Alice wears a breastplate: it’s a rather flattering breastplate, as breastplates go. Her long strawberry blond curls cascade on to its metal surface, framing her pale white cheeks and reminding us that she’s still pretty despite her new warrior image. The heroine of Tim Burton’s newest film- a remake of the Lewis Carroll story ‘Alice in Wonderland’- is thirteen years older but no more cynical. In fact, she sometimes believes six impossible things before she even has her morning frappuccino.
As usual, Alice’s life before she fell down the rabbit hole is left largely unexplored. Her recently deceased father was a thoughtful and ambitious man who taught Alice (Mia Wasikowska) to believe that anything was possible. Worn down by a conformist mother, she escapes her white collared world through dreams, dreams that will inevitably come true. Down the hole she tumbles, falling against a backdrop of flashing images: Gold, blue, yellow and green, roots, weeds and carnage.
The densely forested underbelly of Wonderland is Tim Burton’s finest flourish. Oversized flower petals are strewn across stretches of scraggy foliage and enormous toadstools tower above creatures, casting shadows on Lewis Caroll’s previously sunny world. On one end of this vast green plaza lives the red queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and on the other, the white queen (Anne Hathaway.) A mane of reddish curls graces the top of red’s ridiculously large head and a face daubed with blue eye make-up as in a crude cartoon. Small delicate movements and high-pitched lyrical sounds contribute much to the character of white queen- irritating at best.
The show doesn’t really begin until Johnny arrives: Johnny Depp that is. He plays the mad hatter, but that doesn’t really matter. He’s the ice sculpture that the party revolves around. Great luminous eyes bear witness to his lonely old soul that’s waited for Alice these long years while the red queen slowly destroyed wonderland. He greets Alice with a gap-toothed smile and a charmingly slurred, “you’re absolutely Alice- I’d know you anywhere.”
As the ice sculpture, Depp is surprisingly sub-par. Tim Burton has framed his leading man so convincingly that he has reduced the rest of the characters, including Alice, to scenery. Tears on Depp’s mascara-ed lashes do little to move the story forward and the film loses its momentum towards the finale. What do we care if Alice slays the jabberwocky? We don’t even know her. Her bouts of self-doubt and then bravery seem to come from nowhere and she is left to flounder in two-dimensionality. Surprising, considering the film is in 3-D.
The story of Alice has been retold numerous times over the decades since it was first imagined 150 years ago. It’s been told in almost very possible medium- fiction, cartoon, anime, musical, video game and various television and movie adaptations. Each recreation must find something new, an under-developed grain, or it is not worth the telling. Tim Burton’s huge production is a collage of the original Carroll book, a time warp, and the traditional Burtonian dark stamp. Its delicious imagery brings a fresh visual discourse to the old tale and yet, nothing has really changed. Burton is undoubtedly a visionary but he has allowed his vision to overpower the simple beauty of a much beloved story. In the end, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (2010) is an epic film but not a subversive, or even a necessary, one.