Review

Silliest tea party ever

Disney movie purportedly goes Through the Looking Glass, but Alice doesn’t live here anymore

Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) is a ship’s captain who must return to Wonderland and travel back in time to save the Mad Hatter in James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, a sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton film Alice in Wonderland.
Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) is a ship’s captain who must return to Wonderland and travel back in time to save the Mad Hatter in James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, a sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton film Alice in Wonderland.

I'm sorry to report we officially live in an age where true inspiration and riotous imagination have been savagely commoditized and beaten down into unadulterated claptrap: A risible litany of obvious formulas, prescribed points of dramatic arc, a manufactured sprinkling of cheap, emotional flashpoints, surrounded on all sides by layer after layer of protective netting, so that absolutely nothing has even a momentary hint of danger.

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The White Queen Mirana (Anne Hathaway), the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) uncover an evil plot to put the Queen of Hearts back on Wonderland’s throne in James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass.

By which, of course, I mean to say, Disney's "adaptation" -- and, believe me when I tell you, the association between this goopy, focus-grouped monstrosity and Lewis Carroll's absorbing, astounding novel, more or less begins and ends with the first name of its female protagonist -- only serves its own strikingly self-serving and shameless agenda.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

72 Cast: Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska, Matt Lucas, Rhys Ifans, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lindsay Duncan, Leo Bill, Geraldine James, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Barbara Windsor, Matt Vogel, Paul Whitehouse

Director: James Bobin

Rating: PG, for fantasy action/peril and some language

Running time: 113 minutes

Carroll's original novel, a follow-up to the wildly successful Wonderland published six years previous, is mostly based on a complex and wide-ranging game of chess. Alice returns to a magical but utterly confusing land and is promised to be made a queen if she can successfully advance, as a pawn, to the hallowed eighth rank across the countryside of a board. Encountering many odd, difficult characters in her travels, Alice makes her way to her eventual coronation, which quickly devolves unto absolute anarchy before she finally wakes up out of her dream.

Facing the production of a "family friendly" film that the Mouse feared might confuse and alienate children (as opposed to delight and enchant them), director James Bobin and longtime Disney scribe Linda Woolverton quickly scrapped everything of Carroll's book, stripping it down to the studs in order to rebuild it from the ground up. Regrettably, the structure they built is like a bland townhouse on a boring cul-de-sac in a meandering subdivision on the outskirts of nothing much: There's no "there" anywhere near it.

When we meet the older, emboldened Alice (Mia Wasikowska), she's captaining a galley ship over treacherous waters in order to escape from a trio of pirate ships. Successfully returning home after a long voyage at sea, she discovers to her horror that her mother (Lindsay Duncan) is facing the prospect of either losing her house or having to sell Alice's beloved ship, to Hamish (Leo Bill), a rich, idiotic fop whose marriage proposal Alice spurned several years ago.

Facing the loss of her adventurous innocence, Alice instead slips through a mirror in one of the mansion rooms of Hamish's estate and, following the commands of Absolem the butterfly (voice of the late Alan Rickman), returns to the magical land of her youth. Once there, though, Alice discovers a crestfallen bunch of anthropomorphic CGI creatures, all devastated by the rapid deterioration of the Hatter (Johnny Depp, painted like a junkie cadaver with a fright wig), who is bitterly mourning the loss of his family to the flames of the Jabberwock Alice apparently killed in the previous film.

Convinced his family is somehow still alive, the Hatter holes up in his hat-shaped house and implores Alice to help him find them. A plan is quickly hatched by Mirana (Anne Hathaway), the White Queen, for Alice to sneak into the chamber of Time and travel back to before the Hatter's family was killed. Once there, in a giant, gleaming clock cathedral, Alice confronts Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), a mechanized German prig, steals his time-generating chronosphere and uses it to travel back in order to save Hatter's parents. Standing in her way, besides a frantic Time, who fears for the existence of continuity if Alice doesn't return his chronosphere, she is also dogged by the fearsome, bulbous-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter), who angrily stomps around her kingdom, terrifying everyone.

It's not enough that the film pays absolutely no mind to the story or characters of the novel, it also agonizingly provides background stories and stupefying emotional arcs as to why the characters have turned out in the manner they have. The Red Queen, we're duly informed, is only evil because her sister, the White Queen, did her an injustice when they were young girls; the Hatter is only "mad" because of his grief and his ongoing daddy issues. Meanwhile, Alice needs to find ways to adapt and take stock in her life so her return to the normal world can be triumphant. It's all pandering treacle, and it so utterly misses the point of the book that everyone associated with it should be forced to sit in a corner and think about what they've done.

Carroll's work was riveting precisely because it was wholly unexplained and inexplicable. Instead of wincingly forced emotional back stories, his fanciful characters appeared fully formed, using highly sophisticated, intricate wordplay leading to everyone's bafflement, which in turn, fed perfectly into the surreal milieu of his world. Take, for example, this winsome exchange between Alice and the two Queens from Carroll's original:

White Queen: "Can you do division? Divide a loaf by a knife -- what's the answer to that?"

Alice: "I suppose ... "

Red Queen: "Bread and butter, of course. Try another subtraction sum. Take a bone from a dog: what remains?"

Alice: "The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it -- and the dog wouldn't remain: It should come to bite me -- and I'm sure I shouldn't remain!"

Red Queen: "Then you think nothing would remain?"

Alice: "I think that's the answer."

Red Queen: "Wrong, as usual: the dog's temper would remain."

Compare that, if you will, to a sample of what might be called one of the film's witticisms: When Time is stuck waiting for Alice at one of the Hatter's tea parties, everyone takes turns making lamentable puns at his expense ("I'm right on time," the fuzzed-up CGI Cheshire Cat says, sprawling over the increasingly exasperated shoulders of the guest). Otherwise, Alice essentially is stuck saying obvious things for the audience's benefit ("It works like a ship!" and "I can't change the past, but I can learn things from it!"), dumbing down further an already obvious script in a way that I can only imagine would have made Carroll visibly cringe.

I'm not suggesting the film should have stuck perfectly to the book's admittedly convoluted and contrary story, but this film is so thoroughly disrespectful of Carroll and his work, I want to take a vorpal sword to the marketing suits who greenlighted it. Pan, a similarly brain-locked attempt at a classic's reimagining that was met with critical derision and box office failure, is our best-case scenario here.

Most depressingly, however, is the way the Mouse Oppressor and minions have once again twisted a childhood masterwork into something unrecognizably awful in order to best fit their turgid branding and marketing platforms: Childhood is all imagination, adulthood is total drudgery, the magic in the world comes out of our love for our families, and the like.

Watching this cynical, cloying farce, it's clear the only reason they use the "Alice" name in the first place is because it still retains high-recognition levels with its core audience. As usual, the people who will suffer the most at Disney's hackneyed hands are the very ones who maintain a strong emotional stake in the original books, which provides that name recognition in the first place: One final brick of bitter irony sent hurtling toward the novel's true believers.

As a humble representative of said faction, I can only say: Off with their heads.

MovieStyle on 05/27/2016

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