Monday, March 15, 2010

Tim does Alice

I’ve been a Tim Burton fan ever since I saw Beetlejuice, followed closely by Edward Scissorhands. I love the distinct visual sensibility that runs through Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride and Burton's knack for bringing a certain warmth to grotesque or potentially unlikable figures (such as Edward Wood and his dedicated but thoroughly inept movie-making crew in Ed Wood) - and, conversely, making potentially likable people seem twisted. I also like his recent use of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, two actors who are very well-suited to the Tim Burton universe. Here’s a director who has a very clear sense of the things that interest him and the types of films he wants to make, and then sets about unselfconsciously reworking his themes and fetishes. Even when his films have been uneven – as they frequently are – I’ve found them more interesting than the well-rounded films of many other directors.

I was a bit disappointed by his re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland though. After watching it yesterday I read this bit from a Burton interview, where he says he never really felt a connection to the Lewis Carroll stories:
It was always a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another... [this film] is an attempt to really try to give “Alice in Wonderland” some emotional grounding that has never been in any version before...the attempt was to try and make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events.
My reservations about the film come precisely from Burton’s need to make it “feel more like a story”. He’s taken a brilliantly abstract, hallucinatory tale and sharpened its edges, giving it a straightforward narrative arc – the arc of a Lord of a Rings-style fantasy, complete with the well-worn theme of the Little Hero rising (voluntarily, of course) to the daunting Big Task that must be performed so that the world can be saved.

Thus, in the final 20 minutes we have (a grown-up) Alice donning armour and setting out, vorpal sword in hand, for a drearily conventional one-on-one battle with the Jabberwock (who is, alas, forced to leave the pages of the stand-alone poem he has inhabited all these decades, recast as the Red Queen’s Ultimate Weapon, and made to look like an emaciated, generally less impressive cousin to the Balrog from The Fellowship of the Ring). This climactic fight went against the grain of everything I expected from an Alice in Wonderland film, even a re-imagined one. More to the point, it isn’t the sort of thing Burton does particularly well; seen even on its own terms, it wasn’t anywhere near as gripping as the battle sequences in Peter Jackson’s LOTR films. (Little wonder, for this material doesn’t lend itself to that sort of grandeur. Red and white playing cards as bloodthirsty foot-soldiers engaged in a fight to the death? Terrifying!)

Otherwise the film was very good to look at, as one would expect. I mostly liked watching it in 3-D (not having seen a 3-D film in years, and never one where the visuals were of this quality) even though the glasses were poky and hurt the bridge of my nose. Minus points to PVR on that front.

[An earlier post about the trickiness of adapting fantasy to the big screen]

14 comments:

  1. Whereas in Jabberwocky, the creature is more at home in absurd surroundings.

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  2. I haven't seen this movie yet but would definitely watch it. Thanks for some info about the movie. 3D version of a movie specially like this would turn out to be great.

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  3. Maybe his heart is not really into this kind of thing though.. being an avid fan will surely help you show the difference. For me the movie is an average though.

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  4. Ugh! He actually said that about the book? Like you aptly observe, the whimsicalness of the book is its very charm! That one comment of his may just have led me to lose ALL respect for the man's intelligence!

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  5. Amen.
    As Anon above said the whimsical nature of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is what made is such a classic. And I dunno how Lewis Carrol did it but he sure has an idea of a child's perception of the chaotic human society. I mean, what else is the Caterpillar or the Cheshire Cat or the Mad Hatter or the Queen or any other character in the series? People think Barrie was a Peter Pan who always wanted to stay a child and all.... I say Carrol sure beats him in getting into a child's mind though he was quite an adult. :)

    I hope Tim Burton ain't losing it.... he is supposed to be the one of the few who knows the "magic" in the story/storytelling. And HE doesn't see the source of the Wonderland worldwide appeal?
    Mogambo sad hua!

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  6. "It was always a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another... "

    If that's how Burton reads the original text, my expectations from this movie just sunk lower.

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  7. yeah, this was balls, and clearly made by someone who didn't get it at all. however I watched it without the 3d glasses and that made it more fun. everything was fuzzy and druggy.

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  8. Emotional grounding? In Wonderland? Oh dear, he must have had to try quite hard.

    Still, I'll go see it. Just because I want to see sopmething in 3D and nothing would induce me to see Avataar.

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  9. And the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts were the SAME character... and there was no Humpty Dumpty and NO Mock Turtle....

    But it was very watchable....

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  10. Yes, I was rather disappointed too.. I was expecting a psychedelic, brilliant Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds-ish Alice from Burton, and I ended up with a tepid mix of rehashed LOTR-meets-Narnia. Sigh! (for what might have been..)

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  11. what aishwarya said. this is the first burton film i don't plan to watch.

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  12. Being a fan of the original story and Burton's work, I was disappointed. And it may have been because of what you put so well - forcing a shape on to a mystical story. Didn't see it in 3D, but my favorite visual was that of the Cheshire Cat. I think its mysterious mischief was perfectly captured.

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  13. Where does this leave a fan of Alice, Caroll, Burton, Depp who really didn't want to see either LOTR or Narnia. That I'll have to see the movie dubbed in a foreign language doesn't sound so bad now since I probably won't enjoy it very much in the first place.

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  14. Great review...missed the quirky madness of Carroll in the film. Came out deeply saddened about Burton's missed opportunity.

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