Underwhelming Underworld

On the face of it, Tim Burton would seem to be the ideal filmmaker to tackle a big-budget spin on Lewis Carroll's beloved stories. The director's body of work (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman, etc.) features some of the most imaginative and macabre characters in modern cinema. But Burton's singular vision is diluted in this collaboration with screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King), and the resulting film is a big, pretty bore.    

Woolverton's plot centers on a return visit to "Underworld" by a 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska). We pick up with our heroine at a Victorian garden party organized in honor of the seemingly foregone conclusion that she will accept a proposal of marriage from an unctuous aristocrat. When she's put on the spot, however, the willful girl bolts. She follows the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen) down a rabbit hole/portal that transports her to a land of fantastical madmen and kaleidoscopic wonderment.

The characters she encounters will be familiar to most moviegoers. There's the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and a host of other now-archetypal creatures.

While the characters are lifted straight from Carroll, the storyline is not. Burton's stated aim regarding his desire to fashion a film that is "more of a story" than a "series of events" was evidently an error of judgment. The themes at work - coming of age, gender equality, self-empowerment - are admirable. But Alice's quest (a hero's journey that ends with her dressed in a suit of armor, battling a dragon, with the fate of Underworld hanging in the balance) is a massive deviation from the spirit of the original source material. The episodic nature of Carroll's stories imbues them with a level of surrealism that cannot be matched by all the imaginative makeup and artful animation at Burton's disposal.  

The film may be the fruit of a misbegotten marriage between Disney and the mind that cooked up Pee-wee's Big Adventure, but the aesthetic is all Burton. From the dark, twisted, cylindrical tree limbs and profusion of physical decay and perversion to the luminosity of his heroine and the score by longtime collaborator Danny Elfman, the spectacle, such as it is, bears Burton's unmistakable mark.

The cast is graced with Burton regulars, as well. Depp and Bonham Carter (Burton's partner) stand out, as usual, with remarkable and amusing performances. Wasikowska is well-cast in the lead, lending an evocative combination of youthful naiveté and precocious knowingness that works perfectly as a modern conception of Alice. Of the remaining cast, only Anne Hathaway is exceptionally poor as the White Queen. The actress claims to have attempted to add a touch of "punk-rock, vegan pacifist" to the role - an artistic aim as absurd as it is inappropriate - and her ashen monarch is a graceless mess.

The flights of fancy emanating from Burton's imagination are always at least passably entertaining. Such is the case with Alice in Wonderland, but, sadly, the emphasis must be on "passably." It's curious that the meeting of two minds as idiosyncratic as Burton and Carroll's would largely result in tediousness and excess. It may be yet another object lesson in the often negative effects of letting the folks at Disney in on the action, or it could be that Burton simply needs some fresh - rather than time-honored - material to work from.

In any case, if you're a fan of Alice, you'd do better to return to the books.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com