Remember the 1960’s song ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane, the trippy 1967 rock classic about the psychedelic drug scene with lyrics derived from the characters and incidents of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland? Grace Slick seductively crooned about hookah-smoking caterpillars, eating mushrooms, drinking strange liquids and taking pills that altered your height. While watching Tim Burton’s new take on Alice in Wonderland, two things occurred. The first was I couldn’t get the Jefferson Airplane song out of my head. The second was a burning desire to have ingested any of the illicit treats Slick sang about to help make Burton’s movie less of a chore to sit through.
A sequel of sorts to Carroll’s original novel (forget the fact that Carroll actually did write a sequel himself), the Alice of Burton’s film is an independent 19-year old (Mia Wasikowska) facing the nightmare of being forced into a loveless marriage for the sake of money (how Jane Austin!). At her surprise engagement party, Alice keeps seeing a rather large rabbit darting through the bushes and hundreds of guests. When the young girl is put on the spot by her boorish fiancé-to-be, she decides to escape by following the rabbit through a maze.
The rabbit leads her to a tree with a rather large hole that takes her to…you guessed it, Wonderland (or as it is referred to in the film, Underland). While everyone, including the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), remembers her, she doesn’t remember them or Underland (she thinks this is all a dream). Whether she is the actual Alice or not, the wacky inhabitants of Underland are convinced that Alice is the only one who can slay the fire-breathing dragon the Jabberwocky and free their oppressed land from the rule of the wicked, animal-abusing Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter).
When people say that Tim Burton’s unique filmmaking style is a perfect match for certain material, one should temper their expectations greatly. 2007’s bloody good Sweeney Todd aside, Burton has misfired to various degrees on so-called “tailor made” material quite a few times over the past decade and a half. Be it the woefully dull Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the convoluted Planet of the Apes or the sporadically amusing Mars Attacks! you don’t see a director working to his fullest creative potential. You see a filmmaker that appears bored, simply going through the paces en route to a big Hollywood payday.
Sadly, that same Burton showed up to direct this film. Instead having a grand old time making the most out of Carroll’s loony universe to create a imaginatively twisted tale like Beetlejuice, Burton just moves things along with the grace of a traffic cop, relying on his ensemble casts’ hammy antics (Carter and Depp are alarmingly one-note, Wasikowska gives it her best shot) and a mixed bag of CG effects made even more obvious by subpar 3D technology. Even the film’s big action climax of good vs. evil has all the excitement of a third-rate videogame.
While Burton should shoulder most of the blame for the film’s failure, I doubt there could have been anyone in Hollywood who could have breathed much life into Linda Woolverton’s limp screenplay, a far cry from her script for 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. Forgoing Carroll’s work to instead create her own tale in the late author’s universe (why exactly is this film called Alice in Wonderland, anyway?), Wonderland’s story is utterly predictable from start to finish, filled with forgettable, one-dimensional characters and devoid of any real sense of joy or fun. Why Burton and Woolverton didn’t just take one of Carroll’s novels and do a straight adaptation into a film is beyond me. At least they would have had a story that actually worked.
At one time, I actually had hope for Alice in Wonderland. I still admire many of Burton’s films. One could almost write off the creative failures of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes on studios keeping Burton on a short leash to protect their pricey productions. Is that the case with Alice in Wonderland? Perhaps. It would be understandable if Disney Studios felt the need to be protective of its $200 million investment. But one can only cast a wary eye toward studios when a film stinks. Blame also has to go to the people who went ahead and actually made the movie. A Tim Burton-directed trip through Wonderland should have been a trippy, wild ride. Instead, it turned out to be as exciting as the Teacup Ride at Disney World.
– Shawn Fitzgerald
