Rating: ***I knew we were in uncharted territory when Alice in Wonderland didn’t open with one of those great title sequences to Danny Elfman’s theme music that typically kick off a Tim Burton movie. Burton is perhaps my greatest filmmaking inspiration, which is why it pains me so to say that his Alice comes out into a mere ho-hum. Granted, it’s visually amazing, but I can’t say that I was whole-heartedly engaged with this take on Lewis Carroll’s classic. It seems as if Burton has spliced together the original animated Disney Alice with a tame version concocted by American McGee, all in what seems like an effort to bolster Johnny Depp’s ongoing campaign to make himself as ugly looking as possible on film.
Yes, the Bozo the Clown meets Lloyd Christmas mug of what’s supposed to be the Mad Hatter on the movie posters is indeed Johnny Depp. I can’t knock the guy’s enthusiasm, but now having completed their eighth collaboration, I think it’s time for Burton and Depp to see other filmmakers. Nothing against either of them, but Depp’s become a crutch for Burton because Depp’s an actor that Burton knows will go out on a limb. But Depp is “big box” now. His boutique days when he could get away with playing a guy with scissor hands or a cross-dressing schlock-maker while burying his movie star presence aren’t what they used to be. Sadly, Depp doing kabuki Mad Hatter doesn’t work as well as it should. For the most part.
But The Hatter isn’t the main character of this story. In this Wonderland Alice, played by newcomer Mia Wasikowska, is a young woman who’s taken to party where it’s expected she’ll be proposed to. Like Robin Williams’ Peter in Hook, she’s grown up thinking that her childhood sojourn into another world was nothing more than childish fantasy. So it’s an awful surprise to her when she sees a familiar white rabbit in a waist coat and fob watch hopping through the garden. It takes Alice a while to catch on that her Wonderland excursion was real, not that this is the Wonderland she once knew thanks to the machinations of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter).
Of course this isn’t an adaptation, which is probably why the film feels like it has no cohesion beyond the stylistic. There’s a blatant kind of Lord of the Rings feeling where there’s an elaborate quest for a magical device and a final, titanic battle on a chessboard shaped field. Frankly, in this instance, the whole thing seemed rather dull and if there’s one thing that Wonderland shouldn’t be, it’s dull. Sadly, it might be the fate of these 3-D efforts, Avatar included, to suffer in the narrative while being visually very pleasing. In this case though, I can’t completely get behind the look of the film since all the digital tricks work against that Burton vibe. He’s not a boy with his toys like James Cameron, Burton’s the kid that wears 40s fashions because of his distaste for all things modern.
There is an ambition to the film that’s admirable, but Tim Burton has never been an epic kind of filmmaker. Even the little superhero movie he did (Batman) looks like a low budget indie as compared to the way summer tentpoles are made now in days. What does this matter? Because Burton’s about quirk, and quirk doesn’t cost. He’s also about character, and you don’t need motion-capture technology to make a character interesting. The difference between Alice and Burton’s past triumphs is the difference between someone singing a song and really being a performer. I can enjoy it, it can engage me, but it doesn’t really fill me up spiritually. Alice in Wonderland, as the collective name of Lewis Carroll’s literary work, is insanely adaptable with enough vibrantly weirdo characters for two Tim Burton movies. But this could have been better. And while 3-D may save the movie industry, some of us still want a good story with compelling characters. And if possible, a less scary looking Johnny Depp.
