insanity of the other characters bounce off of her and could have got rather boring. Wasikowska was able to play things so naturally, though, that things never went from odd to ridiculous. Her character almost took things in stride, like they were supposed to be happening, and it allowed me to better suspend my disbelief right along side of her. At the same time she emoted just enough to keep me invested in her ultimate fate and worry about her safety. Helena Bonham Carter was fun and over the top as the Queen of Hearts. Every line she delivers is laced with entitlement, impatience, and spiteful malice. Her head really seems to be the only thing she had to work with, as it appears digitally pasted on a too small body and she makes up for the limitation by being hyper expressive and hammy. At times I was reminded of Virginia Leith’s awesomely campy performance as the severed head in a pan in B cinema classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. High praise indeed. Anne Hathaway plays the Queen of Hearts’ saccharine soaked, goody goody sister the White Queen and is an absolute riot. She plays the character as an almost dim-bulbed Stepford Wife clonebot, weirdly floating her hands around in the air at all times, vacant faced, and giving off more the vibe of an animated Disney princess rather than a flesh and blood human being. Hers too was a role that could have been boring if it was left in the hands of a less bold actress. The rest of the cast is filled out with various British voice actors playing the roles of Wonderland’s strange inhabitants, and each one is better than the next. Alan Rickman lends his smooth yet sinister vocal stylings to the Blue Caterpillar, Matt Lucas voices the dimwitted dullards Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Stephen Fry is chilled out and very chi as the elusive Cheshire Cat, and Christopher Lee goes back to his fright roots as the demonic voice of the dreaded Jabberwocky. Each actor is pitch perfect in their performance and I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite out of the four.
What you end up with coming out of a viewing of Alice in Wonderland is a perfectly acceptable children’s tale with an uplifting female empowerment message, aesthetically pleasing production design, and a manageable runtime. I’m sure most audiences will walk away totally pleased. My question is whether or not making an acceptable children’s movie is enough of a goal for a respected artist like Tim Burton. Where was the heart? Where were the thrills? Why don’t I get cinematic chills when I’m watching his films if he’s such a great talent? Should we really be content with the visionary that brought us unique film-going experiences like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood churning out “perfectly acceptable” versions of existing properties aimed at children? I’ve come to the conclusion that Burton is a talented, if not one note production designer and not much of a storyteller. When paired with a great script like Ed Wood’s he knocks the material out of the park. When paired with something trashy like the script for his Planet of the Apes remake he’s not able to do much to elevate the material. That’s not to say that I want him out of the filmmaking business, I just wish he would take a break from these big, studio backed blockbuster properties and seek out a more off the wall, interesting, original story to throw his visual weight behind. Until then he’s not going to make a movie that gets any better than perfectly acceptable.
