Movie Review: Alice in Wonderland

Any “Alice in Wonderland” that gives top billing to the Mad Hatter must be as unbalanced as the Hatter himself. So it is with the version directed by Tim Burton, which updates Lewis Carroll’s story by 13 years but mainly gives Burton a chance to explore his three biggest obsessions.

The first is spooky visual splendor, supplied by the baroque production designs of Robert Stromberg (“Avatar”) and darkly psychedelic palette of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (all of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies). The special effects are variable and most impressive on a smaller scale, but the picture always looks sumptuous.

The second is a fascination with Johnny Depp, who’s collaborating with the director for the seventh time. Burton and writer Linda Woolverton have made The Hatter a tormented character, who’s a genius at making headpieces but whose own head is metaphorically in pieces. He finds sanity in saving his homeland and, as far as I can tell, may be destined to love the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, freakishly made up to resemble Burton’s ex, Lisa Marie).

The third is the story Burton has made again and again over two decades: A lonely person, alienated from parents and society, discovers an unexpected talent and asserts independence through it.

In this case, heroine Alice (Mia Wasikowska) decides to slay the Jabberwocky, an enormous and fearsome dragon-thing controlled by the shrieking, huge-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s current squeeze; the movie is a sexual therapist’s dream).

The story takes place in Underland, which makes nonsense of the title. The girl has lost the father who encouraged her to dream, and her society-mad mother has made a nightmare of the present by arranging an engagement to a rich twit.

The 19-year-old Alice flees a party, flops down the rabbit hole again, does the usual drink-me-eat-me routine to change her size and ends up re-meeting characters she had forgotten: the hookah-puffing caterpillar (Alan Rickman), the Tweedle brothers (Matt Lucas), the nervous White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), those saintly and sinister queens, and the one-eyed Knave of Hearts, who is the Red Queen’s hit man (Crispin Glover, inexplicably not overacting where it would be welcome).

From there, the plot becomes the usual teen quest for self at the center of so many studio offerings these days.

Soon Alice is rejecting preconceptions that define her – “I make the path!” – and seeking the vorpal sword that will go snicker-snack and lop off Jabberwocky’s head. (Did no one re-read Carroll? His poem is titled “Jabberwocky”; the beast is the Jabberwock.) By the time this fatal meeting takes place, the script has become a knockoff of five dozen film and literary fantasies.

In a sense, Burton and Woolverton are prisoners of Carroll’s great novels. (“Jabberwocky” is in “Through the Looking-Glass,” the even better sequel to “Wonderland.”)

The Jabberwock looks just as it does in John Tenniel’s classic illustration for the original book; the Red Queen’s henchmen are still shaped like playing cards; she hunts again for stolen tarts and plays croquet with a flamingo and a hedgehog. The March Hare is on hand only because we can’t imagine the Hatter acting without him.

Yet the filmmakers have abandoned the complexity of those books, which were not just coming-of-age stories but political allegories, social satires and a depiction of existence as a vast chess game, in which pawns can gain power and prestige through labor.

Where Carroll was providing young readers with subtle lessons about life, Burton is content to skate through familiar thematic territory and dazzle us with appearances. The film is always fun, but as Carroll might have observed, it’s not much of a muchness.