by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran Charles a movie, Alice Through the
Looking Glass, the 2016 sequel to Tim
Burton’s marvelous 2010 (sort-of) adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and a sufficiently dull and disappointing movie both Charles and I found ourselves nodding off through
bits of it. The 2010 Alice in Wonderland departed considerably from the Urtext of Lewis Carroll’s (t/n Samuel Dodgson) original
books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (originally titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which may have motivated Burton and his writer,
Linda Woolverton, to insist that the name of the magical place Alice visits is
really “Underland” and she got it wrong in the first place) and Through
the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
— and like most Alice in Wonderland
movies it freely mixed and matched between the two books instead of just doing
one or the other. Woolverton did a few things in the first Alice movie that really annoyed me, notably giving Alice
and her parents the last name “Kingsleigh” (an homage to another British fantasy writer, Charles Kingsley,
whose 1867 book The Water-Babies
might itself be worth filming even though the Wikipedia page on it says it fell
from popularity because of its anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Black
aspects) when it’s well known the real-life Alice who inspired the books was
named Alice Liddell. (Someone traced her in England in 1924 and did an
interview with her, though by then she’d been married and went by the name
Alice Liddell Hart.) Apparently Carroll saw the real Alice laying under a tree,
having fallen asleep while reading, and that inspired him — though there are
some reports that Carroll was really a pedophile who had a crush on the
11-year-old Alice Liddell. Alice Through the Looking Glass begins with what turns out to be its best scenes: it
opens in the Straits of Malacca in 1864, where the Kingsleigh family ship, the Wonder, is being chased by pirates and is also about to tip
over and sink in a storm. The anxious officers and crew members want to turn
back, but Alice, the ship’s captain, insists on pressing on and adding more
sail until the ship passes safely through the storm while the three pirate
ships that were chasing her run aground on reefs. The scene then cuts to
London, one year later, and Alice crashes a party being given by her former
fiancé Hamish (Leo Bill) to commemorate his assumption of the title of Lord
Ascot following the death of her father, who was also the business partner of
Alice’s late father.
In Alice in Wonderland Hamish was merely an insufferable upper-class twit,
but in Alice Through the Looking Glass he’s an out-and-out villain who’s bought out the Kingsleighs’ 10
percent interest in the company his father and Alice’s co-ran and is
threatening to evict Alice’s mother from her home unless she signs over the
papers for the Wonder. That means
Alice will no longer have a ship at her disposal for her explorations, but
Hamish offers her a job as a clerk and says she’ll be able gradually to work
her way up through his organization. He stresses this will be a rare
opportunity for her because almost no other company in Britain hires women as
clerks. Needless to say, Alice finds this a fate almost as bad as death, and
she hides in a study of Hamish’s home during his party and comes across a
looking-glass through which she enters and crosses back into Wonderland, or
Underland, or whatever it’s called. Linda Woolverton misses Alice’s discovery
of the backwards looking-glass world in the marvelous opening chapter of Through
the Looking-Glass, including the bit that
she can’t read the books on the other side of the looking-glass because they’re
all printed backwards, but that’s not the biggest problem with Woolverton’s
script. Once she actually gets Alice back to Wonderland (or Underland, or
whatever it’s called) her writing turns flat, ordinary and just plain dull as,
instead of working out clever variations on Lewis Carroll’s themes, Woolverton
comes up with an annoying and ponderous tale of her own based on some of the
Carroll characters as well as some new ones she invented. The schtick this time around is, instead of the manic character
he was in Alice in Wonderland (both
book and the previous film), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) has gone into a
heavy-duty depressed phase because he’s found the first hat he ever made — a
tiny blue toy hat made of paper which he made for his parents before they were
killed by the Jabberwock in the first film’s backstory. This indicates that his
parents may have survived the attack after all, and for some reason instead of
lifting his spirits and giving him a sense of hope, it plunges him deeply into
depression.
He summons Alice in the hope that she can work out a solution to
his problem; he also briefs her that Time is actually an animate being (played
by Sacha Baron Cohen with his usual insufferability — I briefly thought Depp
might be doubling the roles of the Mad Hatter and Time, but he wasn’t and this
film might have been better if he had been) and he’s in possession of something
called the “chronosphere,” which controls the flow of time. If Alice can steal
the chronosphere and use it to reverse time so the Mad Hatter’s family aren’t killed after all, his depression will be lifted and
he’ll be happy again. Alice crashes Time’s castle and steals the chronosphere —
despite the efforts of Time’s minions, a bunch of clockwork gadgets reminiscent
of the animated sidekicks in previous Disney productions like The
Little Mermaid and Beauty and the
Beast, to stop her — and once she has it it
instantly expands from a round crystal atop the center of a giant clock to a
round vehicle, sort of like the ones used in the Jurassic World movies, in which Alice can go through both space and
time. The vehicle’s controls seem an awful lot like the ones that ran the
TARDIS on the Doctor Who TV show
— a reference score composer Danny Elfman caught and exploited by quoting the Doctor
Who theme in his music — only the
chronosphere is stolen by the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who wants to
use it to start a genocidal war against the other denizens of Wonderland
because she’s still pissed off at her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway),
for some transgression from their joint childhoods. This part of the plot seems
like Woolverton was ripping off Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, in which the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch were
estranged sisters and had tongue-twisting names — in Alice Through
the Looking Glass the White Queen is called
“Mirana” and the Red Queen “Iracebeth” (or is it the other way around?).
Anyway, the Red Queen steals the chronosphere and uses it to screw up time,
only since time can’t really change everything ultimately reverts to what it
was before. The Red Queen grows a heart (like the Grinch) and the Mad Hatter
finds his family, alive but in suspended animation and miniaturized, in the
molding of a picture frame. He’s able to bring them back not only to life but
to normal size via a cake with a label, “Eat Me” (ya remember the cake? The drink labeled “Drink Me” which shrunk Alice,
and the cake labeled “Eat Me” that expanded her again, were both in Lewis
Carroll’s first book and Tim Burton’s first Alice movie, but bringing the cake back this way did have a certain degree of charm), though they seem so
dull and oppressive one wonders why the Mad Hatter wanted them back. (Then again, traumatic relationships with
their parents are a specialty of Tim Burton’s leading characters; remember the
odd backstory he gave Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, filling out the character from
what Roald Dahl had written and making Wonka’s father a crazy dentist who not
only forbade his son any
chocolate but encased him in a helmet-like tooth brace which Tim Burton said
was something like the one his real-life father had made him where when he was
a kid.) In the end Alice says a sad farewell to the Mad Hatter and returns to
Britain (a scene very reminiscent
of the ending of the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz — the Burton-Woolverton conception of Alice
in Wonderland is very much influenced by Wizard, not only in giving her these tearful farewells but
also in making Alice a far more assertive and self-actualizing character than
Lewis Carroll did), where her mom reneges on the deal she made with Hamish and
risks eviction to keep the Wonder
in the family so Alice can captain her in another voyage.
Alice
Through the Looking Glass has enough charming
moments it can’t be dismissed completely, but it’s a weird fantasy indeed in
which the opening and closing framing scenes set in the normal world seem far
more moving and dramatically coherent than the fantastic bulk of the film.
Besides, Woolverton makes one of the basic mistakes of fantasy writers: because
she’s dealing with a genre in
which anything can happen, she
makes anything she can think of happen whether or not it makes any sense or
follows the internal logic of her story. Tim Burton didn’t personally direct Alice
Through the Looking Glass — someone named
James Bobin did, though Burton is listed as one of the producers and he’s
clearly the auteur (and Bobin’s
chief qualification for the job of directing this movie seems to have been that
he’d worked with Sasha Baron Cohen before on his TV series Da Ali G
Show) — but the problem with this movie
isn’t that Tim Burton didn’t direct it, it’s that Linda Woolverton did but brought far less imagination to creating her
original story than she had in adapting Lewis Carroll for the first film. There
are a lot of scenes here that achieve some of the charm of the earlier movie —
notably the one in which Humpty Dumpty (Wally Wingert) gets knocked off his
perch and realizes as he’s in free fall, “Oh no, not again” (though even here Wingert is up against the
competition of W. C. Fields’ marvelous and incomparable voicing of Humpty
Dumpty in Paramount’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland film) — but on the whole this is a disappointment,
especially since the first Tim Burton Alice was so good. It was a disappointment at the box
office, too, though according to imdb.com the poor returns were attributed to
Johnny Depp going through an unpleasant and well-covered divorce from Amber
Heard — though I suspect word got around that it simply wasn’t that good a movie and was a far cry from its predecessor.
I should mention that Alice Through the Looking Glass is a “doubles” movie since it features two actors
who’ve played Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, Rhys Ifans (Zanik Hightopp) in
the TV series Elementary and
Stephen Fry (who voiced the Cheshire Cat) in Sherlock Holmes: A Game
of Shadows (the 2012 sequel to the first
Holmes film starring Robert Downey, Jr.).
