Is she the 19 year old rebel played by Mia Wasikowska in this weekend’s 3-D Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton? Or the insane character of America McGee’s video game Alice? Or the martial arts instructor of a recent Syfy channel adaptation?
In fact, she’s all those people and more.
Originally written in 1865 by Lewis Carroll, the little girl who found a world of wonder down the rabbit hole, has become one of the more enduring and malleable characters of literature and film.
“The books are a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which people project their own ideas,” says The Mystery of Lewis Carroll author Jenny Woolf.
Alice first got the big screen treatment in 1903 in a 12-minute silent version featuring rudimentary special effects of the hero changing sizes. Played by Mabel Clark, (who was also employed on the set as a “help-out girl,” making costumes and running errands), the look of this traditional retelling closely resembles the book’s original illustrations. Out of print for many years, it’s now available as a DVD extra on the recent reissue of the 1966 Alice starring Peter Sellers.
The Sellers version, a made-for-BBC television movie, is as mad as a hatter. Director Jonathan Miller sought to boil the production down to the essentials, to dispense with the “japing and game play” of earlier versions. To that end none of the strange creatures Alice meets along the way are played by actors in animal costumes. This approach could have fallen flat, but when you have actors like John Gielgud and Peter Cook accentuating the wonderful dialogue rather than the flashy production design, it works. Add a trippy soundtrack by Ravi Shankar and some veiled drug references and you get a film that could only have been made at the height of the Swingin’ Sixties.
It’s hard to know what Alice Liddell, the young girl who inspired the movie would have thought of any of the wild and wacky versions of the story, but we do know she enjoyed the 1933 Paramount version.
“I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted,” she told the New York Times. “Alice is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!”
I wonder if Tim Burton has a monkey butler at home. I ask this because I think anyone who can come up with the kind of flights of fancy he puts on screen probably has a monkey butler and other strange and wonderful things kicking around the house to feed his imagination. His latest film, a retelling of “Alice in Wonderland,” benefits from his rich visual style.
Using the original Lewis Carroll stories as a stepping stone, in this reimagined version of the classic tale Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) is 19 years old. She’s a dreamer in a world of pragmatists who, on the advice of her late father, tries to imagine six impossible things before breakfast each day. This sets her at odds with almost everyone, including her family who think marrying her off to the churlish and haughty Lord Hamish will settle her down. At their engagement party she flees his very public proposal, disappearing into the garden and falling down a rabbit hole into Underland. It’s her second trip to the place she calls Wonderland. Ten years previous she been there but has no memory of it. On this visit she meets an odd assortment of characters including the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Absolem, the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the strangest one of all, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). They convince her she needs to help them overthrow the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) by slaying the terrifying Jabberwock (Christopher Lee).
Burton has always made films about outsiders—think Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood Jr. and Willy Wonka—and in Alice he has found another one to focus his camera on. As a headstrong young woman who doesn’t quite fit the mold of Victorian England she a perfect character for Burton. Like his most famous characters she lives in a world of dreams but unlike his best realized characters she isn’t nearly as interesting. As a result, despite the beautiful visuals and the eye popping 3-D, “Alice in Wonderland” is a bit of a flat line.
Sadly much of the problem lies with Wasikowska. She is delicately beautiful in a way that would very likely leave Lewis Carroll weak in the knees and after her stint on the television show “In Treatment,” we know she can act, but she rarely looks really engaged with the character. Perhaps it is that she spent the entire time acting against a green screen and didn’t get to actually interact with her co-stars very often, but she’s a little too low key to be at the center of a large, fanciful film.
It’s not a complete wash, however. Burton overloads the screen with eccentric and interesting visuals and has succeeded in creating a dream-like version of “Alice in Wonderland.” Unfortunately, like most dreams, when it’s over it’s quickly forgotten.
