Tim Burton’s Frabjous Alice

Did many children truly love Lewis Carroll’s Alice books? Did they embrace the absurdities and antique wordplay of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass with the same rapt fervor they invested in other favorite stories, or did they find the Carroll works dry and remote? Couldn’t it be that kids were listening out of politeness to the big person sitting by their bed? Martin Gardner, author of the 1960 The Annotated Alice, thought so. “It is only because adults — scientists and mathematicians in particular — continue to relish the Alice books,” he wrote, “that they are assured of immortality.” Make that scientists, mathematicians and ’60s potheads, who saw Alice’s descent into the rabbit hole, the EAT ME cake and the mushroom-borne caterpillar as evidence of the first great psychedelic trip.

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Anyway, it’s adults who’ve made the couple dozen film versions. The Carroll texts are appealing because their vaudeville format — Alice’s encounters with a series of outlandish comic creatures — lends itself to brief star turns. W.C. Fields played Humpty Dumpty, Gary Cooper the White Knight and Cary Grant the Mock Turtle in Hollywood’s 1933 Alice. Peter Sellers, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave and Michael Gough helped populate Jonathan Miller’s 1966 BBC TV play. Sellers joined other Brit luminaries in a 1972 film of the books.

These films, and the Disney version in 1951, had their incidental pleasures but also an arch, starchy tone to the parade of Carroll’s lunatics. What the author needed all along was a kindred cinematic soul: a grownup with the reckless imagination of a child or a nonsense artist, a director who’d impart a wonder to Wonderland.

For example, Tim Burton. At 51, Burton still has the otherworldly air of a bright kid distracted from conversation with adults by the crazy-beautiful pictures playing in his mind. Since Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, his 1985 debut feature, Burton’s signature films have dwelled in the realm of arrested infancy. When he hasn’t adapted children’s classics (Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), he’s confected his own scary, sweet bedtime fables (Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride). The typical hero of these films is a naïf who stumbles into a world that threatens or baffles him and whose armor against its denizens is his innocence. Granted, that’s the plot of many children’s books, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to The Lord of the Rings. But it also suggests that Burton has been making variations on Carroll his whole career. His new Alice in Wonderland is just the official version.

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It happens that the movie arrives in a little sulfur cloud of industry rancor. When Disney, its distributor, announced that the picture would be released on DVD only three months after its opening in movie houses instead of the usual four, the bosses of British theater chains balked, declaring they would not show Alice. A compromise was reached, and the film is now playing throughout the U.K.

(Read a review of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland at Techland.com.)

That news should be of interest only to accountants. So how’s the movie? Mostly frabjous. The visual palette is more artfully riotous than that of other Alice films, the performances more zestful. The walls of the hole that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) falls into are stocked with all manner of the White Rabbit’s mementos; this could be WALL•E’s cluttered annex. Alice meets flowers with faces and cruel tongues, frogs that serve as insecure butlers to Iracebeth the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and a more voluptuous picturization of Wonderland — here it’s called Underland — than even Carroll could have dreamed. Though the 3-D goggles function almost like sunglasses, filtering out about 20% of the light, Dariusz Wolski’s images are luminous and cunning enough to evoke the vivid colors of old Warner Bros. cartoons.

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Some actors lend their voices to CGI characters: Alan Rickman to the Caterpillar, Stephen Fry to the Cheshire Cat, the 92-year-old Gough (in his fifth Burton film) as the Dodo Bird. Other stars appear in fanciful makeup. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter matches his flaming red hair with red eyeliner, as if he’d been crying for years; he’s a gentleman ghoul out of Johnny Weir’s closet. Anne Hathaway, as the White Queen, is given crimson lips, platinum hair and, alas, no redeeming quirks. Bonham Carter (Burton’s partner offscreen) sports blue eye shadow that could have been applied by windshield wipers. Iracebeth is as much a spoiled child as an evil monarch, pouting as she demands a pig for a footstool, and Bonham Carter plays her as a parody of Bette Davis in her Queen Elizabeth roles. There’s a lilt to her malevolence; she keeps fey at bay.

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Wonderland’s Joan of Arc
Screenwriter Linda Woolverton and Burton made two big changes to the text. One was to transform Carroll’s episodic tale into an epic quest, based on the poem “Jabberwocky.” Alice must seize the vorpal sword and slay the fearsome Jabberwock. In assuming this challenge, she becomes a female Frodo, Wonderland’s Joan of Arc. This twist legitimizes the feature-length running time but also risks turning this jovially anarchic enterprise into your standard action-adventure. The film is better at reveling in eccentricity than at replaying Excalibur.

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The other change was Alice’s age. In the book she is “seven-and-a-half, exactly”; here she’s 19 and meant to wed a pruny nobleman. It’s not a crime for a film to turn a girl into a young lady: Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz was 16, about twice the age of the book’s Dorothy. And upping Alice’s age removes the whisper of pedophilia that the 20th century applied to the love that Charles Dodgson, the Oxford math professor who was the real Lewis Carroll, lavished on the real Alice Liddell, the 10-year-old for whom he extemporized the original story on a canoe trip in 1862.

Wasikowska, the Australian who was superb as a suicidal teen on the HBO series In Treatment, brings a soft-focus regality to her role. Emotionally, though, her Alice is a bright child, a preteen in a late teen’s body, as if she had suddenly sprouted by nibbling a magic cake. Her Wonderland dream is an escape from social strictures back to the freedom of childhood, and not imprisonment but liberation.

The movie Alice is also stricken by her beloved father’s death — as Dodgson said he had been. So the movie is in a way an autobiography of each man-child responsible for it: Carroll and Burton. That may not matter to the kids who find this film much livelier than earlier versions and easier to warm to than the original. And is Burton’s vision trippy enough to serve as a hallucinogenic blast? Go ask Alice.

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