AndrewBloom
7/10 4 years ago
[7.3/10] *Alice in Wonderland* feels more like a showcase than a movie. It doesn't have a plot so much as it has a series of random events happening in succession. It doesn't have characters so much as it has living toys, wound-up by this or that and crashing into one another. And it doesn't so much have a build to the finish so much as it leaps from scene to scene until all its myriad personalities and pieces pile-up in one grand finale.
And yet, that loopy formlessness is also the film’s charm. Our closing glimpse through the keyhole suggests that this whole escapade may be Alice’s daydream. While more linear than liminal, that sluice of moments and players helps capture the absurdity of dreams and the spirit of joyful nonsense that animates the adaptation of Lewis Caroll’s original work.
It would be hard to describe what happens in Disney’s 1951 release without resorting to a series of “and then” statements, but that matches our tenuous efforts to describe our real life reveries. Why shouldn’t it apply just as easily to their cinematic equivalents?
The best element of *Alice in Wonderland* its unwavering commitment to that sense off-kilter loopiness throughout. In the film’s introduction and bookend, Alice tires of her studies of history and speaks hopefully of a word defined only by its absurdity, by its self-contradictory silliness, by its negation of everything sound and sensical. Then, Disney’s team delivers just that, an amusing and thoroughly loony realization of the young woman’s idle thought.
Rabbits in waistcoats race through impossibly sized portholes. Sea creatures race in circles in a sopping-wet conga line. Honking twins tell rambling fables of greedy walruses and witless carpenters. Hookah-billowed caterpillars speak in glyphs that match their overenunciated utterances. Kangaroo courts full of head-chopping tyrants, demurring kings-in-name-only, and playing card subjects convene for the world’s most useless array of witnesses. A smiling cat slips bits of his figure in and out of perspective, treating his own anatomy like more of a suggestion than a given. And that’s all without mentioning the tea party.
*Alice in Wonderland*, then, is delightfully bizarre. There is little that holds these interludes together. Alice traipses through many of them initially when trying to find the White Rabbit and rushes through the remainder when trying to find her way home. The final courtroom scene and race back to reality also unite the disparate personalities of this bonkers little burg. But for the most part, the film indulges in silliness and weirdness for their own sake, which is neither a crime here nor in wonderland.
It’s not hard to see, then, why this one became a favorite of the psychedelic set. The film is awash in an array of colors, from the bluish hues of the seaside bunch, to the springtime tones of the floral chorus, to the puffs of multi-colored smoke spewed by the multi-legged aficionado. Visual puns abound with a host of interesting character designs. The lines between animals and tools blur. Card-like citizens of the Queen of Hearts’s kingdom bend and flop and cascade with an appropriate elasticity. And Alice herself moves with a child’s grace and chagrin through it all.
The piece de resistance of the whole production comes in the famed tea party. There, the film not only reaches its apotheosis of ridiculous wordplay and entertaining vindications of Caroll’s efforts to twist and bend language to suit his own purposes, but finds a visual outlandishness to match. The physics-cracking pouring of a literal half a cup of tea, or unbirthday celebrations where cakes emerge from empty space, or pocket watches “fixed” with butter and jam (but never mustard!) give the film its high point of enjoyable craziness, no small feat given the other contenders.
And yet, despite the sense of goofiness for its own sake, the proceedings carry the whiff of satire that’s only perceptible in the broadest of terms for modern audiences. I’ll cop to having little, if any, understanding of the social and political eccentricities of Victorian England, which Caroll’s novels, and by extension, their adaptations, inevitably seem to be holding a fun house mirror too.
That said, even a century and a half later, plus the added mediation of a new method of presenting the story, it’s not hard to comprehend the subtle critique beneath all that dreamlike nonsense. Upper crusty types blithely “solve” problems by enlisting (or gobbling up) the less well-heeled. Rulers demand to be feted and coddled, responding violently to minor transgressors, whilst henpecking their partners. Trials are shows and shams, made into venues for more parades of gobbledygook and sentences that bear no relation to crimes or verdicts. Even without knowing the specific references, the broader thrust of that social criticism still comes through clearly.
The only major weakness from a lean and amiable release is that, stacked on top of one another, each new serving of absurdity starts to lose some of its novelty. Disney’s team rights the ship by the end by smushing all of Alice’s woebegotten acquaintances together into one raucous escape. But after a while, the surfeit of silliness sloughs off some of its senationalness through sheer repetition.
Still, that mild sense of exhaustion works with the low key themes of the film. Alice wishes for a land free from the responsibilities and structures of being a proper young woman. Then, when confronted with them, she finds that shaggy reality is less hospitable than she imagined, and yearns to go back to the more stollid but nevertheless safe world (and adorable cat) that she once knew. The audience is in far less peril than Alice and she grows and shrinks in size and faces corresponding shifts in might and mercy. But it’s easy to reach the end and share her sense of having had one’s fill of such freewheeling foolishness.
That foolishness, though, is the point of *Alice in Wonderland*. The film doesn't much care to tell a story, or develop its characters, or progress from one thought to another. It just wants to entertain, and capture the imaginative free-associating glory of dreams, and let foolishness rule the day, or at least the hour. That’s more than worth a trip through the looking glass.
