Alice in Wonderland
is exactly what one would imagine a Tim-Burton directed adaptation of Lewis
Carroll’s novel to be – tons of menacing, slightly grotesque creatures, an
ethereal-yet-tough female protagonist, and Johnny Depp as a supposedly
delightful weirdo. As such, Burton’s latest
re-emphasizes the nagging impression that the director is stuck in a creative
rut, making pictures that are a tad too
well-suited for his idiosyncratic style and, thus, feel dispiritingly ordinary.
Burton strays from his source material by advancing his Alice’s (Mia
Wasikowska) age to 19 and transforming her trip to Wonderland (or, as its denizens
call it, Underworld) into a return visit, one in which she must fulfill her destiny
as a Jabberwocky slayer. Alice falls down the rabbit hole after fleeing a
public marriage proposal by a repugnant aristocrat, thereby making her
adventure about female self-actualization and empowerment, a twist that might
have worked if Alice’s real-world feminist stance had any metaphoric
relationship to her surreal Wonderland exploits. Alas, aside from a few stray Wizard of Oz-ish parallels (her future
mother-in-law is positioned as a virtual Red Queen), Alice never convincingly melds its two realities into complementary
images of the same whole, thereby diffusing the story’s thematic potency. This
shortcoming is a shame given that, aside from Burton’s gift for spiraling
imagery and Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as the petulant, giant-headed
Red Queen, there’s not much to visually admire about the proceedings, which are
doused in outlandish CG effects that rarely astonish. 3D doesn’t help matters,
the greater distance between foreground Alice and digitized backgrounds merely
calling attention to the green-screen work at play. And neither, ultimately,
does Depp, who as the Mad Hatter – re-imagined as a tedious Alice sidekick
whose insanity is the result of post-traumatic stress – once again succumbs to
mannered goof-offery that takes the now-standard, ho-hum form of wearing clown
make-up, speaking in a funny accent, and acting foppish.
I mostly agree with everything you say but suggest that no review of this film would be complete without mentioning how fabulous that Cheshire Cat is. I also felt like the main problem with the film is that the plot is basically a generic tween adventure yarn. It almost seems like this movie could have been produced by Drew Barrymore.
Posted by: Richard | March 18, 2010 at 04:37 PM