If you go
“Alice in Wonderland”
3 out of 5 stars
Stars: Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway
Director: Tim Burton
Rated PG for fantasy action/violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar.
Running time: 108 minutes
Certain things aren’t expected in either the Disney brand or the children’s fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland.” But then again Lewis Carroll, the 19th century English author of the habitually reinterpreted “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” never heard of director Tim Burton.
His new version contains gooey body parts: a castle moat full of floating decapitated heads, a jar of amputated fingers, an impaled eyeball. It features a beyond-Mad Hatter — mental institution-deranged, really — played by the planet’s leading middle-aged sex symbol Johnny Depp. And, it typifies the Burton style with its lightly sadistic humor and Goth-influenced, art school chic.
But Carroll purists and parents of small kids should know: This trippy extravaganza preserves the familiar characters but not the story or the innocent sensibilities of the two classic books. It may be called Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.” But it is far from Walt’s easy-to-swallow, 1951 animated film version, maybe the best known of the many previous versions. Still, today’s revisionist adaptation has visuals that could hardly be more imaginative and intricately eye-catching — especially as they are married to state-of-the-art 3D and computer-generated images technologies.
In the Linda Woolverton screenplay, Alice (an unexceptional Mia Wasikowska) is not a dazed child having a fun adventure. She’s a haunted Victorian 19-year-old who escapes down the rabbit hole to avoid an arranged engagement to a stuffy aristocrat. Once in this “underland,” she befriends all the usual suspects: White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the hookah-smoking caterpillar (Alan Rickman), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas), etc. Alice embarks on what turns out to be a “grrrl power” journey to find her identity as an independent woman and the valiance to save her pals by slaying the Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee). The vicious beast is behind the power that the evil Red Queen (a hilarious Helena Bonham Carter) holds over the virtuous White Queen (Anne Hathaway).
In other words, this Alice archetype has been turned into a feminist action hero in a world of estrogen-soaked rivalry. Yikes. Meanwhile, the uninhibited Depp performance — this movie’s marketing hook — is more over-the-top distraction than seamless part of the narrative. Will this great actor just play a regular person in a human drama ever again?
You also have to wonder: Will this “Wonderland” connect emotionally with a wide audience, as it intends, or will it be relegated to the status of stunning-looking oddity?
