Film Review: Alice in Wonderland

Published on Thursday 4 March 2010 18:03

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (PG) ** DIRECTED BY: TIM BURTON STARRING: JOHNNY DEPP, HELENA BONHAM CARTER, MIA WASIKOWSKA

• Anne Hathaway stars as the White Queen. Picture: Complimentary

THANKS to his gilded reputation as Hollywood's king of kook, there's a tendency to believe that Tim Burton's distinctive, gothic-tinged view of the world makes him the natural choice to bring to cinematic life so many of the weird and wonderful stories we've all grown up loving. After all, what could be better than having his febrile imagination interpret oddball tales of billionaire vigilantes, headless horsemen, reclusive sweetie-makers and homicidal hairdressers?

Yet with few exceptions (most notably his strangely kinky Batman Returns), the director's best work has been based on somewhat original material. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride have a distinctive energy, inventiveness and cohesive quality lacking in much of Burton's other work. Where Batman, Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sometimes felt like the work of an artist doodling over someone else's vision, the films that started life as cinematic projects (or in Pee-Wee's case, the stage comedy routine of star Paul Reubens) stand out as undiluted expressions of a maverick film-maker unleashing his imagination on stories perfectly in synch with the way his brain seems to work.

So why does Burton persist with literary adaptations and remakes? It's a question to which his latest film, Alice in Wonderland, offers no answers. Bankrolled by Disney, the film could be classified under either of the aforementioned categories, inspired as it is by Lewis Carroll's two Alice books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) and containing elements familiar from Disney's own 1951 animated take on the story. But it's also a product of that specious Hollywood phenomenon known as the "re-imagining" – a horrible, creatively bankrupt marketing term Burton helped to popularise while promoting his terrible Planet of the Apes remake. Here, the story has been "re-imagined" as something of a sequel to the original books, picking up the tale of the titular heroine as a young Victorian woman haunted by dreams of white rabbits, grinning cats and blue caterpillars, little realising they're memories from an actual childhood adventure 13 years earlier.

On the cusp of marriage to an unctuous fool, Alice tumbles down the rabbit-hole once more and finds herself in a soulless CGI world full of magic potions, cartoonish creatures and Johnny Depp, the latter sporting a shock of carrot-coloured hair, helter-skelter eyes and an irritating habit of slipping into a gruff Scottish brogue every time his Mad Hatter has to spring into action. What narrative impetus there is for Alice's return evaporates almost immediately upon entering this surreal world. In Burton's hands, Carroll's literary nonsense is reduced to poorly rendered and charmlessly voiced animated characters, such as Tweedledum and Tweedledee (both played by Little Britain's Matt Lucas), Stephen Fry's Cheshire Cat, Michael Sheen's harassed White Rabbit and Crispin Glover's dastardly Knave of Hearts. They look like rejects from a Shrek film and, as a result, Wonderland no longer seems quite so wondrous.

But that's maybe because Wonderland isn't actually Wonderland anymore. As the film has it, the younger Alice simply misheard the name. It should be "Underland", yet that subtle change seems oddly symbolic, especially given the way the crooked strangeness and slanted-and-enchanted wonkiness that once made Burton's films so unique seems to have been smoothed out, presumably to ensure it appeals to the largest family audience possible without risking upset.

Of course, some of what's on display can still be classified as suitably "Burton-esque". As Alice, newcomer Mia Wasikowska's pallid skin, wide eyes and golden tresses ensure she's as wan as any of the protagonists from his past movies. And yet, despite supplying her with a liberating quest for independence involving a predestined date with the hideous, dragon-like Jabberwocky (voiced by Christopher Lee), the film comes to life only intermittently, usually with the appearance of either the bulbous-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) or her good-natured sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, channelling Nigella Lawson as she cooks up potions with a naughty, suggestive smile). Both are locked in a sororal struggle for Underland that Alice's return may tip in favour of the latter, but this plot point quickly takes a back seat to the chaos of the visuals and the distracting, undisciplined deployment of Johnny Depp, whose serial oddball routine is just that: routine.

Yes, sad as it is to report, Depp conjures up little magic as the loony-tunes milliner. Those ticks and tricks that once made him Hollywood's favourite outsider have now been so fully embraced by the mainstream they're starting to feel old hat. What's more, his gift for silent comedy is rendered obsolete, with his supposedly show-stopping "thudderwack" dance relying on CG-enhanced crazy legs, rather than any physical dexterity on Depp's part.

On top of all this, there's the horrible 3D. Once again suggesting that the modern use of this technology may be the greatest swizz perpetrated against moviegoers since digitally altered "special editions", the only things it enhances in Alice in Wonderland are the flaws in the overbearing production design. The virtual sets look a little cheap and naff, nothing seems particularly well integrated, and in the end it feels more like an afterthought than an additional tool to pull us through the looking glass. That's a shame because, while there's little doubt that Burton is a talented film-maker, he seems curiously intent on wasting those talents conforming to what the mainstream expects him to be doing, instead of setting the left-field blockbuster agenda.