Review by Sean Moreland: I had a recurrent thought as Alice (Mia Wasikowska), in hot pursuit of the white rabbit (Michael Sheen), fell down the rabbit-hole, and Underland's weird wonders writhed by her in nifty 3D: "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto. This seems more like Narnia or Middle-Earth to me." Tim Burton's Disney-produced version of "Alice in Wonderland" gleefully confounds Lewis Carroll's immaculately nonsensical source novels with the far more linear, Manichean fantasy of Frank L. Baum, or the sword-and-sorcery fictions of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. While Burton's movie features many of the characters from Carroll's books (like earlier adaptations, it conflates "Alice in Wonderland" with "Through the Looking-Glass"), it departs considerably from the source with its storytelling style, opting for good-versus-evil/cause-and-effect clarity and yellow-brick-road linearity for most of its duration.

This is the result of a deliberate decision by Burton who, in interviews, has complained that the books and earlier adaptations presented "a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another, and I never really felt any real emotional connection." As he puts it, his film represents "an attempt to really try to give [the story] some framework of emotional grounding that has never been in any version before, [and] to try and make 'Alice' feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events." Linda Woolverton, who wrote the screenplay for Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" and who co-wrote "The Lion King," certainly produced a version that feels "more like a story," but with the unfortunate consequence that it also feels less like "Alice." This is compounded by Woolverton's apparent determination to give the narrative a forthrightly liberal-feminist spin, which is at times a little strained and detracts from the inventive delirium that characterizes Carroll's classic; for example, on being taken to task for refusing to wear a corset to the garden party, Alice replies, "to me, a corset is like a codfish," thus recouping a perfectly frabjous piece of nonsense in the name of good sense.

The film follows each of its threads very predictably, leading up to its clanging denouement: a battle scene that derives heavily from Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien, turning Alice into a vorpal-blade-brandishing, mail-clad and eminently Eowyn-esque warrior-princess who has taken on the role of the "beamish boy" from Carroll's "Jabberwocky" and who must hack it out with the eponymous monster (voiced by Sir Christopher Lee). But simultaneously more disappointing and disturbing is the film's back-to-reality conclusion—spoiler warning!—in which we see Alice rejecting the pale, clammy hand of the wretched and indigestion-disposed Hamish in order to apprentice with his mercantile father's trading company and plug her ambitious idea of opening trade routes to China. Apparently, in Woolverton/Burton's world, following one's dreams leads logically to global capitalism. Of course, as this is a Disney picture, there's a certain honest charm to this conclusion as well.

While the film's narrative lacks imagination, its visual presentation goes some distance in making up for this. "Alice in Wonderland" features an unfolding tapestry of magical spectacles and lives up to Burton's earlier films with the feverishly fantastic landscapes of "Beetlejuice" or "Edward Scissorhands." James Cameron publicly criticized Burton's decision to shoot the film in conventional 2D and convert to 3D during postproduction; while the film's 3D-CG effects aren't quite as technically stunning as those of "Avatar," they're nonetheless suitably impressive, even pleasingly idiosyncratic in their conception. Main characters are brought to wondrous life by these effects—the frumious Bandersnatch, the Jabberwocky, the bobble-headed Iracebeth, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and Chessur the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry)—which move through the background in subtle and diffuse ways; the film frequently catches the corner of the eye with emergent surprises, and these help maintain a sense of wonder despite failings with the script.

The cast also works remarkably well. Wasikowska's embodiment of Alice is noteworthy, making the character's oft-emphasized situation between girlhood and womanhood something other than a weary cliché. The film certainly sexualizes Alice's character much more explicitly than the books do, especially through the eyes of the sleazy Knave of Hearts, Stayn (Crispin Glover). There is a genteel prurience to the treatment of the scenes in which Alice outgrows or outshrinks her clothes. Also effective is the contrastive characters of the Red and White Queens; their war for the Kingdom of Underland is humorously presented like an inflated familial feud between two sisters, both of whom are equally bizarre. Anne Hathaway's interpretation of Mirana the White Queen as a "vegan, punk rock pacifist" is strangely compelling, and she manages, with a deliberately distracted, glassy-eyed performance full of quirky movements as enchanting as they are awkward, to make the character (one of the few who required no CG modification) as vividly unusual as her less humanoid subjects.

Last Word: Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" is fun, often visually stunning and sometimes stylistically inventive but, sadly, it spends too little time being "Alice in Wonderland" and too much time being a generic action-fantasy film.

Review By:
Sean Moreland

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