Two children's classics whose hallucinatory mixture of exhilaration and dread has perhaps been most compellingly evinced by a Jefferson Airplane song and a Tom Petty video, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are tricky cinematic source material. The 1951 Disney animated feature never quite reached the canonical status of a Cinderella or Snow White; Lewis Carroll's iconoclastic heroine seemed to resist the plangent, embalming tones of such fare, despite having her own coterie of talking animals and fatalistic queens. What she didn't have was a prince, which curiously enough is the first thing Tim Burton, in his hybridic update, gives her. It's a conventional tweak that doesn't bode well for an adaptation of a tale as idiosyncratic as Alice, which requires descendants to inhabit its spirit of invention in an organic and yet equally singular way.
In fact, Alice's prince is no prince at all but a Lord, and one of distinctly unprincely countenance. Having vexed her mother with her lack of either stockings or a corset and sporting the prettiest of frowns, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is unconstrained and distinctly out of place at the garden gala they attend. Burton gives the gathering and its powdered guests an almost blown out, blindingly white quality that will contrast with the rich gloom of the underworld to come. When she realizes the party is an engagement ambush -- a nostrilly prig named Hamish (Leo Bill) has deigned to ask for her hand -- Alice, distracted throughout by visions of a white bunny cavorting through the grounds, leaves her suitor hanging and heads straight for the rabbit hole.
Alice's chatty observances have marked her in polite society as impertinent, and at 19 (combining elements of both Carroll stories, Burton has aged the heroine up) she is painfully in-between on a number of levels. It's a predicament highlighted in her first trial in Underland, where she trustingly drinks a potion that makes her 10 feet tall, then nibbles a cake that shrinks her down to a quill. Bodily fluctuations, personal sovereignty, and questions of identity figure prominently in what becomes a painfully explicit adventure in self-actualization. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton's (Beauty and the Beast) insistent narrative overlay organizes Carroll's unruly interplay of themes, symbols, semiotics, and subversive fiddle-faddle to the point of defeat. Every bit of havoc and nonesuch is put in service of the story of Alice's feminist awakening, and it's about as exciting as it sounds.
"You've lost your much-ness, Alice," the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) tells her. "You were much more much-ier -- something's missing, you're not the same." His remembrance of her as a young girl is a nod toward what has been called the Ophelia complex, where headstrong young girls lose their nerve in adolescence. The problem is the script's gestures toward this idea -- as with Depp's gestures toward eccentricity, which in this case involve lime green contacts, swerving accents, and yet more Burtonian greasepaint -- amount to little more than that.
Lured to Underland so that she might slay the Jabberwocky (here a seeming MacGuffin that probably should have stayed that way) and wrest power from the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) back to the White (Anne Hathaway), Alice's "adventure" has all the surprise and delight of an Amtrak shuttle to Albany. The connection between the Jabberwocky and the Red Queen's power is little understood -- a problem for a script that insists on logical terms and progressions -- as is Alice's struggle to reconcile what is expected of her (her fate, as she is reminded over and over, has been foretold) and what she actually wants to do.
These complaints are allayed here and there by the visual and performative pleasures of Burton's Alice, a 3-D affair that takes place almost exclusively on CGI turf. Underland looks and feels as airless as it is, and Burton uses the dank, claustrophobic aesthetic to an interesting effect: particularly for a young woman like Alice, dreams can be a place of danger; they may also be where you face your clammiest fears. Bonham Carter is delectable as the wicked, capricious Red Queen: her every deranged gesture (her head is inflated on her body into a kind of bloated heart) and inspired line reading ("Use the curtains if you must but cloth this enormous girl!" she trills) bring the film as close as it will get to a reanimating spirit of pure, unhinged conviction.
Wasikowska, such a riveting presence on In Treatment, struggles a little with Alice's opacity but interacts charmingly with the host of creatures eager for her ear. Despite her tousled hair and shoulder-skimming garb, this is a sexless Alice, one who treats her would-be fiancé and the leering Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) with the same oblivious affect. Her moment of triumph in fact finds her in a Knight's armor; her revelation involves not a husband but the promise of hard work. And yet for all its forward thinking, this Alice feels suspended in Disney's marquee aspic. "Throw some 3-D in there, that'll make it different!" you can almost hear the executives blare. What the film really needed was a little fifth dimension fun, and a beating heart here on the ground. Tim Burton used to be good at that.