Alice In Wonderland: Spuriouser And Spuriouser

Crispin Glover plays the Knave of Hearts in Tim Burton’s reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, a part that requires him, in several scenes, to ride a horse. Except I’m not sure Glover actually is riding a horse — his body has been digitally stretched for the role somehow, and the horse he’s sitting on is one of several talking animals in the film, and so it’s at least partly a CGI creation as well. So it’s some kind of half-CGI man on a half-CGI horse, and especially when the horse turns around or begins to gallop, the whole image looks vaguely but unmistakably fake. Movie directors have been shooting people riding horses for more than a century now, but in the middle of this hugely expensive, state-of-the-art blockbuster, Tim Burton has somehow figured out a way to make the sight less convincing than it would be in a film shot in 1895.

Am I nitpicking here? I don’t think so — at the end of the film, the Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp) cuts loose with a special victory dance. Various characters have been alluding to this amazing dance throughout the entire film, a dance that the Hatter will only perform once the kingdom has been released from the evil clutches of Helena Bonham-Carter's Red Queen. Finally, we get to see Depp deliver this dance routine… but once again, Burton has “enhanced” his performance with a dose of CGI that allows Depp to bend his knees and rotate his spine in anatomically impossible directions. Now, I’m not opposed to fantasy films with lots of visual spectacle, but if we’ve reached a point where directors can’t even show us something as simple as a man riding a horse or a guy dancing with happiness without feeling the need to gussy it all up with distracting computer effects, then contemporary film aesthetics have gone completely out of whack.

I’m very late in catching up with Alice in Wonderland — I avoided it precisely because the trailers made it look like such an overproduced travesty of Lewis Carroll’s original. Which it is, but it’s also too boring to seem worth the effort of getting angry at it. Much of the problem can be traced to Linda Woolverton’s script, which recalls Steven Spielberg’s Hook and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe more than it does the comic playfulness of Carroll. It’s several years after Alice’s first trip down the rabbit hole, and Alice, now 20 years old and about to be married off to a dull, priggish lord, runs away from his marriage proposal and lands once again in Wonderland (whose real name, perversely, turns out to be “Underland”). Just as perversely, not only has Woolverton’s Alice forgotten that she ever visited “Underland” at all, but she also spends the entire film convinced that everything happening to her is merely a dream. The result is a frustratingly passive character who seems to have no emotional stake in anything happening around her — nothing gets the slightest reaction out of this girl, not even shrinking to the size of a mouse or growing to the size of a giant. Having seen Mia Wasikowska’s remarkable work as the troubled young gymnast in the first season of In Treatment on HBO, I never would have thought it possible for this actress to fade into the background, but that’s what Tim Burton accomplishes here — he’s created an Alice in Wonderland in which Alice almost seems like an afterthought. (The filmmakers have made a couple of gestures towards making Alice into a proto-feminist heroine, but these literally amount to little more than costume changes. The character remains a passive bystander in her own movie.)

Johnny Depp, meanwhile, suggests a man dismayed to have found himself in yet another role that requires him to sit in the makeup chair for four hours before he can even walk onto the set — he seems exhausted, as if he decided to let his green contact lenses and orange fright wig carry the part for him. (In the scenes that require him to show emotion, he handles the problem by starting to talk in a Shrek Scottish accent.) And as for Tim Burton, there’s no sign that he feels engaged by this material as anything other than an elaborate exercise in production design. Even the 3-D feels lackluster.

Alice in Wonderland feels like it got made simply because a couple of decades have passed and it’s time to make another Alice in Wonderland adaptation. There are a whole bunch of classic stories and characters that cycle around this way, like ducks in a shooting gallery: Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, King Arthur, A Christmas Carol, Cinderella, Jesus. By the way, isn't it odd that a big-budget 3-D film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde hasn't shown up yet? It’s kind of overdue. Hopefully, though, Tim Burton can resist the temptation to chase that particular white rabbit down its hole.