Nonsense, pro and con

Rating: 3/10 (22 November 2010)

From about fifteen minutes after this movie began to the final credits, I sat baffled. Clearly Tim Burton and the screenwriter Linda Woolverton wished to create a magical fantasy- adventure tale for children about a clash between good and evil, along the lines of the Narnia movies, and that's all fine and good. But why on earth did he call it Alice in Wonderland?
The movie begins with a teenaged Alice (Mia Wasikowska), her spirit cramped by her repressive Edwardian life, tumbling down the proverbial rabbit-hole into "Underland". Familiar characters soon appear -- the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, etc -- but inform her that she is the "wrong Alice." They needed the original, it seems, to be their champion, and to slay the ferocious Jabberwocky and throw off the evil tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter). The Queen, hypersensitive about her outsized head, has ravaged Underland and enslaved its people, with the help of the incongruously menacing Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover)... so wait, a playing card is acting as henchman to a chess piece? Well, let it go.
Well of course this older Alice may well be the real one after all, fancy that, it's just that (we're told) she's lost her "muchness." "My muchness?" asks Alice. The speaker indicates her heart: "In there." Oh, lord. This is of course another variant of those barfy lines so beloved by screenwriters and studio executives, in which the protagonist is informed that she must regain her heart/soul/sense of wonder/sense of fun/idealism/so on in order to succeed. This will then become the movie's doggedly predictable emotional journey. And I am truly depressed to announce that this tired line comes from... the Mad Hatter. The Mad Hatter, dispensing this hackneyed Hollywood "wisdom"? It's like Keith Richards showing up at your door as a Jehovah's Witness.
It's not that everything's bad here. Helena Bonham-Carter plays the despotic Red Queen with tiny pursed lips, and she's very funny. The plump Cheshire Cat, purred by Stephen Fry, swims through the air like a manatee. Even at his weakest, Burton's visuals can be compelling, and the battle with the Jabberwocky is undeniably exciting.
But when the plot calls for heroics the movie feels misguided: the poem "Jabberwocky" was a *parody* of heroic epics (I'm guessing specifically Beowulf), and the solemnity that the movie keeps sinking into was exactly the sort of ponderousness Carroll loved to skewer. Is this really Wonderland? When the evil Knave of Hearts, hunting Alice, arrives at the Tea Party, he scornfully tells the Hatter, "You're mad." Well, I mean, duh. What is he, new around these parts?
Burton has a message he wants to get across, that "nonsense" and "madness" can help us do the impossible, by unleashing our imagination. That's not a bad message, but it's not the message of Alice in Wonderland. The books derive humor from nonsense; they don't endorse it.
The Alice of the books doesn't have much fun. She's insulted and bullied and ordered around by the Wonderlanders; their foolishness frustrates rather than beguiles her. The first book ends in a trial. It's a farce, of course. The witnesses are incoherent, the King as judge is buffoonish and arbitrary, and the Queen of Hearts repeatedly orders unjustified beheadings. Alice, fed up with the travesty, protests. The Queen orders, "Off with her head!" Alice retorts "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" And at this gloriously sensible observation, the court literally flies apart.
Carroll was, after all, a logician, and if he intended any message to Alice in Wonderland beyond simple entertainment, it's here: that people who pretend to power are often only speaking balderdash. Nonsense has only as much power as we allow it to have. If we're clear-eyed enough to see through it, that false power dissolves.
But in this movie, it takes a full army and the slaying of a monster to defeat the Queen. That's giving too much power to nonsense.