Film Friday: Alice In Wonderland (2010)

I’m a fan of Tim Burton, but sadly he died right before making Corpse Bride. And rather than letting his memory rest in peace, the studio replaced him with a fake who’s been making films like Alice in Wonderland under Burton’s name. Alice is sloppy, unoriginal, and it kills the very spirit of what Burton was trying to capture. It’s studio-horrid.

** spoiler alert **

The Technicals

What can I say about this movie? Well, for starters, this movie is not for kids, even though Disney suggests it is. But feel free to disagree if you think your kids are ready to see eyes gouged out with needles, a moat floating with decapitated heads, and Alice drinking blood at the end. . . don’t worry, it’s purple, not red!

Visually, what Burton has done is pretty at times, but it’s all stolen. The Red Queen’s castle is Hogwarts with a different paint job. The White Queen’s castle is Rivendell from The Lord of the Rings. The way the animals were animated comes straight from the Narnia films. Some of the character actions (particularly the Dormouse) are straight from Labyrinth or Willow. And so on.

The writing is pathetic. There isn't a memorable moment or line in the film. The word choice is weak, the dialog is incomprehensible, and the plot is nonexistent. The story begins with a clichéd anachronism, as we’re presented with a lame leftist view of the British aristocracy as nose-picking, inbred fools. These people look like something from a Pride and Prejudice theme party, yet Alice acts like she’s from 1963, and this doesn't seem to bother anyone. For example, she's introduced right after burning her bra. . . er, refusing to wear her corset. She then roams around smugly and condescendingly insulting everyone. Fortunately for her, these characters are clichés and thus are too stupid to be able to fight back, so they just act shocked and cowed. She also skools the old businessman by telling him that she, a petulant, rebellious, stupid 19 year old girl who is prone to fantasies and unreliability should be given control over his firm's operations in China. Naturally, he agrees.

If I were to put a name to this “style” of storytelling, it would be "feminist revisionist period piece” or, more simply, “delusional feminist porno."

To try to seem clever during this opening, Burton and writer Linda Woolverton make several of the aristocrats mimic classic Alice in Wonderland characters, like the two nearly-twin girls who we are supposed to see as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or the businessman we are to see as the White Rabbit. Of course, “clever” is a relative term as this trick has been done in virtually every other “child transported to fantasy world” story since The Wizard of Oz, and nothing original is done with it here.

From there, the story takes you nowhere. Alice falls down the hole, where she meets Johnny Depp, playing a schizophrenic cross between Michael Jackson and William Wallace of Braveheart. He looks like a methhead, and his character is ultimately pointless except as plot filler. Alice then learns that her destiny is to kill the Jabberwocky, and through a series of uninteresting plot points, she does. Ho hum. Along the way, she meets the Red Queen, who is bad, and she meets the White Queen, who seems to be doing a mix of pot and acid. There’s not much more to say about the plot.

Burton’s Real Failure

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) has been loved by dozens of generations. What gives the story its staying power is the incredible world created by Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). And what makes that world so incredible is that Carroll takes reality and turns it on its head by infusing the impossible with the illogical and making that reality. In other words, his world isn’t the real world only containing silly things, like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it’s an entirely different world with a different set of rules. Thus, rather than being a mere story about strange events, Wonderland is a story about a unique place that tickles the imagination and inspires us to think about the possibilities of this new world.

Disney captured this spirit perfectly in its 1951 cartoon Alice in Wonderland, as Alice explores this world on our behalf and learns about its wonders. Tim Burton, based on his reputation, was expected to run with this concept and make the world even more fantastic or even more strange. He failed.

In the book and the Disney version, the world in which Alice finds herself is a reality. The characters within it accept its rules the same way we accept things like gravity and the way we know the sun to rise in the East. This is what creates the interesting tension, in that Alice finds herself in a world were everyone else knows what’s going on except her. And as she explores she finds that the impossible is not only possible, but common. Burton, however, tosses that structure away. What he presents instead is a world that is exactly like our own, and which plays by the exact same physical and logical rules as our own, only it contains strange looking characters with some odd traits.

That’s a huge difference. In the original and Disney worlds, we are pulled in as we learn the new rules and we love this world because anything is possible. In Burton’s Alice, by comparison, we get nothing of the sort. We already know the rules by which they live, and the only thing left to marvel at are the strangely dressed characters and their few abnormal traits. The difference between these two is like the difference between finding yourself at a tea party in a world with no physical laws versus finding yourself drinking tea at Michael Jackson's house.

Moreover, this gives the actors little to work with, and it shows. In most of Burton’s prior films, the actors could use the new realities of the worlds in which their characters live to find something to inject into the characters to make them interestingly bizarre, yet within the realm of normal for their worlds. Thus, the Joker’s psychopathic showmanship in Batman fit perfectly in his Gotham, though it would fail miserably in our world. Edward Scissorhands’ strange mechanical nature, Ichabod Crane’s terror at discovering a world of magic in Sleepy Hollow, and Pumpkin Jack’s inability to do joy instead of terror in Nightmare Before Christmas all infused these characters with drama, tension and depth. We understood who they were from how they fit in their worlds.

In Alice, there is nothing fantastic about the characters except that they are physically misshapen or strangely dressed. So the actors resorted to trying to seem “fantastic” by doing things like lisping their lines (Carter, Depp) or waving their arms around like idiots (Hathaway) or slinking about (Crispin Glover). But these things just make the characters look uncomfortable and out of place in this world, they don’t give us any sense of who the people are, nor do they make us think they are in some strange world. Instead, it feels like Burton simply shot this at a mental home. Compare that with truly unique characters like Disney’s Mad Hatter or the Caterpillar, who were fixtures of a different reality.

It really is sad. The studio took a guy with tremendous imagination and asked him to dream big, and what he came up with was a formulaic studio film using strangely-dressed characters all pretending to be crazy. Why even bother?