Tim Burton is
obviously drawn to the look if not the substance of Victorian Gothic, and to
protagonists relentless in their refusal (or inability) to conform. Little
wonder he wanted to direct Lewis Carroll’s Alice
inWonderland, a Victorian
classic about a girl who flings herself down a rabbit hole into a world where
the tedious logic of Western civilization is made to dance on its head.
Alas, Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a largely mirthless
enterprise. The director appears more interested in mining the attention
deficit demographic than interpreting the richness of the story. For many
stretches, Alice
the Movie is a kinetic spectacle of seen-it-before computer graphics as not so
marvelous beasties chase each other across a fantasy landscape.
Burton conceived his film as a sequel to Carroll’s story, which is not a bad
idea (even though Carroll wrote his own sequel whose plot is unrelated to Burton’s). In the film
version, Alice
has become a young woman whose only memory of her childhood adventure in
Wonderland is an odd, recurring dream. Bright and imaginative in a rigidly
disapproving Victorian upper class society, she is prodded to marry a wealthy
lord, a twit of the first order. Alice
escapes the engagement party by dashing after a waist-coated rabbit (voiced by
Michael Sheen) down his hole and into the Wonderland of unconscious memory. Burton’s scenario could
work as social satire if only it were funny.
Johnny Depp was
born to play the Mad the Hatter, and his fright-wigged performance is among the
film’s bright spots, along with the imaginative visualization of the enigmatic
Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) as a creature capable of dissolving into a cloud of
smoke. Helena Bonham Carter delivers one of her trademark whackjob performances
as the Red Queen, her character transformed into a tyrant in a story that
begins to resemble Narnia shorn of spiritual allegory. The moral of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, that all the best
people are a little off their heads, is the motif behind most of his films. He
has done a better job elsewhere of presenting the idea.
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