Adventures in slumberland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has already inspired a pair of probing films, each delicious in its own way - the Dennis Potter-scripted Dreamchild (1985) and Jan Švankmajer's herky-jerky Alice (1988) - so perhaps it's greedy to expect another film-maker to conjure miracles from the same text. Even so, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, needlessly shot in 3-D, is a crushing disappointment. It exposes the director at his lowest ebb, artistically speaking, since the double non-whammy of Planet of the Apes and Big Fish at the start of the Noughties. An apparent wealth of funds and technology has resulted in a fantasy drained of the fantastic; the wonder is how so little of what makes this director special could have reached the screen. Only a fool would go to a Tim Burton film for elegantly tailored storytelling, but now even the visuals are off-the-peg.
Linda Woolverton's sketchy screenplay sends the 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) tumbling back down the rabbit hole of her childhood dreams. Once in "Underland", there is some confusion over whether she is the same Alice, the "right" Alice. Her validity is called into question, as is her certainty that everyone is merely a walk-on in her dream.
The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) realises with muted alarm that, if this were the case, then he would be a figment of her imagination. It is a measure of Depp's mastery of nuance that he can still transmit, from beneath a vomit-orange fright wig, mime-white face powder and prised-wide eyes, the Hatter's fear at the thought of his own extinction.
Besides the prospect that he may not exist, the Hatter has to contend with the cruelty of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), whose head - digitally engorged so that it appears to totter on her puny shoulders - is swollen with sadism and paranoia. When the Hatter is angered, he becomes demonstrably Scottish, which should be taken as a sign of Depp's facility with accents, rather than a slight against a nation, or a prime minister. When the Queen is vexed, her face reddens in the time-honoured Looney Tunes style and she reaches for a catchphrase ("Off with his head!") that ameliorates all woes.
But the menace is missing, and not just from Bonham Carter. Crispin Glover (who did an eerily good send-up of Depp's Willy Wonka in the dire Epic Movie) pops up in a heart-shaped eyepatch as the Knave, and delivers the sleaziest line. "I like you," he pants at the statuesque Alice. "I like largeness." But as with Matt Lucas, who is given embarrassingly little to do as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Glover is nothing more than garnish.
It must have been an awareness of the material's thinness that led the film-makers to graft another Lewis Carroll text on to the body of the movie: the Hatter recites part of "Jabberwocky" as the fearsome creature rears its head during a climax that feels more like a tailing-off. Upon arriving, Alice is told she has to slay the Jabberwocky, either to defeat the Red Queen or because it is written in the ancient runes that if you want boys in the audience you need dragons (see Enchanted). An assurance from the Blue Caterpillar (voiced by Alan Rickman) that "the sword knows what it wants - all you have to do is hold on to it" drains away any residual traces of excitement, leaving Alice as a courier in her own adventure.
This air of resignation lies heavy on the film. Part of the problem is that a director as textured and tactile as Burton once was can only be neutralised by the digital revolution. In his early films, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, the monsters were sculpted from gaily coloured clay, and rendered in twitchy stop-motion. I'm not being a Luddite when I say that the sleek Photoshop gloss of the effects in Alice in Wonderland represents a backward leap, just as the synthetic blue-screen sets create an airlessness more readily associated with George Lucas.
Charitable viewers may speculate that the plainness is intentional, signifying that Alice's once-jubilant fantasies have fallen into disrepair. If so, then Burton never got around to telling his composer, Danny Elfman, whose score might have been rejected by Cecil B DeMille for being a tad overwrought.
