RETURN TO ODDS
Alice in Wonderland
***1/2
Review by Steven Lewis
So it’s Tim Burton doing “Alice in Wonderland”. Do you KNOW what kind of films Tim Burton makes? Do you know what kind of a work “Alice in Wonderland” is? If so, you already know whether you want to see this movie or not. Frankly, a review of Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” seems as superfluous to me as . . . well, a review of Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”!
But I suppose a few things should be said. First of all, to get it out of the way right up front, this movie is indeed everything you’d want and expect from Tim Burton doing “Alice in Wonderland”: imaginative sets, trippy visuals, creepy-yet-not-TOO-creepy action, and characters that, delightfully, more closely resemble (in both performance and physical presentation) beautifully crafted life-sized marionettes than actual people. I loved every minute of it.
But I saw a recent review of this movie which placed it alongside such junk as “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “G.I. Joe” as an example of busy, overly digitized studio product designed to appeal to the ADD set by constantly throwing things at you. Well . . . sure, it kind of is. There’s definitely a sensory overload aspect to the picture, and the frame often feels cluttered. What sets it apart from those other films, though – and this is crucial – is that Burton fills his frame with visions and ideas that are all wonderfully inventive, clever and imaginative. To me, that goes a long way toward forgiving the clutter. I don’t know about you, but I find that when my senses are delighted, they don’t mind so much being overloaded.
Now, as for the story. As has been widely noted, it’s not really “Alice in Wonderland” so much as its sequel. In the film, Alice is nineteen and due to be married, when she follows a white rabbit down his hole into an alternate universe she remembers from her childhood dreams. Once there, she finds the kingdom in great disarray – and discovers she is the Chosen One, who must save Narnia by defeating Voldemort and restoring to the throne Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Obviously, the plot is stitched together from some very standard fantasy-adventure tropes. But so what? It works – at least as enough of a through-line from which to hang those wonderful and lovingly created visuals I mentioned above. And in any case, there’s no real “story” to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books anyway – they simply follow the protagonist from one phantasmagoric setting to another until they finally tire themselves out and return her home. One could argue that by imposing a structure – even one as rudimentary and derivative as this – Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton provide the pace and forward momentum necessary for this material to succeed as a FILM, rather than simply a coffee table picture book masquerading as a movie.
But maybe it all comes down to how you like your Burton buttered. One could make the fair point that the director’s early films – the ones that really made his name and sealed his reputation – were themselves largely plotless affairs, and succeeded more on the strengths of their tone and visuals than through the imposition of tight, rigidly worked out storylines. We’re talking here of Pee-Wee and Batman, the two Eds (Scissorhands and Wood), “Beetlejuice” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. The Burton who made those films might very well have chosen to do a straight adaptation of “Alice”, preserving its loose structure and emphasis on mood and spectacle over focused narrative.
Thing is – and here’s my big boatload of bias, so pay attention – I find THAT Burton to be pretty much a waste of time. Oh, visual artistry oozing from every frame no question. But I find the meandering nature of those films, and their indifference to dramatic structure and plausible character development (plausible even within the worlds they’ve set up for themselves) annoying in the extreme. To me, Burton does not get interesting as a filmmaker – that is, a COMPLETE filmmaker, not just a visual stylist – until “Sleepy Hollow”. For, that is when he starts putting care into marrying his visual invention to the telling of actual STORIES. The stories themselves may not, in themselves, always be the freshest or most inventive – but the fact that they exist, and have at least been logically worked out from start to finish, gives the director’s visual talent something solid to be in the service of.
That’s my take on Tim Burton, anyway. I am quite aware it is not everyone’s. However, the extent to which you either enjoy or feel let down by his “Alice in Wonderland” will likely have everything to do with the template you have in your mind for what a “great” Tim Burton film should look and feel like. No way to know for sure except by taking a plunge down the rabbit hole.
Directed by: Tim Burton
Release Date: March 5, 2010
Run Time: 108 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: PG
Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures
