Friday we joined a packed theater at Cinemark Palace on the Plaza for opening night of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. We hardly knew what to anticipate, except that between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, who played the Mad Hatter, we knew it would not prove boring.
The movie did not disappoint. As always, Burton’s eye for color, absurdity, and beauty in the least expected places, lent the film his distinct style and awkward grace. The makeup, scenery, and costuming (oh what I wouldn’t give for Alice’s wardrobe) were not only breath-taking, but also added complexity and depth to the characters and plot.
Burton’s “Alice,” though set in Wonderland and sporting all the familiar characters, is not a retelling of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel. It is instead a sequel of sorts. Alice, now a young woman, remembers her girlhood stint in Wonderland as a dream more than a reality. Mourning the death of her creative, ambitious, loving father, she is struggling to reconcile her own inherited sense of adventure and zest for life with the duties and obligations foisted upon her by her mother and a society where marriage to a wealthy man was the acceptable role for an upper-class woman. Confronted with a very public marriage proposal from a young man who repulsed her, she turns and flees, only to fall down a rabbit hole and land back in Wonderland.
Her ensuing adventure is a quest to find herself. When he meets her, her old friend The Mad Hatter says to her, “You used to be much…muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.” Frightened and confused, Alice attempts to leave this world too, but she finally moves forward and recaptures her muchness, discovering that she alone can write her own life’s story and that belief in the impossible can transform it into the possible.
The themes are not original. The film is a motivational speaker wrapped in a fantasy world and set to a story line. But their unoriginality does not diminish their importance. In a results-driven world, standardization and conformity are the great values fed to an insatiable machine churning out more: more power, more money, more food, more security, more stability within the hierarchy.
Unfortunately, it never amounts to much.
A few exceptional people follow the lure of Wonderland, and when they do, they return to this world with a renewed courage to reconsider the line between impossible and possible. Their muchness irritates and confounds those who enjoy controlling the world, but inspires those who seek to discover and truly live in the world.
Sometimes you simply must follow the white rabbit, Alice.
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