ALICE IN WONDERLAND

By Steven D. Greydanus

Early in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland comes the Lament of the Corset. What, you ask, is the Lament of the Corset? This is the scene in a period piece, from Titanic to Ever After to Pirates of the Caribbean, that reminds us how cruelly constrained women have been by patriarchal expectations, how roped in and squeezed into society’s mold.

It’s the scene where women say things like, “Of course it’s unfair! We’re women. Our choices are never easy.” Or, “If one cannot breathe, one cannot eat.” (Like it was a good thing.) Or, “You like pain? Try wearing a corset.”

After a prologue in which we briefly see six-year-old Alice’s irrelevant father comforting her after a bad dream about falling, we meet Alice at nineteen in a carriage on her way to a gala at the manor home of some chinless wonder named Hamish whose engagement to Alice is a fait accompli in every way except that Alice doesn’t know the proposal is coming.

En route, Alice’s mother is aghast to discover that for this clandestinely momentous occasion her daughter made the shocking choice not to wear a corset — or stockings. “I’m against them,” Alice (Mia Wasikowska) declares firmly. “Who’s to say what’s proper? If everyone decided that wearing a codfish on your head were proper, would you wear one? To me a corset is like a codfish.” Or something like that.

An ominous sign, you say? Reader, you don’t know how right you are. Before long, dancing with Hamish, Alice giggles. “I was just picturing all the women wearing trousers and all the men wearing dresses.” His lordship is not amused: Alice would do well to keep such fancies to herself.

Not once, but twice, the film enumerates all of the reasons Alice must marry Hamish: (1) Everyone expects her to; (2) she doesn’t want to be a burden to her mother; (3) he is a lord; and (4) she doesn’t want to wind up an old maid — like dotty, disheveled old Aunt Imogene, with her pathetic delusions of a forbidden engagement to a prince.

Who, you ask, could possibly think it a good idea to trick out Alice in Wonderland in such aggrieved feminist didacticism? The answer, apparently, is screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who contributed to the similarly schoolmarmish, politically correct Arctic Tale, and was one of a great many writers on Mulan, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.

Interviewed for a New York Times piece, Woolverton explained her approach to characterizing Alice: She says she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” Reader, I believe her.

Woolverton believes it’s important to “depict strong-willed, empowered women,” she says, “because women and girls need role models … who are empowered have an opportunity to make their own choices, difficult choices, and set out on their own road.” As a father of three daughters, I couldn’t agree more. What I don’t think my daughters need is yet another case of Squelched Girl Syndrome, à la Monsters vs. Aliens.

Alice embodies the gender feminist narrative of vibrant young girls losing their mojo as they come of age in patriarchal society. When she returns to Wonderland — or Underland, as this sequel to Carroll proposes it’s actually called — she has no memory of her first visit, and few of the Underlanders recognize her, not because she has grown but because she has diminished.

“You were much … muchier,” the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) tells her. “You’ve lost your muchness.”

How to regain a young woman’s lost muchness? Woolverton — whose sensibilities regarding Carroll’s world seem to be all looking-glass topsy-turvy, so that the worse an idea is, the better it sounds to her — says she saw Alice’s story “more in terms of an action-adventure film with a female protagonist.” Reader, I kid not. Alice is like Burton’s take on one of Disney’s Narnia films (“a C. S. Lewis Carroll Alice in Narnia,” critic David Edelstein cracks).

The film is actually a joint evisceration not only of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but also of “Jabberwocky,” with Alice recast as (so help me) a messianic warrior-hero in shining armor destined to claim the fabled “Vorpal Sword” on the fated “Frabjous Day,” waging war against the forces of the cruel Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) on behalf of the dulcet (if slightly Goth) White Queen (Anne Hathaway), ultimately confronting the dragon-like Jabberwocky (voiced by Christopher Lee).

Yes, the Jabberwocky, reader. You say the beastie is called the Jabberwock, not the Jabberwocky? Ah, you have read the poem. Have the filmmakers? Who can tell?

Burton’s last adaptation of a children’s book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had its good points, though Depp’s Willie Wonka was easily the worst thing in the film. That’s not the case here, though Depp is no better, running the gamut from irritating to insufferable with a repertoire of disjointed tics and vocal stylings. Charlie at least had the virtue of sticking close to Dahl for much of its running time. At no point does Alice threaten to do anything similar.

Computer graphics have now advanced to the point where Burton can put basically whatever he fancies on the screen, and he fills the screen with his mad visions, not without some consolation for the viewer. Perhaps the real textual basis for this Alice, since it is obviously not Carroll, is the illustrations of John Tenniel. His caricature-like portraits of the Red Queen and of Tweedledee and Tweedledum have been realized with goofy literalness, though why Helena Bonham Carter’s head has been digitally swollen to twice its size for the Red Queen, while Depp’s head, except for slightly exaggerated eyes, has been left alone, is a mystery. (Tenniel gave them both heads the size of beach balls.)

In any case, Bonham Carter’s imperious, delusional Red Queen is the best thing in the film, followed by the enjoyably animated Cheshire Cat, who’s voiced by Stephen Fry with the same sort of purring, smugly knowing quality that Keith David gave the Cat in last year’s Coraline. Crispin Glover, as the Knave of Hearts’s head on a spindly computer-generated body, is oddly reminiscent of Wormtongue in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers. “I like largeness,” he whispers leeringly at an oversized Alice, buttonholing her like Éowyn in a corridor in the Red Queen’s castle.

(Note: Climactic spoiler warning.) The Éowyn resonances are even more pronounced in the climactic battle, with Alice triumphantly hacking off the dragon-like Jabberwock(y)’s head, like Éowyn decapitating the Fell Beast. In Tolkien, that was a prelude to the confrontation with the Witch King. Here, it’s a symbolic image of Alice confronting her anxieties about marrying Hamish. Watching Alice grasp the Vorpal Sword to decapitate the serpent, it doesn’t take a Dr. Freud to conclude that the wedding’s off.

P.S. Alice’s shifts in size seem to come with a body-image subtext. For whatever reason, her clothes don’t change size with her, so she repeatedly winds up nearly or even entirely naked, and spends much of the film in ill-fitting, rather revealing makeshift garb. Reader, who is the target audience again?