The Mad Hatter’s tea party has never been anyone’s idea of a chic happening, but never has it looked more depressing than in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. The now 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska), returning after many years to the land she thought was only a dream, again stumbles onto the Hatter’s little never-ending get-together. But the glory days have evidently passed—next to an abandoned windmill, surrounded by fog and decaying plants and under a sky that seems perpetually overcast, the Hatter (Johnny Depp) presides over a massively unkempt table, with plates and cakes and teapots and cups scattered everywhere with no rhyme or reason. The March Hare is still there, strung out on caffeine and throwing plates like a junkie, while the Hatter himself appears blissfully unaware of what a pitiable sight the whole thing is. I never thought I’d say this, but perhaps Wonderland could benefit from gentrification.
I don’t think anyone other than Burton would think to film the Hatter’s tea party in quite the same way. Since most of Burton’s live action films have been adaptations of previously existing characters and stories, a lot of their appeal comes from seeing how a familiar icon will be uniquely Burtonized: Batman as gothic film noir, the legend of Sleepy Hollow as a rococo Hammer horror film, the “Mars Attacks!” trading cards as a big-budget Ed Wood film, and now Wonderland—actually “Underland,” as it turns out—with all of its fantastic flowers, mushrooms, and forests overgrown and messy like an abandoned nature preserve.
As always with Burton, Alice in Wonderland is fundamentally a visual experience. Wonderland is rendered almost entirely from CGI, and instead of Avatar-style photorealism, Burton’s surreal landscapes are like computer-rendered paintings. There is intriguing tension between Lewis Carroll’s candy-coloured vision and Burton’s gloomy sensibility: the film suggests Carroll’s Wonderland is in desperate need of a janitor and a paint job.
As much as Alice in Wonderland seems ideally bizarre material for Burton’s sensibilities, his heart has always been with the outcasts and the eccentrics, and he barely conceals his indifference for Alice herself. There’s nothing really wrong with Mia Wasikowska’s performance, but Alice is more of a reactive than proactive character—an audience surrogate who can view the oddball characters objectively, she never becomes more than a bland teenager. Burton is more interested in meandering around Wonderland, sketching little character portraits: the Red Queen, amusingly played by Helena Bonham Carter, is loud, quick-tempered, and thin-skinned; the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), is a parody of royalty, prissily holding up her arms and talking in a Glinda the Good Witch squeak. Burton is even interested in the Mad Hatter, though I admit I never really got a handle on Depp’s performance. He seems constructed from the spare parts of other Depp oddballs, with a level of self-awareness—and accent—that rotates between Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, and Ed Wood.
The film is a delight in its early stretches when Burton’s Wonderland has real novelty, but it starts sagging at around the one-hour mark. There is no real emotional investment in these characters (Alice is a black hole, and even the best of the supporting characters are regarded with a certain cool detachment), and the plot machinations—from rescuing the Hatter from the Red Queen’s castle to Alice’s battle with the jabberwocky—are predictable. Maybe Burton would have been better off doing a straight remake of the 1951 animated film—he may have felt he was treading familiar ground, but it might have been exciting to see all the iconic set pieces as if for the first time through Burton’s eyes. Alice might have become more of a living, breathing character if we were re-introduced to her from the beginning, as opposed to several years after the story began. Certainly, the original film’s episodic structure better suits Burton, who has never been very interested in three-act narratives.
Still, there are a lot of images that I really will cherish: Helena Bonham Carter’s head balanced precariously over the Red Queen’s tiny animated body; her animal servants, including a snobby-looking fish that walks on its tail, and frog guards who stand upright with their chests out; the White Queen’s faceless army marching to the beat of Danny Elfman’s score; Tweedlee and Tweedledum, who look like two little balls of white dough with matching slacks, suspenders and striped shirts. As a film, Alice in Wonderland is a marvellous coffee table art book.
Alice in Wonderland is now in theatres.
