When will we get a decent Alice film?

Rating: 1/10 (22 December 2010)

When a really talented director—like Tim Burton—goes off the tracks, the result can be a spectacularly bad film. (In fact that one can argue that some of the very worst films were made by some of the very best directors). Alice in Wonderland is such a film. Not only is it bad—it is monumentally, mind-bogglingly, brain-cell destroyingly bad. What was Burton thinking? Please note—many spoilers follow.
First honors for this disaster have to go to the screenwriter Linda Woolverton. Her CV is replete with child- and teen-oriented television. Her feature credits include The Lion King, Mulan, and Beauty and the Beast. Nothing in this intellectually and aesthetically underpowered and painfully formulaic material constitutes any preparation for dealing with a text of the imaginative and psychological complexity of the Alice books, let alone an understanding of Victorian society. All of this is painfully evident in her shoddy excuse for a screenplay.
To begin with, the very title is misleading. This film, apart from appropriating a range of Carroll's characters, has nothing to do with the Alice books. Instead, we are to believe that Alice, after her original dream-visits to Wonderland (her subsequent visit to Looking-Glass Land is ignored, even though characters from the later book are yoked in by violence) share the story with her incredibly understanding father—now a shipping magnate instead of a clergyman (as in the original). He dies, and she grows up a willful and peevish young woman, to the despair of her mother (Lindsay Duncan, in a thankless role).
The film proper begins with a 19 year old Alice on her way to her engagement party with a man she has not as yet accepted (Leo Bill, in another thankless role as a chinless, clueless wonder.) Almost as damaging to the film as the screenplay is Alice herself. Mia Wasikowska takes a gracelessly written part and makes it worse. It is easily one of the most tedious performances I have ever seen—particularly when Alice is clearly intended to be a sort of Disney Princess / fully realized Modern Woman.
Let's consider the engagement party. Engagements were serious business to Victorians—one of the great Victorian novels, Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, deals with the almost catastrophic implications of two women jilting or potentially jilting the men to whom they were engaged. It is literally unimaginable that a family would give a massive engagement party where the bride to be was not committed, or where she could publicly jilt her intended. To anyone with any sense of Victorian society, this is nonsense.
Alice follows the White Rabbit into the rabbit-hole and into the Underland—Wonderland devastated by a war between the Red Queen and the White Queen. I do not propose to synopsize what passes for a plot here, except to note that Alice's Destiny Is To Slay The Jabberwocky And Defeat The Red Queen—which she does. Helena Bonham Carter chews the scenery as the Red Queen; as the White Queen, Anne Hathaway looks like she wandered in from an Elvish domain in Lord of the Rings.
There is almost no recognizable trace of Carroll in these sorry proceedings. Characters like the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter have been Disneyfied into cuteness. The only character that still is like the original is the Cheshire Cat—voiced by Stephen Fry. Johnny Depp is lost in makeup, costume, and bad writing. Even the poor Jabberwock is not immune. Readers will recall that the entity was the Jabberwock; the poem, Jabberwocky.
With a dreadful inevitability Alice emerges from Underland, rejects the chinless wonder, and at the end is sailing away as a supercargo on one of her family's company's ships. Witless Disneyfied feminism.
Now, the film does look like a Burton film. It is visually striking. But what's the point? You might film the telephone book with great visuals to equal effect. I have to wonder what on earth Tim Burton was thinking when he executed this monumental, beautifully produced, brain dead excuse for a film.
If Burton had a screenplay that stuck to the book, this film might well have been worthwhile. But it raises a question that I have wondered about for many years—why has no one made films of Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass that are in any way faithful to the originals? It is true that the Alice books are sui generis—the greatest works in of all children's literature, unique combinations of psychology and mathematics, each carefully organized around a different set of metaphors—Alice around cards and growing and shrinking and summer; Through the Looking Glass around chess and winter. They are as strange and familiar as paintings by Rene Magritte. They are heavily visual and cinematic. Why mess with them? What forces filmmakers to cheapen and vulgarize them? This film reportedly cost some $200,000,000 to make. What a monumental waste of time, effort, and money. Ms. Woolverton should be publicly flogged before the British Library by members of the Society for the Protection of Textual Integrity and Mr. Burton should wear a particularly itchy hair shirt for the next year as small measures of penance.
It is rare indeed that one finds a film that is so utterly infuriating and so utterly without redeeming features. It is even rarer when it exhibits so clearly the failings of contemporary film—contempt for sources, witless writing, justification through special effects, and no sense of history.
It should be burnt. Or at least shunned.
Save yourself, and avoid it.