Alice As Bourgeois Revolutionary
Alice As Bourgeois Revolutionary
By now it’s become a truism among film critics that Tim Burton’s misleadingly-titled Alice in Wonderland is the nadir of a decade the director spent making high-budget butcheries of deeply-loved classic films that usually get described as both “visual treats” and “pieces of shit.” Written by Linda Woolverton (of The Lion King fame) with as much hubris as Hamlet 2, Wonderland is both sequel and update of the tale as we know it from Lewis Carroll’s books and the 1951 Disney film, from which it lifts most of its limited charm. The twist: Carroll’s bubbly nonsense world is submitted to a conventionalHollywood fantasy-adventure narrative. Take, for
example, Carroll’s nonsense poem about a boy who slays a “Jabberwock” with his
“vorpal sword” on a “Fabjous day! Calloh! Callay!” In Burton ’s version, all of
these neologisms become real things: their playfully elusive meanings pinned
down as mere fantasy jargon. To compensate for these heresies of
unimaginative thinking, Burton marches out streams of animated characters acting
“crazy” and hopes that layering Johnny Depp in three inches of makeup will
disguise the fact that his Mad Hatter is not that mad after all, just slightly
eccentric and traumatized. When he stares
at Alice with
enormous green Bambi eyes you can’t help but long for the comparatively subtle
gestures of Edward
Scissorhands. This is another reason
the film disappoints: not only does Burton
sabotage characters we love; he reminds us that we used to love his films
too.
Alice emerges from the
rabbit hole confident to turn down Hamish and rebuke her relatives for their
lack of 21st century liberal sensibilities. Then, in an amazingly weird scene that will
certainly seem ironic if you’re reading it without having seen the film, Alice announces to Lord Ascot that the future of English
trade depends on establishing oceanic trade with China , which she then heads up
herself. By killing the Jaberwocky, Alice
the Bourgeois Revolutionary has severed ties with childhood meekness and archaic
feudal values and made the world safe for intrepid female imperialists. This is, of course, nonsense: in Burton ’s Wonderland,
Alice herself ends as a representative of that insane adult world, filling it
with exactly the kind of nonsense Carroll’s Alice would have found ridiculous.
Rover Arts June 2010
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By now it’s become a truism among film critics that Tim Burton’s misleadingly-titled Alice in Wonderland is the nadir of a decade the director spent making high-budget butcheries of deeply-loved classic films that usually get described as both “visual treats” and “pieces of shit.” Written by Linda Woolverton (of The Lion King fame) with as much hubris as Hamlet 2, Wonderland is both sequel and update of the tale as we know it from Lewis Carroll’s books and the 1951 Disney film, from which it lifts most of its limited charm. The twist: Carroll’s bubbly nonsense world is submitted to a conventional
Where Burton ’s film fails most spectacularly is in
its slaughter of the tale’s critique of ideology. Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland stands out from most
works of children’s literature that earnestly try to impart “a moral” to their juvenile
readers. In contrast, Carroll’s fable
sees the young Alice
mystified by the strange Victorian ideology she is supposed to absorb.
She tries to grasp the correct way to behave, but her lessons become muddled in
her dream state and come out as nonsense. Carroll’s nonsense is not just random
weirdness but a garbled version of the common sense of the adult world.
Woolverton’s script is also about
ideology. At the beginning of the film Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19, is
being set up to marry Hamish, a bumbling, unattractive Lord who is far too much
of a utilitarian to understand her eccentricities. Everybody expects her
to accept him because he’s rich and women shouldn’t really think too much
anyway. Alice ,
of course, refuses to follow social convention and runs off chasing a white
rabbit in a waistcoat. We get to feel smug about the advances women have
made from Carroll’s day to ours—if only those Victorians had been smart like
us.
The world down the rabbit hole has been
turned upside down after the assumption to power of the evil, bulbous-headed
Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter). As
opposed to the perfect features of her sister, the sadly-usurped White Queen (Anne
Hathaway), the Red Queen’s physical deformity is a sign of her decadence,
something her sycophantic courtiers encourage as they decorate themselves with
exaggerated ears, chins and codpieces.
When the Queen loses the support of her drone army at the end, one of
her drone soldiers expresses his liberated consciousness by calling her a
“bloody bighead,” as he defects to the side of the Hollywood
hotties. Rather a strange take on
disability from a director who used to champion scissor-handed underdogs and write
poems about oyster boys.
Rover Arts June 2010
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Wow! You certainly didn't like that one. On the other hand, my 7-year-old daughter and I loved it for the simple reason that it was a girl-centred film. Alice declines marriage, slews the jabberwocky and is hired to head a shipping empire. Quite empowering and anti-princess. It's on my list of great films for girls. Heather
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