What goes up must come down; occasionally at the same time. In the past decade, the quality of Tim Burton’s films have more or less stagnated, with each successive film not so much worse than the one prior so much as a retelling of the same joke, landing with a duller thud each and every time it is told. At the same time, his stature has done nothing but grow, evidenced not only by the recent exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, but also by his adoption as the patron saint of depressed, angry children that like the color black everywhere (I’m trying not to be condescending; I was one of them, or at least I acted like it). But with the arrival of Alice in Wonderland, and all of the questionable revisions that accompany it, one can’t help but feel that the title is misplaced: not only does the magic appear to be gone entirely, you can’t help but wonder whether or not it was ever there to begin with.
In a plotline that borrows heavily from both Return to Oz and Hook, Alice dashes down the rabbit hole once again at the age of 20 to escape a courtship with one of those drab, nasally young men who seem to exist only as Victorian era royalty or Nazis. Once down, she finds Underland (it's apparent actual name) in drastically different shape than she originally found it. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), with the help of henchman Stayne (Crispin Glover), has usurped the power of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and has turned Underland into something roughly equivalent to the African savannah once Scar took it over in The Lion King (she has not, however, stopped the growth of all plant life, as Scar was apparently able to do). But now that Alice is back, she’s going to set things right with the help of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), despite the fact that she spends the entire film laboring the point that this is entirely a dream, and that she and the rest of the inhabitants of Underland can’t seem to decide whether or not she is the Alice that they are looking for, as she doesn't remember having been there (as if we don’t know where this is going).
It’s hard to find, but at least a few of you are probably familiar with Lost Girls, Alan Moore’s pornographic take on a sexual tryst between Alice, Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, and Peter Pan’s Wendy in a hotel just before World War I breaks out. Narratively, it’s probably Moore’s weakest book, but it gets at something that most popular renditions of the stories have strenuously avoided: there’s something really weird and fairly unsettling about children leaving their parents and going off into inaccessible lands where they can’t reach them, especially when you take into account that Lewis Carroll was an opium-addicted pedophile. On surface glance, one might think that would make Burton an ideal candidate for the material, given his reputation for producing surprisingly odd material for mainstream releases (one can only imagine what pitching Edward Scissorhands was like), but on further consideration, one would be hard-pressed to think of a time when his take on any piece of material was all that challenging. Like pretty much all of his leads, Alice is a misunderstood outsider, who is given to thinking fanciful thoughts and isn’t entirely sure she wants to be married away at the age of 20, but she is made threatening only by virute of having been placed in the most cartoonish depiction of regal Britain since Jason Isaac’s villain in The Patriot. His Wonderland fares only a little better, with certain compositions evoking the majesty that a far away kingdom is supposed to (the Red Queen’s moat is full of severed heads, which is kind of neat), but the digital age has not been especially kind to Burton, whose most imposing effects have always had a severely retrograde quality to them (there’s nothing here to rattle the bones of Halloweentown, the movements and colors of which were far more assured and convincing).
What separates Alice from his prior leads is the fact that, rather than consigning herself to suffer as Edward Scissorhands does or blindly releasing her wrath on innocents a la Sweeney Todd or the Penguin , she asserts herself in the society that she’s placed in, and it’s astonishing how empty the gesture feels. Burton takes such pains to establish that Alice is out of place in staid society (but also clearly not cognizant of why) that you can’t help but wonder if she’s too stupid to conceive an original thought of her own, and isn’t ultimately worth all the trouble that this film is giving her. In the closing reels, when Burton pays feminism the shallowest lip service and allows Alice to become the action hero that modern cinema seems to demand that even the most anciliary characters in a period drama be, it seems entirely possible that Burton doesn’t even understand what it means to contribute to society or to interact with someone in a healthy and mutually fulfilling way. That wouldn’t be such a problem if he didn’t seem dead-set on punishing his more assertive weirdos, or at least preventing them from taking center stage once in a while (this film would have been a good deal stronger had it given more screen time to the Queens, who turn in what are easily the strongest performances in the film). As is, it rejects conformity in the way that Pink rejects conformity: by depending on it in its most obvious forms to reach the broadest audience possible.
Perhaps Burton is building up credibility with the studios to make something really shocking, or maybe he never wanted to be the firebrand that some people insist that he should be. But even by those standards, it’s a notable failure, because he cedes ground where no filmmaker should: he projects what he (or maybe the studio) thinks that people want him to be.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The set comes with the Blu-ray disc, the DVD, and the digital copy, though I’d be hard pressed to say why anyone would need all three versions. The Blu-ray disc contains about four times the number of bonus documentaries (all of them pretty standard but appealingly comprehensive making-of featurettes), including: Scoring Wonderland, Effecting Wonderland, Stunts of Wonderland, Making the Proper Size, Cakes of Wonderland, Tea Party Props, Finding Alice, The Mad Hatter, The Futterwacken, The Red Queen, Time-Lapse, and The White Queen. The DVD contains only Finding Alice, The Mad Hatter, and Effecting Wonderland.
"Alice in Wonderland" is on sale June 1, 2010 and is rated PG. Children & Family. Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Linda Woolverton. Starring Alan Rickman, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, Matt Lucas, Megan Park, Mia Wasikowska, Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry.
