Movie Review: Alice in Wonderland
- Theatrical release date
- February 25, 2010
- DVD release date
- TBA
- Grade
- A
A great update of a classic movie.
Tim Burton’s take on Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland offers audiences amazing special effects and brings to life fantastic characters for a welcome two-hour escape from the mundane reality of daily life. Like the book, it has a wide appeal and has done well playing to the mass market at the box office. But the movie should have a special appeal to the childfree because Burton’s Alice confronts social pressures and choices that we can specifically appreciate.
The Burton film is a compilation of Carroll’s novels Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, as well as Carroll’s poetry and Burton’s imagination. Unlike the story many of us remember from our childhoods, Burton’s film features Alice as an adult, still dreaming of wonderland, still possessing a belief in the impossible, but suddenly thrust into the pomp of the aristocratic social scene. She attends a party with her mother only to discover, to her horror, that it is a surprise engagement party for her. When the dullard Hamish proposes to her before an audience of hundreds, she darts off into the woods and falls down a rabbit hole into the underground world where her adventure begins.
The better part of the movie chronicles Alice’s journeys in this strange world of her dreams. She meets Carroll’s classic and beloved characters—Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter, a role given a new twist by the inimitable Johnny Depp—and the not-so-beloved Red Queen, based on Carroll’s Queen of Hearts and portrayed in a memorable performance by Helena Bonham Carter.
In a parallel to her life outside the rabbit hole, Alice learns that she is the subject of much expectation: she is the long-awaited slayer of the Jabberwocky. From the moment she learns of what has been foretold of her to nearly the very end of her adventures, Alice steadfastly refuses to take on the mission. Ever loyal to her friends, she risks her life time and again to save them as they do to save her. Yet it is the death of the Jabberwocky—a death Alice refuses to instigate—that will return the land to its rightful ruler and her friends to their once joy-filled lives.
In the end, Alice steps forward to take on the challenge. She casts aside her fear and hesitation and takes up the sword to set the world right.
(An aside: I am personally very fond of the battle scenes between Alice and the Jabberwocky as the young woman, clad in armor and wielding a sword, evokes images of another woman who defied social order and fought for justice—my patron saint, Joan of Arc.)
It is clear that Alice ponders her role and the expectations set for her throughout the film, but she appears resistant to those expectations almost to the end. The actions Alice takes in opposing the Red Queen appear to be driven by self-preservation and a sincere desire to protect her friends. Exactly what tips the scale and causes Alice’s change of heart toward her role in battle is not entirely clear. A motivational and philosophical talk from the Blue Caterpillar gives her reason to reconsider. Yet as she takes up the sword, with complete confidence and self assurance, the decision is clearly her own. At no point in the film does Alice display any hint of submissiveness so it would be wrong to suggest that she alters her decision under pressure. Perhaps she realizes that she alone is capable of performing such great feats.
Alice’s next major decision proves her strength in the face of even the most unpleasant of realities. Upon slaying the Jabberwocky, she is given the choice to stay in wonderland or return to the world above. In a symbolic acceptance of adulthood over childhood, Alice opts to return and very quickly faces the same time and place—her engagement party—she’d left.
Here Alice confronts the choice that we childfree individuals know all too well—to take the path prescribed by society, to do what is expected of us, to accept rather than challenge our cultural norms, or to pursue our own happiness in the life we want for ourselves, regardless of whether it fits within the parameters of “normal.” Alice, of course, ever the “abnormal” child chooses the nontraditional path, rejecting Hamish’s proposal and promising to marry whomever and whenever she chooses. And, in a postscript, Alice enters the business world, expanding her father’s company to China.
Ironically, not much has changed in terms of social pressures to marry and have children, since Alice’s era. At least in the United States, the average age of first marriage has gotten progressively older and the average number of children per woman has gotten smaller, but there is still an expectation that a person will marry and have children. Movie genres such as the romantic comedy reinforce this expectation and the notion that there is something “wrong” with being single. And I can’t think of a movie of any genre with an avowedly childfree protagonist.
Alice in Wonderland is in part Burton’s celebration of Alice’s “abnormalness,” or perhaps “abnormalness” in general, for one would be hard pressed to call any of the denizens of wonderland “normal.” For the childfree, it is refreshing to see a heroine who, although perhaps not childfree, is content to set her own path in life.
Copyright Julie Nisley. Published 1 April 2010 in What’s New.
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