Alice in Wonderland: A Burtonesque Twist
A clash of two prominent authors didn’t lead to disaster, but it didn’t exactly delight either.
This is a reimagining of Carroll’s tale about Alice: the heroine returns to Wonderland, experiences new adventures, and ultimately battles the forces of evil.
Alice is no longer a girl, but a grown-up young lady. From time to time, she is tormented by vague memories of a childhood adventure, the details of which have slipped from her memory. On the eve of her engagement to an unpleasant young man, she sees the White Rabbit, chases after him, falls down the hole, and is forced to remember everything. Both the magical land (not Wonderland, as she thought she heard as a child, but Underland – an underground world), and the Red Queen, who has become completely unbridled and a ruthless satrap, and her sister, the White Queen, embodying a somewhat frightening good. As well as the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse, delivering angry speeches in a forest kitchen about the bloody regime, the Jabberwocky, the Bandersnatch, and a suffering dog that has faded so much from memory that even Lewis Carroll’s book doesn’t mention it.
The Unnecessary Adaptation?
By and large, “Alice…” doesn’t need an adaptation at all (although it has undergone countless ones). The book itself seems to project images directly into the reader’s brain. But Hollywood, consumed by an eternal plot hunger, decided to try to turn the text inside out and see – maybe there will be something fresh and marketable inside? Tim Burton, an outstanding storyteller and specialist in soft macabre, took on the new content of the box labeled “Alice”.
He masters Carroll’s world confidently, as if furnishing a new apartment with familiar furniture. From the original text, the director immediately snatches his favorite motif – a severed throat (remember “Sleepy Hollow”, “Sweeney Todd…” and Pierce Brosnan with Sarah Jessica Parker in “Mars Attacks”). Therefore, the Red Queen is destined to become the brightest participant in the performance, obsessed with the desire to chop off heads: her fortress moat is filled to the brim with the results of this almost conveyor-belt production, and in the castle, axes with heart-shaped blades are found at every turn. But besides the heads lying around, the film has another sign of the author’s style. It has long been clear that for Burton, Johnny Depp is not even an actor in the usual sense of the word, but rather a favorite doll that can be dressed in new costumes and, conveying different frozen facial expressions, placed inside any guignol.
Depp as a Living Doll
In “Alice…” the idea is brought to perfection: Depp doesn’t look like a human at all and walks around with one crazy look throughout the film. If you’ve seen the promotional poster, you’ve seen his entire, huge, by the way, role (the Hatter, who occupied several pages in the book, becomes almost the main character). A lot of claims can be made against the script written by Linda Woolverton. The key one is that she is not Lewis Carroll and she clearly has nothing to equal him with. Dramaturgical amateur performance (dogs, the fight against the bloody regime, Alice’s complex relationship with the Bandersnatch) very quickly begins to annoy. But then Burton intervenes, able to save the situation even in the proposed circumstances.
Carefully selecting actresses (Wasikowska, Bonham Carter and Hathaway are beautiful), drawing details and demonstrating familiarity with the work of Paolo Uccello (an Italian Renaissance artist who actually painted the climactic battle with the Jabberwocky for him), he ultimately gets an insanely beautiful film. Well, or at least a set of postcards with a non-standard vision of Lewis Carroll’s characters.