Every good date night should end with a “date morning.” If the person you’re dating works nights at a bar (like the Liberian Girl does) then the morning could also double as a time to have a legitimate date. With meals, movies, snowball fights in DuPont Circle and those sorts of things.
On a Saturday morning after the Washington, DC that had been buried by February’s blizzard had been unearthed once again, the Liberian Girl and I dragged our funky behinds out of her bed and headed to the AMC in Georgetown. Both of us wanted to see what Tim Burton had done to Alice in Wonderland.
We bought tickets for an 11:30 am screening. As we peeled the plastic casings from our recyclable 3D glasses, she pointed out that we were the oldest people in the theatre who were not accompanied by an adult.
The film began with a jumble of 3D and 2D shots briefly introducing us to Alice and the curious circumstances of her life. I found myself slightly distracted by the 3D experience at the start. (We really need glasses that cut off your peripheral view of everything that isn’t the screen. Or maybe we need to do away with the glasses altogether.) Then that rabbit appeared, a grown up Alice dove into the hole after it, and we discovered an old world imagined anew. Suddenly, the 3D glasses weren’t such a bother.
I don’t remember much about the classic version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I may not have even read it. I know all about it, though. There’s a white rabbit. There’s a mad hatter. Someone says, “Off with her head!” And some little girl has to do something to pull it all together. It’s one of those pieces of pop culture that seeps into your consciousness whether you invited it to or not. Often, the seeping replaces the substance of the thing itself, and only the creator of the thing can say whether the seeping or the substance is more important.
For this version of Alice, that playful menace, Tim Burton, has dreamed up a world colored by ironically vibrant grays and populated by scene-stealing creatures who are pretty sure that grown-up Alice still has some muchness left in her. It’s a visually rich film. Like, triple chocolate cake rich. And it has enough fun bits to keep you from drifting completely away from it.
There’s the Dormouse who snatches out the eye of the Bandersnatch and wears it like a Jesus piece. There’s Alan Rickman doing his best Snoop Dogg impersonation as Absolom the Caterpiller. There’s the Red Queen, a villain in the mold of C. Montgomery Burns. There’s Johnny Depp being Johnny Depp.
And there’s the Cheshire Cat.
Children’s stories — even the sophisticated ones — have morals. The simple kind that work in a world where good is one color, bad is another and there are no gradients of either to confuse the two. The Cheshire Cat, pop culture tells us, is a free agent. He appears as he pleases and he seems to have no code. Maybe he can be trusted. Maybe he can’t be. But he has that grin. And you kinda want to follow him because of it. The first time Tim Burton’s translation of that furry, smiling bastard vaporized, the Liberian Girl pulled my ear to her mouth and whispered, “I want to live in his world.”
In any rendering of an icon like Alice in Wonderland, you kinda know what you’re getting. Whether you know the substance or the seep, the story is just too famous for you to be surprised by it. The question shifts from what is going to happen to how it will all happen. When Tim Burton happens … well … Tim Burton happens.
After the lights came up and the 3D glasses came off, a middle-aged couple who looked like English professors climbed down the stairs next to our aisle seats. Each held the hand of a brown-haired kindergartner dressed to look like a princess of Bethesda. The man asked one of his twin girls, “Tell me, did any of that frighten you?” The princess wearing the purple dress pursed her lips, suppressed a smile and shook her head from side to side as if to say, “I was kinda scared. And I liked it.”
That’s usually the best critique of a Tim Burton film. It’s a pretty fair analysis of this one. If you’re six. If you’re not six, then something is wrong with your muchness.
DYL MAG Score: 6
