Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter
I finally got to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. (Directing a show like The Good Harvest means your free time is at a premium until it opens). By the time I saw it, all the critics had had their crack at it. One of the major complaints was that this classic story had been put in service of a conventional feminist be-all-that-you-can-be theme. The movie begins and ends with scenes in the “real” world. Alice is a young woman who is expected to accept the marriage proposal of an unattractive young Lord. Before her return to Wonderland, she is ill-equipped to face her challenges. Afterwards, she can. To focus on the wrapper, however, is to miss what’s been added to the delicious inside.
Much is made of Alice’s identity when she arrives in Wonderland (called Underland in this sequel). She is mistaken at first for the “wrong” Alice, but as the story progresses, we find that she is not the wrong Alice, but an Alice who has lost a great deal of herself. She cannot remember her earlier visit when she was a child, when she mistakenly called the world Wonderland. She has been daunted by the death of her father, a man of epic imagination, as well as a loving father. She has been overwhelmed by her place in the world and the expectation that she marry the young Lordling, who clearly has no appreciation of Alice.
The Mad Hatter tells her: “You used to be much muchier before. Yes, you were much more Alice the last time we met. You have lost your muchness.” Parts of her bravery has died. The story of this Alice sequel is the story of Alice regaining her muchness. Here the filmmakers touch on a truly universal theme. Who among us has not been diminished by life? From the minor assaults of criticisms, insults, difficult co-workers or bosses, to major family troubles, rejections, loved ones’ deaths, career failures and failed marriages, we get worn down. Parts of us die, and we become diminished.
In the Underworld, Alice wakes up to this diminishment of herself for the first time in her young life and musters the will to restore herself. She takes it as a challenge to overcome. “Lost my muchness, have I?” she says in a wonderful scene in which she uses the severed heads in the Red Queen’s moat as stepping stones to attempt to save The Mad Hatter. The heads are a perfect representation of the personal deaths she must overcome in order to become fully alive once again.
From that moment on, the adventure tale is laden with the story of the girl restoring herself. Part of that is finding the ability to slay the Jabberwocky. Convinced that she is incapable of slaying anything, Alice only finds the strength to face her fate when she has a final encounter with the caterpillar.
What allows her to see past her fear is the caterpillar’s acceptance of the end of one life leading into a transformation to the next. He must allow his caterpillar self to die for the butterfly to live. Alice has been busy reviving dead parts of herself, but the last transformation is to let go the part of herself that cannot possibly slay the Jabberwocky. Her passive self must die—and symbolically (and actually) she must kill the Jabberwocky to progress. Only when she cuts off the Jabberwocky’s head and drinks its blood can she return to her own world transformed and ready for the challenges she faces.
As the critics have said, the challenges she returns to do seem like familiar stuff in contemporary juvenile fiction, but that’s okay. Her journey through Underland touches on a universal story of soul transformation—and that makes it a worthy reimagining of a classic tale.
–Richard Engling
Often I read film reviews by writers that haven’t the slightest understanding of the mythological underpinnings of the story they are reporting on. This review shows understanding and depth. It explains what many critics have failed to see and have subsequently dismissed as “the hubris of rewriting Carroll for ones self gratification”.
Great Review!