Follow the White Rabbit
The 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland works best when your brain is somewhere it probably shouldn’t be—the colors are wrong in exactly the right way, the logic collapses and rebuilds itself every three minutes, and the Caterpillar sitting on his mushroom and blowing smoke rings at a confused little girl has a serenity that only makes sense if you’ve ever been that calm and that obnoxious at the same time. I watched it as a kid and it rewired something. The Cheshire Cat disappearing except for the grin. That grin hanging alone in the dark like an idea that refuses to leave.
Tim Burton has been circling this material his whole career without ever quite arriving at it, so when his version finally came together the anticipation had the particular texture of something long overdue. I was at the Astor Film Lounge in Berlin for the world premiere screening—the actual premiere was in London, broadcast live to the room while it rained on everyone at the red carpet, including the host, who did his best to seem warm and dry. He was neither.
And then the film. Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter as something between grief and low-grade menace—not the usual eccentric-kook reading—and it mostly works. The real discovery is Mia Wasikowska as Alice: she has a quality onscreen that reads as slightly elsewhere, present but not fully captured, which is precisely what the role needs. The 3D is used well, deploying depth to build layers of unreality rather than flinging objects at your face.
The story is thinner than it should be. You can feel the plot being managed rather than discovered, and the characters who should be psychologically interesting—the Hatter above all—occasionally flatten into spectacle. Burton is better at atmosphere than narrative and this film is no exception. But the atmosphere here is extraordinary. The world he’s built sits somewhere between fever dream and illuminated manuscript, and there’s a sequence late in the film lit in this bruised, glowing color that I haven’t been able to shake since the credits rolled.
The white rabbit led somewhere worth following.