Tim Burton (2010)

One day soon, someone is going to adapt Beatrix Potter’s stories for cinema again and it will climax with Peter Rabbit zapping Mr McGregor and Tom Kitten annihilating Samuel Whiskers.  Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton (based on both the Alice books), builds towards Alice’s slaying the Jabberwock.  She’s kitted out in armour for the occasion and the imposing 20-year-old Mia Wasikowska, who plays Alice, suggests a spoof Joan of Arc but the experience is very familiar – another computer-generated big fight.  Lewis Carroll has been adapted often enough to make it difficult for a film-maker aiming for a distinctive interpretation to avoid accusations that the original is being travestied.  The problem with this film is that, while it gives a newish look to Wonderland (or Underland – as it’s called in the script, if not the title), that look is disappointingly similar to other other worlds recently seen on screen:  the place and its inhabitants recall, in different ways, Middle Earth and The Golden Compass, even Jurassic Park, and with Danny Elfman’s score we might as well be in Gotham City. (Elfman’s music is supplemented by a dreary theme song by Avril Lavigne.)

As with Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton’s imagination doesn’t seem to go beyond design features.  The CGI-ed characters (the Red Queen, Tweedledee and Tweedledum), with the features of the actors grotesquely distorted but recognisable, are remarkable; some of the costumes (by Colleen Atwood) are works of art; and the set dressing (by Karen O’Hara and Peter Young) can be supernaturally precise – the table at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, for example.  In other ways, though, this Alice doesn’t even look that great against other recent pictures with which it invites comparison.  Without wanting to be fair to Avatar, its 3D effects are a lot more impressively integrated and animated.  When, in the last sequence here, a blue butterfly (which Alice recognises as the reincarnation of the Caterpillar) floats out of the screen towards us, it’s a beguiling moment – and a strong one because such moments are so rare in Burton’s film.  Whether there was a problem with the print we saw I don’t know but the whole thing was very dark with the 3D glasses on.  The size-changing (‘Drink Me’, ‘Eat Me’) bits are good enough but the landscape of Underland is pointlessly vast and mostly much less eye-catching than the vistas of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.   (The cinematography is by Dariusz Wolski and the supervising art director was Stefan Dechant.)

It’s a mystery why Burton wastes the first quarter hour on a prologue before getting Alice down the rabbit hole.  The child Alice (Mairi Ella Challen) has a bad dream, which we gather is a recurring one, and her father Charles (Marton Tsokas) comes to her room to talk her reassuringly back to sleep.  The action then leaps forward more than ten years:  the father has died and Alice and her mother (Lindsay Duncan) are going to a stuffy Victorian garden party, at which Alice is expected to become engaged to Hamish (Leo Bill), the chinless wonder son of Lord and Lady Ascot (Tim Pigott-Smith and Geraldine James, in a Jewel in the Crown reunion).  It’s to escape the tedium of the occasion and the dismaying prospect of a life with Hamish that Alice starts seeing and following the White Rabbit.  This whole sequence is toneless and the actors are obviously uncertain how to play it.  (The one admirable exception is Frances de la Tour, passionately eccentric and fully in tune with her character, as the wild-haired old maid Aunt Imogene.)   Apart from two sisters who anticipate Tweedledum and Tweedledee, there are no amusing resonances between the characters at the garden party and those that Alice meets in Wonderland.

This set-up is typical of Linda Woolverton’s screenplay in that it’s immediately suggestive – the nineteen-year-old Alice resisting an irrevocable commitment to the grown-up world – but turns out to mean very little.  It’s like the fact that we discover that Alice is on a return visit to Wonderland, where she first went as a young child:   the similarities or differences between the two visits aren’t developed or in any way interesting.  When she resurfaces in the real world, Alice rejects Hamish’s hand in marriage but goes into business partnership with Lord Ascot, a colleague of her late father, and we last see her setting sail for China.  I’ve no idea what this is supposed to signify – a liberated woman before her time?   There are other striking but eventually pointless details, like Alice being the daughter not of an Oxford don but of a man whose name, Charles Kingsleigh, is homonymic with that of a Victorian storyteller very different from Lewis Carroll.

After the hopeless social comedy of the prologue, Alice’s descent to Underland is protracted – Tim Burton fills the journey down the rabbit hole with obstacles big enough to threaten fatal injury and the sequence is spectacularly unpleasant rather than amusing.   The persisting lack of humour of the film is both frustrating, because Burton is a comic talent, and counterproductive – and this dual problem is embodied in Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen.  When the Red Queen first appears, she has frog footmen lined up in a kind of identity parade and is interrogating them to find out who stole the tarts (this gives a reasonable idea of how Burton and Woolverton mix up the original’s ingredients).  The Queen’s peremptoriness is funny and the suspects’ discomfort – especially the culprit’s guilty swallowing – delightful.  Helena Bonham Carter is becoming a character actress you look forward to seeing:  she was a good Mrs Lovett and her lethal petulance here, although the voice owes something to Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in the Elizabethan Blackadder, is very enjoyable.  She looks amazing.  But she’s an essentially comic figure and it makes no sense – and feels all wrong – when the Red Queen is eventually vanquished as if she’d been a villain to take seriously.

Because of who he is (especially to Tim Burton), Johnny Depp’s role as the Mad Hatter has been expanded – and inflated in terms of the moral weight it’s expected to bear. (The Wikipedia article on the film is eloquent on this, when it quotes Mia Wasikowska as saying that Alice and the Hatter ‘have an understanding about each other. They both feel like outsiders and feel alone in their separate worlds, and have a special bond and friendship’.)  In spite of this, Depp has some charming and occasionally affecting moments – he’s obviously trying different things out and though some (like the Scottish accent) work less well than others (the Hatter’s melancholy), the effect is likeable.  Considering the confused conception of the role, Mia Wasikowska does well as Alice and Matt Lucas is rather brilliant at making Dum and Dee both same and different but some of the other performers are disappointing:  as a militaristic Knave of Hearts, Crispin Glover doesn’t come through strongly; Anne Hathaway is an uncertain White Queen (it’s also hard to make out what she’s saying much of the time).

The sound-only contributors too are a very mixed bag:   Imelda Staunton has a vivid cameo as the voice of a flower face but some other speakers don’t seem to connect with the figures on screen.  This may be because of the design of those figures but actors famed for their vocal versatility, like Michael Sheen (the White Rabbit) and Paul Whitehouse (the March Hare), barely register.  Voice recognition is no guarantee of success either:  Timothy Spall is good as a bloodhound and Alan Rickman very effective as the Caterpillar (the marriage of his voice with the movement of the animated insect’s face and body is perfect) – whereas Barbara Windsor (the Dormouse) and Stephen Fry (the Cheshire Cat) are no more than predictable.  (That cat also looks really naff, even though it dematerialises nicely.)

22 March 2010