Complaining about the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland
In addition to continuing to complain about the NBC Dracula, I watched the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, which I had been carefully avoiding for the past three years. Alice is very dear to me, and Burton’s Sweeney Todd made me very angry, so I didn’t want anything to do with it. However, as we know, I have a thing for adaptations of stories I love, I could only resist so long.
It could have been worse, I suppose. Mia Wasikowska was lovely, if not all that much like my conception of Alice (that isn’t so much coming out of Wasikowska’s performance as the script, I think - I don’t read Alice as a renegade anti-victorian, which seemed to be how she was written). At times I liked the odd logic of it, Alice constantly changing sizes as she does in the book, the Hatter stuffing her in the teapot.
The film cut out most of my favorite characters - Bill the Lizard, the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon (why does everyone cut out the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon?). Depp irritated me a great deal. Helena Bonham Carter, who I often like, was boring here - she did a more watered-down version of Miranda Richardson’s Queen of Hearts in the Hallmark Alice a decade ago. I hate the ubiquitous meshing together of Wonderland and Looking-Glass, when they have their own worlds and their own internal logic and their own themes. A lot of the gags were inane; the self-conscious darkness drew far too much on previous adaptations.
But, more fundamentally, I think Burton and Woolverton missed some things that are at the heart of the books and thus the film, while entertaining, really doesn’t feel like an Alice adaptation to me.
Burton’s Alice is a story of good against evil, with fearsome monsters, tyrants being opposed by noble rulers, and a heroic, idealistic young heroine who sets out at the end to travel the world and be a visionary (in some very colonialist ways, I might add).
Carroll’s Alice is not. Carroll’s books are adamantly opposed to moralism - everyone in them is absurd and petty, sometimes senselessly cruel and sometimes surprisingly kind. The Duchess is abusive and mean and horrid when we first meet her and then suddenly friendly and sugary. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare are rude and inconsiderate but very often right, and Alice is rude right back at them. Even the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, whose chapter is the gentlest in the book, have their moments of harshness.
There aren’t any rules to this; you can’t determine how someone is going to treat you based on their allegiance to one ruler or another. In Through the Looking-Glass, though characters do belong to either the red or white armies, there is nothing to choose between the two (true, the Red Queen may be more severe than the White Queen, but she is also more helpful), and when it comes to Alice being made a Queen herself, both sides are happy to band together to be alternately welcoming and exclusionary. Carroll makes a strong point of this, especially in Looking-Glass - Alice tries to find a good guy and a villain in “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” but upon faced with the respective selfishnesses of both the characters, she eventually must conclude that they both are quite unpleasant.
In a lot of ways, it’s like life.
But it certainly isn’t Wizard of Oz, isn’t a good witch and a bad witch and a heart-warming moral where we get to go home having learned our lesson. People may like to conflate Baum and Carroll, but in this, and in many other respects, they are very far apart.
Sentimentalizing Alice in an adaption is nothing new, of course - the only version I can think of which doesn’t do it is the Jonathan Miller film, which plays it all as a dreamy victorian fantasia about the oddity of the adult world through a a child’s eyes. But, in most of them, it feels rather tacked on - in the Hallmark film, the characters speak their lines from the book and then awkwardly shift to messages of self-empowerment at the end of their scenes; in the original Disney film, scenes would be zany and weird and then Alice would suddenly become homesick and sing a sentimental ballad. But, the Burton film, in trying to make the story epic and exciting, twisted the original tone of the book much further than those others did.
I find it ironic that while Burton’s film is so self-consciously a darker and edgier version of Alice, the messages that it endorses are ultimately so much more sentimental and cliche than those of the original.
It could have been worse, I suppose. Mia Wasikowska was lovely, if not all that much like my conception of Alice (that isn’t so much coming out of Wasikowska’s performance as the script, I think - I don’t read Alice as a renegade anti-victorian, which seemed to be how she was written). At times I liked the odd logic of it, Alice constantly changing sizes as she does in the book, the Hatter stuffing her in the teapot.
The film cut out most of my favorite characters - Bill the Lizard, the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon (why does everyone cut out the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon?). Depp irritated me a great deal. Helena Bonham Carter, who I often like, was boring here - she did a more watered-down version of Miranda Richardson’s Queen of Hearts in the Hallmark Alice a decade ago. I hate the ubiquitous meshing together of Wonderland and Looking-Glass, when they have their own worlds and their own internal logic and their own themes. A lot of the gags were inane; the self-conscious darkness drew far too much on previous adaptations.
But, more fundamentally, I think Burton and Woolverton missed some things that are at the heart of the books and thus the film, while entertaining, really doesn’t feel like an Alice adaptation to me.
Burton’s Alice is a story of good against evil, with fearsome monsters, tyrants being opposed by noble rulers, and a heroic, idealistic young heroine who sets out at the end to travel the world and be a visionary (in some very colonialist ways, I might add).
Carroll’s Alice is not. Carroll’s books are adamantly opposed to moralism - everyone in them is absurd and petty, sometimes senselessly cruel and sometimes surprisingly kind. The Duchess is abusive and mean and horrid when we first meet her and then suddenly friendly and sugary. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare are rude and inconsiderate but very often right, and Alice is rude right back at them. Even the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, whose chapter is the gentlest in the book, have their moments of harshness.
There aren’t any rules to this; you can’t determine how someone is going to treat you based on their allegiance to one ruler or another. In Through the Looking-Glass, though characters do belong to either the red or white armies, there is nothing to choose between the two (true, the Red Queen may be more severe than the White Queen, but she is also more helpful), and when it comes to Alice being made a Queen herself, both sides are happy to band together to be alternately welcoming and exclusionary. Carroll makes a strong point of this, especially in Looking-Glass - Alice tries to find a good guy and a villain in “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” but upon faced with the respective selfishnesses of both the characters, she eventually must conclude that they both are quite unpleasant.
In a lot of ways, it’s like life.
But it certainly isn’t Wizard of Oz, isn’t a good witch and a bad witch and a heart-warming moral where we get to go home having learned our lesson. People may like to conflate Baum and Carroll, but in this, and in many other respects, they are very far apart.
Sentimentalizing Alice in an adaption is nothing new, of course - the only version I can think of which doesn’t do it is the Jonathan Miller film, which plays it all as a dreamy victorian fantasia about the oddity of the adult world through a a child’s eyes. But, in most of them, it feels rather tacked on - in the Hallmark film, the characters speak their lines from the book and then awkwardly shift to messages of self-empowerment at the end of their scenes; in the original Disney film, scenes would be zany and weird and then Alice would suddenly become homesick and sing a sentimental ballad. But, the Burton film, in trying to make the story epic and exciting, twisted the original tone of the book much further than those others did.
I find it ironic that while Burton’s film is so self-consciously a darker and edgier version of Alice, the messages that it endorses are ultimately so much more sentimental and cliche than those of the original.