The more movies Tim Burton makes, the clearer it is to me that Tim Burton can only make one movie, over and over again.† The combination of his highly recognizable aesthetic ó dark twisted fantasy worlds ó and his insistence on using the same two distinctive actors in every film makes it hard for his movies to be anything other than Tim Burton movies.† Thatís not all bad.† Thereís enough variation in the plot and the other actors to make each of Burtonís films interesting in their own right, but his distinctive style is bad news when he tries to do an adaptation.
ìAlice in Wonderland” is a perfect example ó there is so much Tim Burton in the film that it crowds out any possible influence of Lewis Carroll, whose beloved masterpiece is supposedly being evoked.
The film commits the same sin as the original Disney animated feature in amalgamating ìAlice in Wonderland” and ìThrough the Looking Glass,” eliminating in one fell swoop all the significant differences and plot coherence of the original work.† The characters that remain from the original are given new characterizations: the dormouse whose defining characteristic was laziness becomes a bold hero, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) is restyled into an unfamiliar character more kind and sympathetic than anyone Alice encounters in the original work, and the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) becomes a pseudo-love interest with a hastily made-up past to give him some semblance of depth.† Many other characters are completely new, but just as shallow.
An adaptation is not an imitation, of course, and no one went into this film expecting to see the books on screen.† But this is deeper than adaptation decay ó as far as I could tell, in Burtonís ìAlice in Wonderland,” nothing whatsoever remained of Carrollís Wonderland.
Carrollís Wonderland is a dreamscape; its defining characteristics are its illogical layout and lack of geography.† The logic of the land is wordplay and philosophy, neither of which make much of an appearance in the film.† Wonderland consists not in the talking animals or fantastic impossibilities, but in the intense cleverness of the storytelling, a cleverness which is not remotely preserved in the film.
Instead, Burton replaces it with fluff.† We get a prophecy which Alice (Mia Wasikowska) stubbornly refuses to fulfill, demanding that she control her own destiny.† Until she fulfills it, exactly as she is supposed to.† Whatís the lesson there?† Where even is the surprise or interest in such a plot?† Alice discovers conclusively that Wonderland is not a dream ó when one of the most intriguing partís of Carrollís work was the open question of whether or not it was. Stripped even of itís childhood context, Lewisís tale of childhood wonder becomes a flimsy and confusing story of female empowerment in Victorian England ó for lack of anything else to be.
Tim Burton has a reputation for making films darker and edgier, but that tactic falls fabulously flat in this film.† With the decision to advance Alice to the age of 19, the presence of a subplot about marriage, and the decision to make her clothes not shrink or grow with her (something fundamentally unprecedented in tellings of the tale), one might expect some sexual overtones, something which could save the film from the intense boringness of the plot.† But thanks to the Disney stamp and the PG rating, weíre instead left with a conspicuously asexual film which only adds to the unrealistic characterization of Alice and the Hatter.
Ultimately, Burtonís ego edges out all traces of Carroll, leaving us with a Tim Burton film that Burton himself doesnít understand ó a half-baked mess of pretty visual effects and poorly articulated morals.