Wonderland tumults
In a bizarre cinematic fable, Alice goes on dizzying science fiction voyages through time, and learns that the past cannot be changed
Now Burton and Depp return to weirdness and a bizarre cinematic fable. Their stars are waning.
The director of this excursion is Bobin, but he has learnt from Burton and Depp and woven in visions that could have sprung from the recent science fiction film Interstellar. What Carroll wrote they take as a flimsy platform for huge imaginative leaps.
Science fiction in Wonderland? Sure. The books are founded on fantasy — Alice’s dreams — but here the teen (Wasikowska) returns to the strange land via a mirror, where she finds the Mad Hatter (an understandably gloomy Depp) at death’s door. An aural glimpse of the hookah-puffing caterpillar (voiced by Rickman) gives the game away, but we re-encounter the Red Queen (Bonham Carter) screeching as normal (“Off with their heads!”) and, far more prominently, a White Queen (Hathaway), who symbolises goodness at the end of the mission — the chess structure of Carroll’s original is cut.
The whirling tumults to which Alice is subjected are her travels through time. Time himself (Baron Cohen) presides over the colossal clockwork engine that drives the world, and Alice steals from him a key component, to journey into the past, change it, and rescue the Hatter from pale extinction. In these dizzying voyages, time is represented by vast waves and mind-bending curves. Alice learns that the past cannot be changed; we must all die, and Time is not so much a monster as a mentor.
There are indeed monsters, courtesy of computer magic. The conjoined twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by Lucas) mesh well with other devilish conceptions — little mechanical beings and others, many voiced by Fry, Sheen and Spall.
Ifans has a quasi-romantic role. Alice has a “normal” mother (Duncan) but her role is to embody a savage Victorianism that would keep Alice from learning from her travails to step out into the real world and become (as in the first Alice) the captain of a ship — a peculiar choice for a woman of her time, but modernist. The mother learns, in turn, from Alice.
The underground issue of Bobin’s and Burton’s film is that we will never know on which side of the mirror we truly are. Menace is always lurking and only braveness (womanly courage) will break Alice free of the obnoxious men who cluster around her, besotted with their own superiority and scornful of her ventures into the-world-asit-is, or her private Wonderland made universal by visions and lessons. This underworld (freedom for women) will bypass most children who see the movie. But it’s there, a consequence of adulthood. (“We only have one family.”)
Alice is now tiny, now huge as her body shrinks and swells, a physical fate that might even have been in Carroll’s mysterious mind. Little girls grow up.