[REVIEW] Alice in Wonderland
Mar. 8th, 2010 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldA few hours after I watched Alice in Wonderland with Jerry last night, I Twittered that "Tim Burton is the Neil Gaiman of film," and that I wasn't quite sure whether that's a good thing. Gaiman and Burton have each gained their fame through their reimagining of the fairy tales and fantasies we've grown up with as children into satisfying adult narratives, slightly shabby and subtly dangerous stories as grounded with the lives of the stories' readers as the readers can bear. Burton's visual universe is amazing, leaving me feeling authentically disoriented, the actors do their jobs well (Mia Wasikowska holds the film together wonderfully, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter do their patent crazy as well as they always do, and Anne Hathaway's polite but edged spaciness is a pleasure), and I left feeling satisfied and willing to grant the movie a seven or even eight out of ten, but there was still something lacking.
Burton transformed the Alice of Wonderland stories, collections of events in sequences without necessarily much wider meaning, into an epic story of the young adult Alice's self-determination. She became her own person in Underland, regaining her muchness, but once she slew the Jabberwocky and saved the land where else could the story have gone? The movie couldn't have ended so abruptly, Alice couldn't cheat and stay in her new alternate realm, but she couldn't return to the 19th century world where a perfect bore was waiting to marry her as Society watched and sta her own person. The ending, featuring her travelling into the East to extended her father's trading network into China (to push opium?) was a cheat. It's the least bad outcome of the plot, yes, but it's no more satisfying for all that.
Burton transformed the Alice of Wonderland stories, collections of events in sequences without necessarily much wider meaning, into an epic story of the young adult Alice's self-determination. She became her own person in Underland, regaining her muchness, but once she slew the Jabberwocky and saved the land where else could the story have gone? The movie couldn't have ended so abruptly, Alice couldn't cheat and stay in her new alternate realm, but she couldn't return to the 19th century world where a perfect bore was waiting to marry her as Society watched and sta her own person. The ending, featuring her travelling into the East to extended her father's trading network into China (to push opium?) was a cheat. It's the least bad outcome of the plot, yes, but it's no more satisfying for all that.
