Burton Doesn't Lose His "Muchness" with His Darkly Fanciful Take on the Lewis Carroll Classic

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2010)

Mad as a hatter and wildly audacious, this fantastical 2010 adventure turns Lewis Carroll's classic tale of surreal logic displacement on its ear. Who better to translate this story into a female empowerment parable than the master of quirky darkness, director Tim Burton, and his favorite muse Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter? The excesses of Burton's imagination, guided by Linda Woolverton's ("The Lion King") sharp-tongued screenplay, result in a particularly idiosyncratic adaptation. Yet, as dazzling and sometimes scarifying as the computer-generated images are, the film is not overwhelmed by the visual elements and retains the basic themes of the original stories.
Combining elements of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" with its sequel, "Through the Looking Glass", the movie begins when a young Alice awakens from a nightmare in which she has visited Wonderland. The obviously precocious child questions her sanity to which her father assures her that it's fine to be "bonkers", all the best people are. Flash forward several years later, and Alice has become a rebellious nineteen-year-old on her way to a garden party where all the guests are to witness her being engaged to a patronizing fop named Hamish. She hesitates and asks for a moment at which point she chases a rabbit from her earlier dream into a hole. Perpetually shrinking and enlarging, she finds herself in not Wonderland but Underland where she sees all the talking creatures from her dream, but this time, they all question whether she is the real Alice. They all need the Alice of their collective memory, the one who would have no trouble defeating the monstrous Jabberwocky and ending the reign of the evil Red Queen.
Once Alice joins the Mad Hatter's party, it becomes clear she is not in a dream of her making, that she is being signaled to make her own way in life and within Underland, ensure that the virtuous White Queen be restored to the throne, even donning Joan of Arc-like armor for the climactic battle scene. Australian actress Mia Wasikowska ("The Evening Sun", "Amelia") makes a terrifically wary Alice whose sense of wonder is tempered by her palpable search for self-confidence. As you would expect, Depp has the showiest role as the Mad Hatter, all leering smiles and electro-shock orange hair, and he makes the most of it despite an incongruous dance solo toward the end. With her head blown up three times its normal size, Helena Bonham Carter has a field day as the decapitation-crazed Red Queen as she barks orders at her lackeys and demands to be pampered with pigs being used as footrests.
The rest of the cast make the impressions needed within the dimensions of the story - Stephen Fry as the dapper but cowardly Cheshire Cat; Crispin Glover as the villainous Knave of Hearts tending to the Red Queen's absurd orders; Alan Rickman as the surly, hookah-smoking Caterpillar; and English comedian Matt Lucas as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, perhaps the most Disneyesque of the characters conceived here. Only Anne Hathaway disappoints in an arch turn as the White Queen, appearing to channel her Princess Diaries co-star, Julie Andrews, in accentuated "Mary Poppins" mode. All the production values are first-class from Robert Stromberg's wildly varied production design to Dariusz Wolski's rich cinematography and Danny Elfman's bombastic music score. The movie does meander at various points, primarily to establish the next story turn, but fans of Burton's and Depp's work shouldn't be too disappointed.