Squeak and Gibber: ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to 2010’s live-action Alice in Wonderland, tasks director James Bobin (of Flight of the Conchords and the two most recent Muppets movies) with turning out imitation Tim Burton. It’s quite a task considering its predecessor was already Burton himself doing imitation Burton. (It’s easily his worst film, a few appealing grace notes in an ornately garish and dispassionate self-parody.) That Looking Glass manages to be a good movie in spots is a nice surprise. For maybe fifteen minutes total I thought Bobin and screenwriter Linda Woolverton were on to something, finding Alice (Mia Wasikowska, never an unwelcome sight) a ships’ captain in 1875, eager to go exploring. The only problem is these real-world scenes are bookends for a whole lot of consequence-free nonsense in Wonderland taking up the bulk of the movie. Not only does every bit of the story get undone by the end, but it even rolls back some of the last one, too.

Following the template of its predecessor, this new movie follows Alice through token scenes of struggles with her real problems – this time patriarchal business snobs, revealed in a quiet funny cut to wrinkled, bearded white grumps, who can’t even begin to imagine a woman explorer – then spirits her away to Wonderland for a fantastical topsy-turvy fantasy story. There are some clever bits here and there, like a Humpty Dumpty egg rolling off a gigantic chessboard, a doorway opening onto a great height, and, nestled in a chained up grandfather clock, an enormous castle containing time’s master clock. The weirdly unpopulated realm is, however, awfully low on characters who become more than set dressing. It’s also low on conflict. The best the contractually obligated returning creatures – like Tweedledee and Tweedledumb (Matt Lucas’s face floating on enormous CGI heads), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) – can come up with is concern about the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, creepy mannered gibbering passing as creativity) who has been acting strange lately. How can they tell?

It turns out the Hatter is upset by memories of his family, who were killed by the Jabberwocky controlled by the vengeful Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter). Alice is encouraged to go back in time and save the Hatter’s family. To do so, she meets Time (Sacha Baron Cohen chewing over a deliriously silly accent), a clockwork stickler for the rules of time and space. She outwits him quickly, hopping in a spinning gewgaw that allows her to sail the timeline back into the past. This initial flying spasm of effects leads to the movie’s cleverest moment as Time zips after her shouting, “You can’t win a race against time! I’m inevitable!” Later we learn he waits for no man. Also the Cheshire Cat at one point sprawls out on his shoulders and declares that he’s “on time.” You take your small delights where you can get them in a movie that has a lot of movement and noise, but short supply of actual wit or compelling curiosity. Bobin tries his best to provide vibrant colorful images, but the more they pile up the less they add up.

The stifling artificiality of the gaudy colorful sets and costumes has none of the imagination to power actual whimsy, and the plot itself is motored by the flimsiest of motivations. Who cares if Alice can take the Mad out of the Hatter? Not me. It’s not an enjoyable story to be lost in when its very mechanics operate against investment. Its best moments occur when Alice steps back into reality, her adventures in Wonderland having no bearing on the real world and never carrying enough emotional weight to represent metaphoric developments. The movie drains the beautifully logical illogic of its Lewis Carroll source through the blandness of conventional fantasy tropes, and looks all the worse for it. And the whole thing, burdened with an achingly predictable MacGuffin-based plot, is not nearly as delightful as it should be to excuse so much swirling around hither and yon across flat backdrops and Toontown sets dusted with hallucinogenic cartoon filigree. It’s just pointless, plodding gobbledygook. Nothing sticks in the brain. Nothing is worth digesting. Imagine being slowly buried alive in a bottomless vat of cotton candy.

Like a Villain: MALEFICENT

Maleficent, the sorceress who gives Sleeping Beauty her cursed slumber, is one of Walt Disney Animation’s greatest accomplishments. Frightening and elegant, she has a tall, statuesque presence, high model features, towering horns growing from her head, and flowing dark robes swooshing around her. She glows green with dark magic, and by the end uses her powers to conjure the form of a dragon to fight off the Princess’s chances for True Love’s Kiss. She’s an iconic image. Thus the challenge for Maleficent, a live-action retelling of the story from the sorceress’s point of view. How to fill the role with a mere flesh and blood actor? How to recapture the power of those drawn images, so striking and so fearsome? Luckily, the filmmakers were able to meet the challenge and cast Angelina Jolie, whose high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and elegant silhouette make her an imposing presence when draped in the makeup and wardrobe to match the character’s iconic look. Here her eyes are fierce, her face is sculpted and angular. She’s a perfect fit.

But making Maleficent the center of this story is not without its problems. In the 1959 film, as in the fairy tale upon which it was based, she’s pure evil, bestowing an awful curse on an infant for her parent’s crime of failing to invite the witch to a party. Maleficent is a force of destruction and looms large over the plot as pure threat, casting a dark shadow over innocent first love, worried parents, and sweet dotty fairies in a colorful Disney kingdom. Maleficent is out to make some changes, moving the title character into the position of protagonist. This isn’t Sleeping Beauty of old. It opens with a narrator (Janet McTeer) telling us about two lands that sit side by side. One is a kingdom ruled by man. The other is a magical forest ruled by no one, the better for fairies, living trees, sprites, and other fanciful creatures to frolic freely. In this forest a young Maleficent lives, carefree until the day a man (Sharlto Copley) appears, tells her he loves her, and then steals her wings.

The man presents the wings to the dying king in order to be named his successor. Now the new king, he has a daughter. She is cursed on the day of her christening by the vengeful, violated Maleficent who lashes out at the man who hurt her by attacking his child. Hidden away in the forest by three largely incompetent fairies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple, great actresses doing bad comic relief), the baby grows up to be Aurora (Elle Fanning). Something - lingering guilt, perhaps, over hurting a child for the crimes of her father – makes Maleficent hang around, offering unseen assistance to Aurora as she grows, becoming something like a fairy godmother to her. And so, regretting her curse, Maleficent and her raven sidekick (Sam Riley) try to undo it before it is too late. Meanwhile, the evil king is plotting to invade the enchanted forest and slay the sorceress once and for all.

Flipping the script on a classic villain, Linda Woolverton (of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) has written a screenplay that’s a bit of a mess, but at least finds thorny thematic issues with which to wrestle. Now it is not a fairy tale about unexplained evil and the pat True Love that will conquer all. Instead, it’s a movie about the marginalization of women, in which the king sees both Maleficent and Aurora as pawns in his life story instead of people with thoughts, feelings, and ambitions of their own. Just as surely as Maleficent is wounded for the sake of his promotion, his daughter is cast aside for his peace of mind. In the end, Maleficent made huge mistakes, but it’s the king who is the real bad guy.

That’s all interesting, but if only the film had the patience to stop and wrestle with the ideas. Instead, it’s content to only suggest deeper thoughts as it hustles its way through exposition and character beats with a sense of obligation instead of enchantment. Even the appearance of Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) is a huge non-event, which is at once a hilarious example of the movie’s welcome shifting of gender roles and an example of its half-hearted plotting. I love how it takes a story about a young woman whose fate is decided by her father and her love and makes it a story about misunderstood and victimized women and their complicated relationship with each other, but the movie is simply too frustratingly thin to support these deeper concerns.

While Sleeping Beauty is less emotionally complex, it has a stronger and more direct sense of storytelling. Maleficent has a vague understanding of what a story looks like, but often plays like a series of haphazardly connected scenes. Characters have changes of heart and evolutions of thinking for no other reason than because the movie needs them to do so. Consequently, there is not a lot of momentum here and the film grows mushy and aimless in the center as it spends its time telling us what we need to know instead of allowing it to unfold. The result is a small cast standing against flat, over-lit CGI backgrounds reciting dialogue that sounds like someone left all the subtext on the surface of the rough draft and never did a rewrite to bury it.

At least it fits the general phoniness of everything around them. There is never a sense this fantasy world is real. It just doesn’t look good. Director Robert Stromberg is a visual effects artist making his directorial debut. The picture is filled with competently visualized spectacle, with tree-creatures and strange little fantasy animals wandering around. When Maleficent flies about it’s with a convincing woosh and the dragon in the climax is as big, scaly, and fiery as you’d expect. But the action is repetitive and dull. The environments are stiff and dead. It never feels like a coherent vision of a place or time. It’s just disconnected digital frippery. If it was chintzier, you could almost accuse it of feeling like it was shot in a corner of the Disney backlot. Instead, it just looks like endlessly green-screened busyness. This is the movie’s biggest downfall. On a visual level, it simply isn’t as convincing, as inky dark and richly imagined as its lead performance.

Jolie stands in the center of the movie as iconic a screen creation as ever there was. The scene in which the screen darkens as shadows cast by scary green fire flicker over her face as she bellows sinister magic into a crib is genuinely spooky. And yet, Jolie sells her character’s hurt and regret, her elegance and her frozen mask of emotions that slowly melts for the child she has doomed. She’s a sympathetic, complicated creature, capable of glowering harm and glimmering compassion. It’s a great, full-blooded performance in a movie that’s simply not up to the task of working on her level. She’s so good I wished there was enough to the scenes to allow her to really sink her teeth in and chew. She’s big. It’s the picture that’s small.

Curiouser and Curiouser: Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Over the years, Tim Burton has proven himself to be a master of whimsically ghoulish imagery, but he has also proven to not always match his visuals to an equally inspired plot. When he’s at his best his style and content are fused and focused, honed in on the particular obsessions of the film’s protagonist, for nearly all Burton protagonists are haunted and fascinated, attracted and repulsed, by a certain object or concept that drives their goals in tangible ways. This can be seen starting with his first feature, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which finds Pee-Wee Herman tracking down his stolen bike, and continuing with Beetlejuice, which has Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as ghostly homeowners. You can trace this feature through all of Burton’s best work: from Edward and his Scissorhands to Ed Wood and his filmmaking and cross dressing, from Ed Bloom's tall tales to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory to Sweeney Todd’s revenge with bloody barber’s blades. When there is less of a clear focus on characters and their possessions, Burton seems to lose focus as well. When that happens, despite retaining great, inventive imagery, the films grow manic and inconsistent. That’s the case in Mars Attacks!, a scattershot B-movie send up that is fun at times but ultimately a mess. Unfortunately the same can be said about his latest film, Alice in Wonderland.

It’s an oft adapted tale originating in the late 1800s with Lewis Carroll’s books about a little girl that falls down the rabbit hole, but Burton, working with screenwriter Linda Woolverton, have staked out new ground for themselves that separates their adaptation from all those of the past. This film is pitched as a sequel (of sorts) to the original story, with a 20-year-old Alice believing her earlier time in Wonderland was a dream. As the film opens on a stuffy Victorian life, we find her on the verge of getting a marriage proposal from a sniveling twit. Alice is simply too graceful, too imaginative, too modern for the times. She fits the Burton hero type very well, a discontented misfit with pale skin and dark eyes. As played well by Mia Wasikowska, the early scenes establish an interesting different take on Alice, one with interesting feminist implications, that the film decides to drop as soon, and as quickly, as she falls down the rabbit hole chasing that waist-coat clad, pocket-watch wielding creature.

Upon landing in Wonderland, which is appreciably more post-apocalyptic than any prior incarnation, Alice promptly becomes a pawn in an elaborate, yet charmingly disproportionate, fantasy world. She fades into the background of her own story as we are given a parade of characters and events that make only small impacts that never add up to a bigger one. Besides, Burton seems much more fascinated with the characters played by his regular actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

As the Mad Hatter, Depp takes risks with his performance, slipping in and out of a murderously gravely Scottish brogue while the rest of his lines come out in a whispery, giggly, high-pitched lisp. His eyes are oddly cold, yet always moving, staring out from underneath a coat of sickly clown makeup and frizzy hair the color of rotten carrots. It almost works, but falls flat simply because there’s no character under the shtick. He’s out on a limb with no support from the script.

Carter, on the other hand, is a whirlwind scene-stealer as the Red Queen, playing her as a whiny, stunted monarch, managing to make a shout of “Off with his head!” ring with shifty insecurity and deadly impulsiveness. She’s warped with special effects to have a big head that is quite literal, balancing on a too-thin neck. She’s part fairy-tale villain, part spoiled brat, part demonic bobblehead. Carter marches through the film, chewing scenery, spitting out her lines, and overshadowing everyone. She’s clearly having a great time and it’s infectious.

The other characters are a mish-mash of the familiar and the unknown who all coalesce around a plot that becomes a fairly standard fantasy-quest story that involves recruiting Alice to find a sword and slay the Jabberwocky to restore peace in the fantasy world. Various creatures with the voices of British character actors show up including a delightful Stephen Fry Chesire Cat, squashy Matt Lucas Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and a smoking caterpillar with too few lines for being voiced by the always excellent Alan Rickman. Live action Anne Hathaway shows up as a pearly-white Gothic good girl whose hands seem to float about on their own accord. Also live action, and wholly welcome, is the reliably odd Crispin Glover as a glowering henchman of the Red Queen, digitally stretched in an oddly disorienting and heightened way.

There are fun moments and memorable images to be found throughout these characters’ interactions and the quest’s progression. I loved the look of the Red Queen and her castle, from the gulping frog butlers, the chandelier held by birds, the table held by monkeys, and the pig ottomans, all the way down to the small heart drawn in lipstick on her cold, grey lips. I especially enjoyed the shivery gross-out moat filled with the proof of her love for beheadings. The story moves along quickly and goes down without complication, but unfortunately the movie never quite fits together. It’s bewitching, bothersome, and bewildering.

About three-fourths of the way through the film, I found myself realizing that the movie just wouldn’t resolve satisfactorily. The movie’s simply too manic, too frantic, too eager to show the next cool-looking thingamabob. Too many strands and plot attempts formulate for the movie to conclude simply, and so maybe it’s to the movie’s benefit that it doesn’t try. There seems to be a reluctance for the thing to end at all given the circuitous route to the fairly rote big battle that’s both unneeded and uncommitted. If Burton and Woolverton really wanted to go there, it needn’t be so wishy-washy and over almost before it begins, especially since we’ve known what’s coming since we were shown a scroll that predicts the future very early on.

And yet, all of this wouldn’t matter so much if the dreamy nightmare world of Alice’s weren’t so completely disconnected from the framing device of stifling Victorianism. I would have liked to see her experiences in phantasmagoric confusion relate to some kind of arc or voyage of self-discovery. Instead, Alice starts the film fully formed, experiences some weird stuff, and then ends the film slightly more bold. There’s no sense of any real psychological or emotional stakes. As fantastic as the film is to look at, and as much as it did at times sweep me away in wonderment, it’s simply too hollow and messy to form a cohesive experience.