by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles and I a movie we somehow missed when it was
new (and when I still had two eyes good enough that I could have enjoyed it in
the original 3-D) in 2010: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, produced in 2010 for Walt Disney Studios and
starring Johnny Depp (whom one imdb.com reviewer persisted in calling “Johnny
Deep” — next time turn your auto-correct feature off!) as the Mad Hatter. There
was some debate on the film’s imdb.com page whether this film counted as a
remake of Alice in Wonderland or
a sequel, since in this version Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is 19, she has dim
recollections of the dream in which she previously visited Wonderland (actually
in this script by Linda Woolverton it’s really called “Underland” and
“Wonderland” is a mistake Alice made the first time she was there) and she’s
about to marry an upper-class twit named Hamish (Leo Bill) for no better reason
than he’s the son of Lord Ascot (Tim Pigott-Smith), the business partner of
Alice’s late father, Charles Kingsleigh (Marton Czokas), who dreamed of
expanding his trading company’s reach to the Far East before he died under
mysterious circumstances. Apparently Burton and Woolverton decided to give
Alice the last name “Kingsleigh” and call her father Charles after Charles
Kingsley, who in the 1860’s wrote a book called The Water-Babies that was sort of precursor to Alice in
Wonderland and would probably make a good
basis for a Tim Burton film if anyone out there in the modern audience had
heard of it. (I only heard of it because one of my grade-school classes read
it.) But given that it’s a well-known fact that the real-life inspiration for
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
was a 11-year-old girl named Alice Liddell (she later married a man named Hart,
lived until 1924 and naturally got sought out by fans of Carroll’s Alice books eager to meet “the real Alice”) I found it
jarring that she had a different last name. I thought the movie wasn’t really
either a sequel or a remake so much as a set of variations, much the way
composers have written variations on other composers’ themes and presented them
as original works.
The opening of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is surprisingly close to the book — though Charles
gave him and Woolverton points for putting Alice into Wonderland far more cinematically
than Carroll did in the novel (in which she simply falls asleep while reading a
book which bores her because “it has no pictures or quotations — and what use
is a book without pictures or quotations?”); she plunges picturesquely through
a long tunnel in a sequence pretty obviously inspired by the cyclone that
picked up Dorothy’s house and deposited her in Oz in the 1939 film The
Wizard of Oz, an obvious inspiration
through much of this one. I remember reading an article on The Wizard
of Oz in a Reader’s Digest in the 1970’s which made the point that it and Alice
in Wonderland reflected the different
social attitudes of Americans and British even towards childhood fantasies:
Lewis Carroll’s Alice wandered politely through Wonderland without bothering to
try to change anything, while L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy got actively involved in
Oz’s politics and social order and organized the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion to seek out
the qualities they always wanted. The Burton/Woolverton Alice is considerably
closer to Baum’s Dorothy than Carroll’s Alice in this regard: she not only gets
involved in the war between the good (but rather pallid-looking) White Queen
(Anne Hathaway) and the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, who’s also Mrs.
Tim Burton — one wonders what their breakfast-table conversations are like:
“O.K., darling, what villainess do you want me to play in your next movie?”) and ends up a Lancelot- or Parsifal-like
quest figure, slaying the evil Jabberwock (there’s some confusion in the movie whether
the monster is called “Jabberwock” or “Jabberwocky” — in the original Through
the Looking-Glass “Jabberwock” is the name
of the monster and “Jabberwocky” the title of the poem that tells its story)
with the magic Vorpal Sword only she can wield.
There are also bits of Monty
Python and the Holy Grail, notably a scroll
called the “Oraculum” that predicts the future events of the story — at one
point when the characters unrolled it to read what was going to happen next I
couldn’t help but joke, “The Book of the Film.” Also, like just about all previous adaptations of
the Alice books, Woolverton’s
script freely mixes elements of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass instead of just sticking to one or the other (and
Disney did make a sequel, Through
the Looking-Glass, in 2016 which Burton
produced but did not direct). Nonetheless, I found Burton’s Alice in
Wonderland thoroughly charming, a dazzling
movie in which the computer-generated visual effects were there to tell a
strong and powerful story and not just to dazzle us for their own sake. It’s
also a film that is well paced, though it doesn’t offer many moments of repose;
the images just come right after each other, but they’re cleverly designed
(wisely Burton and his designers stuck pretty closely to John Tenniel’s
illustrations for the original publications of the novels) and I might have got
upset that the Mad Hatter’s role was vastly expanded over the original, except
that a) that’s a star prerogative and b) Johnny Depp turns it into a tour
de force, yet another entry in the gallery
of engaging weirdos Burton has given Depp to play in a long-term director/star
collaboration that rivals John Ford/John Wayne, John Huston/Humphrey Bogart and
Rock Hudson/Douglas Sirk.
