Alice in Wonderland

Directed By: Tim Burton

Written By: Linda Woolverton

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, and Crispin Glover

Director of Photography: Dariusz Wolski, Editor: Chris Lebenzon, Production Designer: Robert Stromberg, Original Music: Danny Elfman

Rated: PG for fantasy action/violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar.

    The dream-like and strange images of Lewis Carroll have been an inspiration for numerous artists, whether is be painting, writing, or of course, cinema. The now iconic images of the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter have enlightened the screen over and over again. But at the heart of Carroll’s two novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, is a girl named Alice. This is her story, and her adventure. Even when Mr. Carroll’s writing divulges from a straight narrative and simply becomes a series of vignettes, Alice is always at the center.

    Maybe that’s why Tim Burton was the wrong person to bring a new adaptation to the screen. Written by Linda Woolverton and directed by Mr. Burton, Alice in Wonderland is a collection of amusing and strange images—in Disney 3D! no doubt—in a script that finds itself completely lacking in character. One character tells Alice that she has lost her ‘muchness’—the problem is Alice isn’t much of anything throughout the film. She’s just a carrier of the images that Mr. Burton wants to create.

    It’s a shame too—Alice, aged up from childhood and instead 19, is played by a usually wondrous actress named Mia Wasikowska. Ms. Wasikowska did great things with a troubled character on the HBO show In Treatment, but given nothing to do here but follow her given path, she’s lost as an actress. Alice’s story begins in 19th century England, where Alice is set to be proposed at a party to a dull man. Instead, following the trueness to Mr. Carroll, Alice escapes the party and follows a clothed rabbit down a hole and into Wonderland (or as it is referred to throughout, Underland). Alice thinks it’s a dream, but things become real for her very quickly.

    Mr. Carroll’s novel worked so well like another classic of the English language, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, because of its anti-narrative stance. Such a curious divulgence is not possible for a Disney film, and Alice’s story involves coming to meet her destiny in an epic battle with the famed Jabberwock. Along the way though, Alice comes in contact with a number of Burton’s CGI creations, voiced by his usual round of actors. The images have their fanciful quality about them—how could Mr. Burton’s ecstatic visions ever let us down—but they also feel tired. Mr. Burton said that he wanted to see these iconic images in their proper form, and has done a lot to make them iconic, including adding a third dimension to the screen to make them pop out (Mr. Burton has no care in the immersive quality of this technique, making it a distraction instead of an addition). But most of them have no soul, and when they do, it feels strange.

    The worst of this is the film’s top billing to Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Mr. Depp, topped with orange hair and green eyeliner, bounces across the screen in his usual fashion. Does it accomplish anything? A few chuckles, but it also distracts us from Alice, who is at the heart of this story. And while Helena Bonham Carter also hammers it up as the notorious Red Queen, and Anne Hathaway walks mindlessly as her white counterpart, they only serve their purpose as the images, not as the characters.

    For a film with so much story packed into it, the narrative feels like a chore for Mr. Burton, and you can see him struggling on screen to push it forward. A final climatic battle feels much less like a real Burton finale than a Disney mandate. The novel’s famous lines feel much more as tacked on checklists than authentic moments. The parallelism of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is evident—Alice’s dream world is a manifestation of her actual problems. In a way, its reminiscent of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, but in other ways miles apart. Mr. Jonze foreground is imagination with a brutal realism, both emotionally as well as in terms of the camera. Mr. Burton only dazzles the images; the emotions are as hollow as any of his other recent films.

    Alice in Wonderland was never meant for the screen. It works as a novel because it is a novel about absurdity, not just visually, but in terms of language and psychology. As much as we can be amused by the imagery of this journey, it is Alice who seems to have gone missing in Wonderland.