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ALICE IN WONDERLAND Send This Review to a Friend
Perhaps it is just a rumor still believed after all these years of revering Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.” Isn’t there supposed to be wit within those cherished pages? For Tim Burton in his new live action and animated film “Alice in Wonderland” the wit lies only in his images, not in the content. He has turned the adventures of Alice into a gaudy action film, splashed with arresting visuals to be sure, but ultimately tedious and devoid of the qualities that have given enduring life to Carroll’s accomplishments.
Burton, working from Linda Woolverton’s dense screenplay, accents the bizarre without providing any meaning to his onslaught of gaudy character portrayals and battle scenes. Mia Wasikowska makes a bland, grown-up Alice trapped in the furor. She falls down the rabbit hole into her imaginative new surroundings after fleeing from the marriage she is supposed to have with her uptight, condescending suitor. Let the visual fireworks begin.
Johnny Depp is the Mad Hatter, but it is a maddening performance—all leers, grins and posturing in keeping with Burton’s splashy concept. Helena Bonham Carter fares someone better as the Red Queen (“Off with his head” is her mantra), and she has been visually transformed into a body with an oversized noggin so that she looks amusingly freakish. Anne Hathaway doesn’t have much more to do than look pretty as the White Queen. You will meet the other familiar characters, but the overall impression is one of a motley gang rather than individuals meant to express anything.
The cast also includes Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Imelda Staunton –good actors all—and voices by Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, Barbara Windsor, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough and Paul Whitehouse. Everyone is slickly meshed into the service of Burton’s assault.
I’m sure there are Burton fans who, as usual, will revel in what he has done. The film would seem to be primarily for them. He certainly knows how to make a movie on his terms, but as for the work of Lewis Carroll, Burton has taken a sledgehammer to it. A Walt Disney Pictures release.
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