Screen Machine

Review: Alice in Wonderland

Watching Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, I was enjoying it, for the most part. But afterwards, trying to decide on an opinion, I realised that I hadn’t actually liked it but could not pinpoint why.  With such a fantastic imagination, why couldn’t Burton get it right? My simple answer: Disney.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an embrace of the marvellous. Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion adaptation Alice (1988) successfully translated the mood of the story, its juncture between reality and animation creating a surreal sense of the uncanny. Although Burton’s general filmmaking style does embrace the marvellous, he falls short in this latest attempt. Stating that he wanted to make the film “feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events,” Burton succeeded, but at the same time removed all the spontaneity and whimsy from Wonderland and from many of its creatures. I don’t think this was only because it destroyed people’s expectations of what the film should have been like but because, as a simple “journey” of a bored Victorian girl, it is a pretty boring story. If the adventurousness that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) discovers in Wonderland can only result in an expansion of trade to China – which in the end is all it really comes to – then there would seem to be something very limited to this discovery.

One of the biggest problems with Burton’s interpretation of this world is that Alice is a very dull character. Throughout the entire film she tries to convince herself that she is in a dream and will soon wake up from all the madness, and when she embraces the bizarre at the film’s end it is all too late. Spending the entire film denying herself the suspension of disbelief, she starts to drill a horrible disbelief into the minds of the audience; its potential wonderment is drained out of it.

Whether this is the fault of the director’s view or that of the distribution studio, I don’t know. But given Burton’s track record of fabulously surreal Astroturf lawns and miniature graveyards, I would say that Disney most likely placed a few limiting standards on how “adventurous” the film could be. Disney must certainly be to blame for the boring run-of-the-mill battle scene at the film’s climax. Dressed in armour, looking all too conventionally girl-power, Alice fights the Jabberwocky in an unnecessarily extended scene (because we know she’s going to win anyway), while the red and white armies battle each other in the background. As though perhaps trying to reach the scale of the Lord of the Rings saga, this scene feels as though it was quickly tacked on as a studio requirement: none of Burton’s quirky passion comes through at all. Even if the aim of this scene was to convey the metaphorical battle that Alice fights with the conservatives, its literal realisation destroys a certain fantasy element. At least, if I was feeling unexcited by this point, Burton certainly seems to have felt the same way.

In Švankmajer’s film, Alice tells the spectator, “you must close your eyes, otherwise you won’t see anything.” This Wonderland is a world of paradoxes, and as Alice accepts this, the spectator can too. Burton’s Alice does not share her sentiment. If I ignore Alice’s denial of the fantastic throughout, Alice in Wonderland is not a terrible film. It certainly looks quite nice, and the voice of Alan Rickman has the potential to make anything great. The main disappointment is the elimination of imagination in a cineworld that could, and should, so easily embrace it.

Eloise is a graduate of cinema studies from the University of Melbourne. She is interested in world cinema and in Hollywood cinema of the classical period, particularly film noir. Eloise is a member of the Melbourne Cinematheque Committee.

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