THE WONDER OF ALICE
The Hatter and co are back in a fantastical adventure, even Lewis Carroll would have approved of
LEWIS Carroll wrote his children’s story Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There, in 1871. But it might as well have been 1971 if you listen to those who like to interpret it as a crazy hallucinogenic trip.
That’s pretty much the line taken by British director James Bobin in Disney’s superior sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 film Alice In Wonderland. It was Burton himself (one of the producers this time) who described Carroll’s stories as like ‘drugs for children’.
Bobin, who gave himself two hard acts to follow with his wonderful feature debut The Muppets ( 2011) and its 2014 follow- up Muppets Most Wanted, seizes the notion and spins it into a CGI- embellished riot of DayGlo colours and fantastical sets.
As the Hatter and the Red Queen, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are again encouraged to give full vent to their innate bonkers-ness, and do so with manifest enthusiasm. If anyone steals the show, though, it is a new addition to the illustrious cast, Sacha Baron Cohen.
He plays the character of Time as a sinister and unhinged Prussian scientist, revelling in laments such as: ‘Will this day
never end? It clings to me like a pair of sweaty pantaloons!’
Mia Wasikowska, at 26, might now be a little old to play Alice, but she again does a fine job as the engagingly spirited Victorian heroine, who in an exhilarating pre-credits sequence, and looking strikingly like Juliet Mills in Carry On Jack, navigates her ship, the Wonder, through treacherous waters back to London.
There she finds that her ghastly, jilted suitor Hamish (Leo Bill) is scheming to humiliate her and her genteel, impoverished mother (Lindsay Duncan). So she steps through the looking glass back into Wonderland, where her old friend Hatter is in a dreadful state, mourning his lost family.
The only way for Alice to help him out of his gloom is to turn back the clock, hence the clash with Baron Cohen’s glowering Teuton, from whom she steals a time-travel device, the chronosphere, and finds out, by the by, why the Red Queen has a historical grievance with her goody- goody sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway).
All this is strange but fun, likely to befuddle and bewilder all but the brightest of the children it is supposedly aimed at, yet chock-full of pleasures for adults. They include a bittersweet one; the late Alan Rickman again gives sonorous voice to the Caterpillar.
Also back in the voice cast are Timothy Spall, Michael Sheen and Stephen Fry, while Matt Lucas has never been better matched with a role than he is as twin weirdos Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
If Lewis Carroll were alive today, I think he would approve. Mind you, from what we read of him he might also have been dragged into Operation Yewtree, but that’s another story.
A GREATER titan of english literature, Jane Austen, is exquisitely served in Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship. This is an adaptation of Austen’s novella Lady Susan that pulls off the near-impossible.
While respectfully doffing its topper to classic Austen bonnets-and-breeches themes — a heaving embonpoint here, a fluttery glance there — it also somehow manages to be gloriously, hilariously original.
Far more so, actually, than another recent film that attempted the same alchemy, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. Kate Beckinsale plays Lady Susan Vernon, recently widowed, very beautiful and utterly, irredeemably devious.
Naturally she is on the hunt for a rich husband, to which end she goes to stay with her in-laws, and plots to ensnare the handsome, guileless Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), younger brother of her sister- in- law Catherine (emma greenwell).
All goes spiffingly until her own innocent daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), turns up out of the blue, having run away from school.
Sensing a potential love rival, Lady Vernon tries to pair Frederica with the eager, buffoonish Sir James Martin ( Tom Bennett, giving an unmissable masterclass of comic timing, and for sheer stupidity eclipsing even the ultimate Regency dolt, Hugh Laurie’s Prince of Wales in Blackadder The Third).
STILLMAN’S
screenplay is a delight, irrepressibly wordy but enormously rewarding to follow. This is his first period drama but in some ways recalls his splendid debut, Metropolitan (1990), which was nothing if not a comedy of manners.
He also reunites Beckinsale with Chloe Sevigny, almost 20 years after they co-starred in his witty drama The Last Days Of Disco.
Sevigny plays Lady Vernon’s sly American accomplice Alicia Johnson — ‘she has none of the uncouthness one normally expects of Americans,’ says Lady V approvingly, having earlier observed: ‘Americans have shown themselves to be a nation of ingrates . . . only by having children can one understand such a dynamic.’
Whether the east Coast sophisticate Stillman is using Alicia to make digs at his own country, or at upper- class english smugness, is unclear. either way, it’s not just his aristocratic characters enjoying a ball. He has one, and so do we.