Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland arrived in 2010 with a built-in advantage: Lewis Carroll’s world, a cast stacked with Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter, and Disney’s 1951 animated feature standing behind it. The film runs 108 minutes. It is a live-action remake of that 1951 feature, written by Linda Woolverton, and it carries the tagline “You’re invited to a very important date.”
It is also a mess, and the score below reflects that.
Trailer, via Disney UK.
Mia Wasikowska and the Nineteen-Year-Old Alice
The premise is the film’s best idea. Alice Kingsleigh is 19, not a child, and she returns to the world she first entered as a child. Woolverton researched how young women were expected to behave in the Victorian era and then made Alice the opposite. Burton wanted an unknown in the role and got one: Mia Wasikowska, cast in July 2008 after sending an audition tape. She read Carroll’s books as a child and re-read them for the part. Burton said he was looking for someone with “emotional toughness… standing her ground in a way which makes her kind of an older person but with a younger person’s mentality.” Wasikowska delivers that.
The problem is everything around her. The plot sends Alice down a rabbit hole, through a bottle labeled “Drink Me” and a cake labeled “Eat Me,” into Underland, where Absolem the Caterpillar tells her she is destined to slay the Jabberwocky and end the Red Queen’s tyranny. That is a chosen-one arc bolted onto a story that never needed one. Carroll’s Alice wanders. This Alice has a quest, a destiny and a dragon to kill, and the film is weaker for the trade.
Johnny Depp, the Hatter and the Mercury Hair
Depp’s Mad Hatter is the film’s loudest element and its most defended. Burton said Depp “tried to find a grounding to the character… as opposed to just being mad,” and that Depp’s goal was “to try and bring out a human side to the strangeness of the character.” Depp and Burton decided the Hatter’s clothes, skin, hair, personality and accent would shift with his emotions — Depp compared him to “a mood ring.” The orange hair is an allusion to the mercury poisoning suffered by hatters who used mercury to cure felt. Depp said the character “was poisoned … and it was coming out through his hair, through his fingernails and eyes.”
That is real craft. It is also buried under a performance that changes register faster than the film can support.
Ranking what works and what does not:
- Wasikowska’s Alice — the one performance with a spine.
- Bonham Carter’s Red Queen — the only villain with a pulse.
- The mercury-poisoning design of the Hatter — clever, underused.
- The chosen-one plot — the film’s central mistake.
- The 3D and motion-capture spectacle — noise standing in for wonder.
The supporting cast is deep: Hathaway as the White Queen, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, Matt Lucas as both Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and voice work from Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall and Christopher Lee. None of them get enough room.
Burton was asked to direct two 3D films for Disney in December 2007, and this was one. Development began then, production ran from September 2008 across the United Kingdom and the United States, and Danny Elfman composed the score. The film premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on February 25, 2010.
What matters here is not the technology. It is that Burton had a genuinely good read on Alice — an older girl refusing the life picked for her — and handed her a destiny instead of a choice. The mood-ring Hatter and the mercury hair show a film thinking hard about its characters. The quest structure shows a film that did not trust them.
Alice in Wonderland is 5.3 of 10.
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