"Alice" as it might have been had it been written by C.S. Lewis

Rating: 6/10 (18 June 2010)

"Alice in Wonderland" has been filmed several times, with a greater or lesser fidelity to the original story, but Tim Burton's recent version departs more radically from Lewis Carroll's text than virtually any other. Burton has said that he never felt a connection emotionally to the original, about a girl wandering around from one weird character to another, so he wanted to make it feel more like a story than a series of events.
His solution was, essentially, to film the book not as written by Carroll but as it might have been had it been written by C.S. Lewis. In the film, Alice is not a child but a young woman of nineteen. (Her surname is Kingsley, possibly a reference to Charles Kingsley, another Victorian children's writer). She is being pressurised by her family into an unwanted marriage with Hamish, a pompous young aristocrat, and running away from his unwelcome proposal, she falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in Underland (as Wonderland is renamed here). Underland is under the tyrannical rule of the Red Queen, and Alice learns that she is the only one who can slay the Jabberwocky, a creature controlled by the Red Queen, thus freeing Underland from tyranny and restoring its rightful ruler, the White Queen, to the throne.
Although some, such as the Duchess and the Mock Turtle, are omitted, most of the characters in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" make an appearance, along with some from its sequel "Through the Looking-Glass", but they are pressed into the service of the above plot, which resembles that of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" or "Prince Caspian" more than it does that of Carroll's novels. The Mad Hatter, for example, becomes a leader of the resistance to the Red Queen and Carroll's dormouse, originally a fat, sleepy creature, becomes a warrior-mouse reminiscent of Lewis' Reepicheep.
Lewis' "Narnia" stories are, of course, Christian allegories, and my initial thought that Burton might be trying to force "Alice in Wonderland" into the same mould became even stronger in the scenes near the end in which Alice puts on armour and arms herself with the Vorpal Sword in order to fight the dragon-like Jabberwocky. In these scenes Alice becomes a female equivalent of the heroic warrior-saints of traditional Christian iconography whose purpose is to symbolise the spiritual battle of good and evil, a sort of Saint Georgina and the Dragon, or Saint Michelle overcoming Satan.
Burton's urge to Christianise "Alice in Wonderland" may have been due to perceived similarities between Carroll and Lewis; both were, after all, Oxford dons and both were devout Christians. (Carroll was an ordained minister of the Anglican Church). Yet the two men were quite different as writers, and despite his religious beliefs Carroll never intended the "Alice" stories to be neat religious allegories. Indeed, they are not neatly constructed stories with a beginning, a middle and an end; their logic is that of the dream. They can be seen as nonsense novels or as examples of literary Surrealism long before that term was first applied to the visual arts.
This is not an altogether bad film. It is saved from a lower mark by two things. The first is the quality of some of the acting, especially from Helena Bonham Carter (a frequent Burton collaborator) as the Red Queen, a splendidly over-the-top villainess. The Red Queen is, in fact, a combination of the character of that name from "Through the Looking Glass" and the Queen of Hearts from "Alice in Wonderland". We learn that her first name is Iracebeth, a play on the word "irascible" and the name Elizabeth; her appearance, with her red hair and very pale skin, is clearly based on that of Queen Elizabeth I. I also liked Anne Hathaway's White Queen, not by any means a straightforward heroine. According to Hathaway, her character "really likes the dark side, but is scared of going too far into it", something certainly brought out in her interpretation. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter is completely weird, but in the context of this particular story that counts as praise rather than criticism.
The other factor in the film's favour is Burton's visual imagination, something as much in evidence here as in any of his other films. (The film is a mixture of live action and digital animation). Burton may have renamed Wonderland as Underland, but it still remains a strange and wondrous place. An example of his imagination is the character of the Bandersnatch, a ferocious beast mentioned by Carroll but never precisely described. Here it is portrayed as a mixture of hyaena, tiger, bulldog and pig, a curious combination but one fully in line with Carroll's imagination.
The Disney cartoon version of "Alice" also departs from Carroll's text, yet remains faithful to its spirit. (My favourite cinema version, however, remains the British musical from the seventies with Fiona Fullerton). I don't think that Tim Burton's version remains faithful in the same way. He takes a piece of dreamlike surrealism and turns it into a tale with a moral, or perhaps two morals. (The moral of the Underland section is "Fight valiantly against the world, the flesh and the devil"; that of the quasi-feminist Victorian back-story can be summarised as "Girl Power!"). If Burton never felt an emotional connection to the original stories, that might suggest that he was not the ideal person to direct a film based on them. 6/10