The 21st century's Wizard of Oz

Rating: 10/10 (6 March 2010)

For decades Tim Burton has had a unique vision of the world that's he's been trying to communicate in his movies. I knew 20 minutes into this one that I was watching his masterpiece; it's the culmination of everything he's been trying to say. He finally got everything right. This movie is flawless, delicate, and a perfect communion of his world view.
I knew halfway through the movie that it was the best I've seen in a decade, and by the end I knew it to be among the best cinematic experiences I've had in 40-odd years.
Watching the movie also gave me a twinge of sadness, because the more I loved the movie, the more I understood -- from experience, mind you -- that it was going to leave a lot of viewers bewildered and unhappy. Tim Burton is generations ahead of his time, and the closer he comes to showing us his true vision, the more people he alienates, leaving an ever-smaller core of aficionados who can be moved and astonished by the brilliance of that vision.
Johnny Depp obviously gets the vision. People who work time and again with Burton do so because they get *him*. And Depp gives a bravura, astonishingly subtle performance of an incredibly difficult character. It may have been his finest work to date. But the difficulty of the character will also confuse many people, and you're going to hear about it in the reviews.
The movie, like many of Burton's movies, pokes fun at precisely the kind of person who doesn't get this movie. People who've lost touch with the wonderment of their childhoods, people who are mostly concerned with what is fashionable and proper, dull people with little imagination and even less tolerance for it in others -- these people are caricatured in Alice, both in the "real world" at the party and again in the Red Queen's court.
Burton's Alice in Wonderland is a wonderful metaphor for the relationship between Burton and his audience. The theme of the movie is that a few people in the world -- "only the best people" -- still have boundless imagination and delight for the truly novel, while the rest of polite society thinks of them as being quirky, off-kilter, or simply embarrassing.
It will take years for this mess to get sorted out, of course. People will whine and moan and complain about it. In time they'll accept it. A generation from now this movie will be viewed as one of the best fantasies of our times: a 21st-century Wizard of Oz (to which Alice pays a brief homage at the end of the film.)
A word of advice: go re-read Lewis Carroll's two Alice stories before watching this movie. No Alice has ever been truer to the spirit of Carroll's strange, haunting and timeless vision.