Alice in Wonderland (2010)

“Curiouser and curiouser,” says Alice of her trip to Wonderland, and the same could be said about a trip to see Tim Burton’s visually arresting but strangely unaffecting take on Alice’s story. On paper, it’s a slam-dunk: a master of charming-creepy movies taking on the archetypal charming-creepy kids’ story—even featuring cinema’s reigning king of quirk, Johnny Depp, as the Mad Hatter. On celluloid, however, it proves trickier than that. There’s a lot to look at here, but, in the end, Alice in Wonderland can’t quite generate enough curiousness to really capture the curiosity…or perhaps the curiouserosity…

Alice’s famous literary encounter with Wonderland (as many of us remember) takes place when she is a young girl. For this movie, that’s background. The story here (screenwritten by Linda Woolverton, previously of The Lion King and other Disney projects) borrows from both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in parts to create a story featuring a 19-year-old version of Alice. Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is the free-thinking daughter of the late Charles Kingsleigh (Marton Csokas), a visionary businessman who bequeathed his child his imagination and a hint of madness…but not his trading company. Instead, Alice is to be married to the boorish Hamish Ascot, the son of Charles’s lordly business partner. This is not exactly Alice’s idea of a good time, and so, when the watch-holding rabbit she recalls from a childhood dream shows up in the Ascots’ garden, Alice is quick to run after him to escape a fate worse than boredom. After she takes a fateful tumble down the rabbit’s hole, Alice finds herself in Wonderland (or Underland, as its inhabitants insist on calling it) and in the company of the usual gallery of odd folk: the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen); an unerringly precise, hookah-smoking caterpillar (Alan Rickman); the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), whose vapory body seems to pivot in all directions around his unmoving head; pudgy, indecisive, and argumentative twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both Matt Lucas); a feisty pin-wielding Dormouse (Barbara Windsor); a gibbering March Hare (Paul Whitehouse); and, of course, Mr. Depp’s wild-eyed Mad Hatter. All these live in fear of Wonderland’s reigning despot, the vain, petulant Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter). The Queen rules through fear: she commands an army of seemingly robotic playing-card-men led by the tall, one-eyed Knave, Stayne (Crispin Glover)—as well as two fearsome Wonderland beasties: the Frumious Bandersnatch (a sort of bulldog-leopard-shark hybrid…I know…don’t worry about it…) and the great dragonlike Jabberwocky. The citizens of Wonderland would much prefer to live under the Red Queen’s gentler sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway)—but she is out of power, and requires a champion to fight her Red sister’s evil creatures. Of course everyone is looking at Alice…

This is all an attempt to create some sort of forward-pushing narrative out of books that mostly consisted of Alice wandering about and running into eccentric-scary persons and animals. This turns out to not necessarily be a good idea. Alice in Wonderland has been taken to task for resorting to the now-usual battle climax, but the script actually earns this by letting the battle stand for a conflict taking place within Alice herself. It’s not the end that’s the problem, but the middle of the movie. Alice has a history in Wonderland; we don’t, and so are suddenly immersed in the politics of a world we don’t know. Sometimes it can be fun to get to know a world on the fly—but here it’s frustrating. The movie throws odd details our way—many of the animals’ proper names, for instance—but not much in the way of motivation. Details are not in themselves explanations, nor does the fact that a character (say, the Hatter) has a backstory mean that we the viewers will comprehend that backstory. This is an odd movie that all feels like a third act. It’s a sort of imprecision that, ironically, most of Lewis Carroll’s original characters would not have stood for. I would gladly have exchanged some of the intrigue here for a leisurely nitpicky talk over tea.

But if its inhabitants are a bit lackluster, Wonderland itself is surely not. As always, Burton’s artistic background comes through, ahem, wonderfully. Wonderland is a splendid mix of wild color in some spots and a dreary wasteland in others. The Red Queen’s palace looks like a playing card designed by M. C. Escher, while the White Queen’s castle more resembles Rivendell painted by Maxfield Parrish. Like James Cameron’s Pandora, Wonderland is almost entirely computer generated, as are most of its inhabitants. Also like Pandora, Wonderland is crammed to the edges with interesting designs: rockinghorse insects, talking flowers, moving mushrooms, and the like. Burton also has great fun with his actors, using effects to alter their appearances. Obviously Sheen-as-rabbit, Rickman-as-caterpillar, and the like are animated, but Depp’s Hatter has enlarged eyes, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are unusually short and stocky, Stayne looks and moves like a stretched-out Tin Woodman, and the Red Queen’s head is half as big (at least) as her whole body. The reason for these changes is not always apparent, but they create a lingering sense of unreality. Alice is pretty sure throughout that this is all a dream—and I couldn’t really blame her.

The movie is, of course, peopled with talented faces and voices, though not all are around long enough to register. Of the creatures, Rickman’s clipped delivery is exactly right for the word-parsing caterpillar, Fry is delightfully droll as the airy Chesire Cat, and Harry Potter baddie Timothy Spall gets to do a nicer turn this time as a basically stand-up dog named Bayard (Burton also has small voice parts for his perennial favorites Michael Gough and Christopher Lee). The humans are a more mixed bag. Mia Wasikowska, as Alice, has the thankless job of being the “straight” character around whom all the madcappery happens. Her Alice is appealing and thoughtful enough, but she somehow lacks the spark of madness the character should have. Depp has the madness to spare, but we’ve seen him do weird before, and this is not one of his standouts. Part of the problem is that the Hatter is not a lead character, and so Depp has neither the time to develop an actual odd “hero” (as he did in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow) nor the license to go totally off the leash (ala Jack Sparrow). The Mad Hatter is…well, he’s mad, and, despite Depp’s best efforts and facial tics, that’s as far as the script lets him go. If there is a standout here, it’s Bonham-Carter, whose bitchy queen takes wonderfully bandersnatch-sized bites out of the scenery. The Red Queen manages to be what most of the other characters are not: genuinely interesting, even if it’s for how appalling she is. Glover as Stayne and Hathaway as the nicer (though still not really sane) sister have less to do: he strides and glowers and she prances and smiles—and that’s about it.

There were plenty of things I liked about Alice in Wonderland. I liked the cloudy gymnastics of the Cat. I liked the anarchy of the Hatter’s tea party, where sugar lumps are thrown and no one passes something when they can walk across the tabletop and get it themselves. I liked the way the White Queen always moves as if she’s escaped from a production of Swan Lake, and I liked the Red Queen’s peculiar way of shouting “offwithhisheeeeaaad!” But the movie never grabbed me, or rose above the sum of its parts. I didn’t care about this world or its people, however colorful both were. Never mind the Red Queen’s threats. This movie’s head is perfectly safe—it’s the heart that’s off.