Pointless

Rating: 6/10 (21 March 2010)

How do you cinematize a literary masterpiece? Now, don't assume I'm one of those purists who'll never be satisfied.
Burton could have done one or more of the following things:
1) Reproduce the original.
2) Create a new, "parallel universe" story that captures the same degree of subversiveness as the original.
3) Modify the original to taste, but imbue Carroll's original images with a new power.
Burton did not repro the original.
He created a sort of storybook pastiche using the characters and a few scenarios from the original. But the subversion he engineers (Alice emerging to transcend the demands of class and status) is puny and tame compared to the big dogs that Carroll takes on.
In a few, few instances, Burton did actually sort of grab me by the throat and make me see the depths of an original, Carrollian, image.
For instance, when we first encounter the tea party, and the camera swoops in on the table, I was whupped upside the head by an inescapable, very dark realization: This is a harrowing depiction of the nature of spiritual madness. It starts out like a tea party, but the striving for stasis--the idea that we must try, at all costs, to preserve this beautiful moment--eventually turns it evil.
But, really, that was about it.
I also didn't appreciate (Spoiler Alert! Here comes my inner purist!) them calling the creature "a Jabberwocky". That oversight on the parts of the writers and artistic directors--whom one would have presumed to be Carroll aficionados--sort of took me by surprise. The creature is called a "Jabberwock", and a poem celebrating its heroic hunting and demise could well be called "Jabberwocky": This in the grand tradition of naming an ode after a noun by adding an "-y" suffix. If that seems nitpicky, just remember that Carroll was notably fastidious about such things.
At any rate, I guess I would have liked to feel that the gang who produced this would have done a better job of artfully scraping away just enough of the aesthetic distancing afforded by the genre of Victorian Children's Literature that we could see with our own eyes (else what's cinema for?) a little more of Carroll's subversive otherworld.
Instead we got a porridge (granted, thicker than gruel) of more of the Hollywood same.