MESSAGE IN THE MOVIES

Alice in Wonderland Rated PG

Directed by Tim Burton.  Starring Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska.

Photo © Walt Disney Studio
Movie Review by Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

A few months ago when I saw the posters for “Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland”, I sighed.  If there was ever an unfilmable book that had been filmed more times than the Lewis Carroll classic, I didn’t know of it.  (A modern British version was just shown this year on the Syfy Channel.) 

Carroll’s book is well worth reading for its wordplay, crazy logic, and mathematical puzzles.  The fantastical world is so trippy, however, that it not only inspired the Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit” (about the pleasures of recreational drugs) but was a mainstay on college room bookshelves in the sixties. 

One of the problems in the book (and in the 1951 Walt Disney animated film) was that Alice mostly observed the craziness around her and didn’t do much of anything. 

In Linda Woolverton’s script, Alice (Wasikowska) is a young Victorian woman whose family is trying to force her into an upwardly mobile, loveless marriage.  As she escapes from a crowd at an engagement party, she falls down the rabbit hole and into the Underland. 

She vaguely remembers being here before as a young girl, but things have changed under the reign of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). 

The Mad Hatter’s party table is cluttered and dirty, and the entire countryside is ravaged and broken.  (Even fantasy worlds get treated to a gloomy future these days.) 

So the film quickly turns into a routine quest adventure, where there are monsters to fight and evil to overcome with the assistance of companions-in-arms, including the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the Mad Hatter (Depp) himself, who is comfortable in both camps. 

It seems that we are living at a time when films can be visually rewarding and also dramatically bland.  Such is the case with Alice in Wonderland; I found it at times to be entertaining, boring, irritating, and intriguing. 

Depp and Bonham Carter have fun with their character parts, and Wasikowska is a perfect Alice, both beautiful and thoughtful.  But Crispin Glover as The Knave shows what awful things can happen when an eccentric character and an over-the-top performance come together. 

There are scenes in this film of incredible wonderment and beauty, but in retrospect I would probably have enjoyed them more as freeze frames.  You know what I mean.  I would have enjoyed these pictures in a book.

Pitchfork Rating: Two halos. ((A modern reworking of a classic children’s book with a decidedly feminist attitude.)

Two picthforks. (For scary monsters, violence, and dark undertones.)

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