Curtsey While You're Thinking What to Say - It Saves Time

Rating: Null/10 (31 March 2010)

As an "Alice" purist I generally cringe at the assortment of attempts to adapt either of Lewis Carroll's works "Alice in Wonderland" and/or "Through the Looking Glass" to the movie screen. These have been of varying quality but even the best are no more than satisfactory ("Dreamchild" being an exception but it was more about the real Alice than about the Wonderland Alice).
But I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into before shelling out the bucks to see this Burton effort in 3-D. I knew that despite what many have said and despite its title, this is not an adaptation of Carroll's books. Accordingly I knew that this would greatly increase my toleration level. They could do what they liked with the traditional characters and play around with whatever sort of plot elements intrigued them; I would not take particular offense.
That said I had no real problem with anything about the film. In Burton and writer Linda Woolverton's story, Alice revisits Wonderland/The Looking Glass House 13 years after waking up from her original dreams. Alice, now almost 20, is attending her sister's garden party, which she discovers is intended to be her engagement party. Cringing at a marriage proposal from the unappealing son of her father's former business partner, she runs from the party and follows a white rabbit down an immense hole.
Her seemingly endless fall is arguably the best scene of the film and is by far the best Hollywood has ever assembled; even including a slick twist at the bottom where her hair is standing on end. Then she repeats the drink-me eat-me shrinking-growing bit from the book. And these two sequences are pretty much the only thing other than the characters that come directly out of the book. One advantage of having a 20-year-old Alice is that her clothes do not shrink or grow with her size changes. She must improvise on each occasion and this adds a touch of physical comedy to the transformations.
For her part Alice seems to have suppressed the memory of her two childhood dreams, showing little familiarity with the characters she is meeting for a second time (in some cases a third time). And initially they are unsure that she is the same Alice who visited them over a decade earlier. But for the white rabbit, the dormouse, the Tweedles, and the smoking caterpillar she has be the right Alice because they have lured her back to fulfill a prophecy. It has been foretold that Alice will slay the Jabberwocky (a dragon worthy of the lizards in the old 50's sci-fi films) with a magical sword. This will change the balance of power, with the good White Queen getting the crown from the wicked Red Queen. We've seen this thing before, insert: "Narnia, Golden Compass, Lord of the Rings" here. And they throw in a few visuals from "The Neverending Story" series.
Ultimately Alice goes all "Joan of Arc" or at least "Jane and the Dragon" and becomes a knight in armor. Many have lamented this action adventure turn of the story but the actual showdown takes only about 10 minutes so I don't think it is that big of a deal. And it has some considerable basis as Alice had been the White Queen's Pawn (because the Queen's daughter Lily was too young to play) throughout the chess match in "Through the Looking Glass". That story was just one big chess game with a lengthy combat segment between the White Knight and the Red Knight, as well as a fight between the "Gladstone" Lion and the "Disraeli" Unicorn for the crown. The only problem I see is that the combat is all too predictable.
Burton's film has many delightful moments; I liked it better than almost any of the recently released big budget stuff although it's not in the same league as "Pride and Prejudice" or "Atonement".
Mia Waisikowska strikes a perfect balance as the title character, playing the bravest heroine in literary history requires a lot of nonverbal stuff and she sells her reluctance nicely along with giving her character a subtle sensual dimension.
Helena Bonham Carter pretty much steals the film, although she is upstaged on occasion by the grinning Cheshire cat. Depp's Mad Hatter never quite comes into focus, playing the character as a schizophrenic (at least that's what I assume he was doing) introduced a little too much pain into this type of story; in much the same way that his take on Willy Wonka just brought the viewer down. A run-of-the-mill lunatic would worked better.
As the White Queen, Anne Hathaway was pretty much irrelevant and was most likely cast because of her "small" head (her features seem to take up her entire face-especially with the extreme make-up), a kind of good-guy bad-guy balance for her evil sister's big head. But I did like the off-kilter Morticia Addams take she gave her character; rather than playing her as a goody-two-shoes.
The audience during my showing was attentive and entertained from beginning to end (well almost to the end as the film goes out on a couple of extremely weak scenes back on the surface). But most bolted before the closing credits, which played over Avril Lavigne singing "Alice" (Avril also appears in the film's trailer). Given that it is mostly up-scale theaters with state-of-the-art sound systems showing this film, those who left missed one of the best moments of the whole viewing experience. Not unlike those who missed the great closing credits animation sequences at the end of "A Series of Unfortunate Events".
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.