Book vs. Movie:
Alice in Wonderland
By Russ Bickerstaff
March 10, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Alice In Wonderland
At some point in the mid-19th century, Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took a journey up the River Thames with three girls, ranging in ages from eight to 13. In an effort to entertain the girls on the journey, Dodgson told them a rather nonlinear story about a little girl named Alice who went in search of adventure. The girls loved the story, particularly the ten-year-old, who was herself named Alice. Legend has it that Alice asked Dodgson to write down the story. A couple of years later, he got around to doing so, adding bits to it to turn it into a more slightly more substantial story, as Dodgson was looking to have it published. Nearly three years after the river journey happened, the story was published as Alice's Adventures In Wonderland under the pen name of Lewis Carroll. The book was successful enough that "Carroll" wrote a sequel to the book some time later - Alice's Adventures Through The Looking Glass. The pair of books became hugely popular. Over the years, the two books have been developed into a number of stage and film adaptations. Aspects of the story have entered pop culture in a very big way. Early in 2007, producer Joe Roth was developing a live-action adaptation of the film. Later on that year, Tim Burton signed on to the project, bringing one of the biggest names in offbeat contemporary fantasy movies to the latest adaptation of Dodgson's classic. How does the latest incarnation of the story compare with the original book?
The Book
The original book is light, breezy and profoundly surreal. The story opens with the young title character chasing a white rabbit in a waistcoat down a rabbit hole. From there, it gets a little weird. What follows doesn't have a traditional plot arc. Alice's adventures are feverishly pieced together with strange dream logic and plenty of fantastically vivid wordplay. Eventually, she returns to the real world. The sequel finds her traveling to an entirely different place as she steps through a mirror. When she finishes her journey, Alice has been through a great deal. There is a sense that she's grown-up quite a bit through her journeys.
Bits of the story are remarkably familiar. What's often overlooked is just how dark the original books are. The amazing thing is how much Carroll balanced the darkness against mad, whimsical humor. There's a subtlety to the books that likely make them a lot more enjoyable to adults of a certain bent than they would be for most modern children. Nearly everyone is familiar with Alice's fall down the rabbit hole and subsequent difficulty with trying to find the perfect size. Between a cake and a potion, her size rapidly changes. When she starts crying, things get a bit fuzzy.
Suddenly there's a small menagerie of creatures. At one point, she decides it might be easier to speak to one of them in French. No reason is given for this. Alice and company eventually find themselves on the shore of the sea of her tears. It's decided that a particularly dry speech could be the best thing to get everyone dry. When that fails, Alice and company decide to have a Caucus Race - an activity that evidently involves everyone running around in a circle for no clearly identifiable reason. At some point, Alice decides that as all of the events she's experienced lately bear little resemblance to the rest of her life, she can't possibly be who she used to be. The book is filled with precisely this kind of dream logic. Alice is perfectly coherent through it all, but there are clear moments where she seems to be every bit as mad as what is going on around her. There's a pleasant kind of madness to it all that holds a subtle darkness. Particularly dark moments include a conversation with a doomed Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall before the fall everyone knows is going to happen and a conversation with a particularly depressed mock turtle.
Some have chosen to read a deeper darkness into some of Carroll's work. There's little evidence of Carroll's alleged pedophilia. Sexuality (and even sensuality) are pretty far removed from anything present here. One of the more complex allegories in Alice's adventures is the story of the Walrus and the Carpenter - a story that some see as being a statement about organized religion. Whether or not it's an allegory, the idea of a couple of characters luring living creatures onto the dinner plate under false pretenses is pretty sinister on its own. A startling amount of Alice's stories have that kind of darkness. And no matter what she does, she often finds herself verbally abused by strange creatures who she seems to be constantly inadvertently offending. Read the books without preconceptions that it's a kid's story and you end up getting something of a twisted horror story steeped in ambivalent madness that is told with a smile. Carroll is preoccupied with song, poetry and mathematics. It's a dizzying work that is deceptively short and simplistic only on its most superficial level.
The Movie
Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland is not a strict adaptation of Carroll's books. The story takes Alice into adulthood. She's now 19. A wealthy man is proposing marriage to her. The formal proposal comes as quite a surprise to Alice, who finds herself distracted, racing after a white rabbit she had seen in her dreams as a child. She follows it down the hole and promptly finds herself in a very faithful adaptation of the beginning of her original adventure. It's all lovingly rendered with brilliant detail. Mia Wasikowska is charming as an adult Alice who can't seem to remember having been to Wonderland before. Many of the characters from the book are there and all seem to remember her from her last visit. They have evidently been looking for her for quite some time. It appears that the Red Queen (who, in keeping with the character from the original Disney animated film, is equal parts her namesake and the Queen of Hearts) has taken over the land and is making things generally disagreeable for everyone involved. The world of Wonderland itself is the same fusion between the rabbit hole and the looking glass that the original Disney cartoon was. Bringing the pop Disney sensibilities of the original animated feature into the stylishly darker world of a Tim Burton film is not without its charm, but there's clearly something missing here.
The film seems to have been a strange meeting place between Lewis Carroll, Tim Burton and executives at Disney. For all practical intents and purposes, the film is an action/adventure sequel to the thoroughly surreal and mind-bending books Carroll wrote. Rather than being a brilliant fusion between Disney commercial aesthetics, the whimsically dark sensibilities of Tim Burton and the playful surrealism of Carroll, the film comes across as a diluted mix of all three, not really completely satisfying as either of the two films it is evidently attempting to be.
As an action film, Tim Burton's Alice is a great deal of fun to watch. There's a very coherent plot structure that quite clearly moves the action from one scene to the next. There's plenty of chase and pursuit, but it's all pretty standard Hollywood stuff framed in a very traditional Hollywood script. As a result it's entertaining, but forgettable as an actioner. Mia Wasikowska looks beautiful in shining armor charging to meet the Jabberwocky, Vorpal sword in hand, but something's missing. It's not as powerful an image as it needs to be to stand on its own as an action climax and it's not deliciously bizarre enough to bring any of Carroll's crazy energy to the screen.
As a tribute to the work of Carroll, the film only mirrors the spirit of his work on the surface. It lacks the deeply subtle darkness balanced by whimsical comedy that makes the book so haunting. As a surreal drama, there are plenty of enjoyable bits here and there. Mia Wasikowska plays Alice with a touching humanity that is not altogether different from the childhood character represented in the book. The problem is that the dramatic end of the film is bogged-down in a coming-of-age story that is ill-suited to the whimsical end of the source material. Tethering the offbeat text of Carol's original story to a traditional action film that also looks to be a coming-of-age drama would only work if any of the individual genres the film was attempting to reside in were significantly added to by the fusion. Instead of an impressive synergy between the three different genres, we get something that isn't terribly satisfying as any of the three films it is trying to be.
The Verdict
Carroll's original books have a kind of depth to them that isn't very well known to those of us who grew-up in the US with the classic Disney animated adaptation of the film. The latest live-action Disney version of Alice isn't a straight adaptation of the novels it's based on. And while it's nice that they tried to do something new with Carroll's source material, it lacks the subtle complexity of the original works, effectively robbing Carroll's world of the subtle bite that makes it so compelling. As a simple coming-of-age action film, the movie isn't that bad, but it hardly lives-up to the source material that made it so interesting.