DIRECTOR: Tim Burton
CAST: Johnny Depp,Mia Wasikowska,Helena Bonham Carter,Anne Hathaway,Crispin Glover,Michael Sheen,Stephen Fry,Alan Rickman
rating:***
Tim Burton has called his film an attempt to create a framework,an emotional grounding,for Alice to make Alices adventures in Wonderland feel like a story as opposed to a series of events,notwithstanding the fact that it was a small girls dream. Sure,Burtons Alice now has a subtext about chasing ones dreams and about losing ones muchness with age,but whats lost in the process is Wonderland.
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This Burton-Johnny Depp collaboration has none of the anything-is-possible mad flair of the books Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass,which it derives from. Impossible things happen,but they are impossible things as dreamed up by grown-up men with little muchness. It isnt Alices imagination thats driving this film but that of 3-D artists at work in their studios,turning up characters who are different for not what they do,or dont as in the book but how they appear on the big screen. So there are fangs,there are colours,there are leaps,and they end up feeling cardboardish.
For a 19-year-old Alice (Wasikowska) to go down the rabbit hole the second time,the scriptwriters motive is an arranged marriage to a man with weak digestion and a habit of speaking down to her. In the name of emotional grounding,Alice gets to slay Jabberwocky (your regular dragon/dinosaur,the lines keep blurring more and more) her destiny,one that she is afraid to face singlehandedly. In a nod to Depps female fans,his Mad Hatter has a thing for Alice,and she for him. And as for the growing up,Alice comes out of the hole with a one-line plan that hardnosed businessmen snap up,no questions asked.
The one question that one should ask is,Is the film mad enough? Alices father tells her in the opening sequence that madness is not such a bad thing all the best people are mad. Alice is mad for refusing to marry a Lord and chasing rabbits; Hatter and others are mad for helping her take on the Red Queen; she is mad for trying to keep her throne irrespective of how many she executes; and the White Queen is mad for being just the opposite.
But is the film mad enough? No,and thats despite Depp,who is drowned in his crazy make-up; despite Burtons suggestion that Hathaways White Queen drew from the mad glint in the eyes of Nigella Lawson at work on one of her dishes; and despite the visual richness of the film. Except for Stephen Fry as an absolutely inspired choice for the disappearing Cheshire Cat (can you think of anyone else?),and moments of sheer insanity by Carter as the Red Queen,Alice in Wonderland keeps its head firmly on its shoulders and its heart simply out of it.
A passing thought: did the film require a bit of James Cameron?
shalini.langer@expressindia.com
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