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Messrs. Burton and Depp fill Disney’s fantasy-action Alice in Wonderland with equal measures of delights and disappointments. The best way to enjoy the interestingly mixed result is to drink in the visual spectacle and performances and forget all about Lewis Carroll’s clever whimsy.

[The following is a REPRINT of the redblog review of Alice in Wonderland on its theatrical release this spring. Alice in Wonderland is now on DVD and available for rental from redbox.]

The latest Alice in Wonderland is not quite the twisted joy dreamed of by fans of both Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton. Devotees of the 19th Century nonsensist and the 20th Century gothy imaginut are going to come away from this hyped-up,  Narnia-ized kiddie-action Alice scratching their (still attached) heads at its odd collision of creative and commercial intentions. However, as is often the case with Burton’s films, if you squint it’s easy to enjoy the gimcrackery around the edges, even if the center does not hold.

The film technically comes at Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as a sequel. Alice is now all growns up into a wan-but-winning, sullen-but-smart 19-year-old, played with willowy, knowing perfection by Mia Wasikowska (HBO’s In Treatment). Her return to “Wonderland” (as she mistook its name during her initial childhood visits) is an escape from Victorian polite society and arranged marriages that are closing in as she reaches adulthood.

What she finds in “Underland” (a clever twist, underscoring how the child’s wonderment once rose-colored her understanding of what was a seething cauldron of the subconscious) is a fairytale kingdom suffering under the despotic rule of the Red Queen (of Hearts). (Helena Bonham Carter having a ball, her gloriously enlarged noggin gleefully chewing the trippy CGI scenery). Older Alice (the “wrong Alice” as the skeptical Underland creatures proclaim her) then re-experiences her original encounters with white rabbits (Michael Sheen), size-altering potions, smoke-hazed blue caterpillars (Alan Rickman), and evaporating Cheshire Cats (Stephen Fry, languidly drifting through the film’s very best vocal performance).

(Acting-wise Wasikowska is the special find—she comes luminously alive as the film progresses, the actress’s growing confidence nicely balancing Alice’s doubts and gumption.)

And of course there is the Tea Party, a lovely tableau of Victorian decay, presided over by its haberdasher and his mental-illness issues. Like the film itself, Johnny Depp’s performance—which is, for better or worse, its centerpiece and selling point–is lazily looping along on Jack Sparrow’s amusingly sidelong schizophrenia. But on the other hand, hey it’s Johnny Depp. There are worst things in the film world than watching our Most Beloved Eccentric goofily phone one in while prancing about in full bull-goose-loony mode.

The first half of Alice in Wonderland revisits the familiar Carroll absurdities, but all the while screenwriter Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast) is pushing the tale into a standard “rebellion awaiting its leader/savior” story. The Hatter and his sundry companions are trying to recruit Alice into helping them overthrow the crimson despot and put Anne Hathaway’s luminously prissy-kooky White Queen back on the throne.

Along the way too much of what has for 150 years made Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a touchstone for lunatic dreamers of all sorts gets shoehorned into that Narnic formula. Did we need to know more about the Hatter’s noble-knight backstory? Nope. Does it strip Carroll’s creations of some of their subversive, satiric mystery? Certainly.

(And in an unrelated note, why exactly is Crispin Glover’s head awkwardly pasted on the sinister Knave of Hearts’ slightly elongated CGI body? To match his Red Queen mistresses’ own distortions, I suppose, but the clumsy effect sadly undermine’s Glover’s slyly determined performance.)

Sure, most of the changes and updates to Alice’s resolutely random story will grate on Carroll fans–a masterpiece of surreal nonsense is jerry-rigged into a Chosen-One Heroine’s Journey, complete with broad Girl-Power messages stapled onto the now-required blockbuster action set pieces. (Again we ask, does a new Alice need a heroic “Marching Off to Battle” scene? Or a dragon-slaying climax with a “kill quip”? No and no.) Nor did Disney need to strip Carroll’s tale of all its allegorical subtext just to keep it palatable for tweeners—the very point of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is that children should not be talked down to by their literature. Or their cinema.

The melding of Burton and Carroll had many expecting a career-topping achievement for the director. But no one in front or behind the camera goes truly, gloriously mad here. This isn’t Burton’s first blockbuster (anyone still remember Batman Before Bale?), nor is it the first time he’s wandered lost in a remake or adaptation, unable to pull his stray, flyaway visions into a cohesive whole; the director’s always been fantastic with the ideas, hit and miss in the execution.

Like most blockbusters these days, Alice has bloat—at times the frantic pace and ODTAA (One Darn Thing After Another) action-film plotting curdles into inertia and the wondrous eventually becomes ponderous.Still, there’s plenty to enjoy in the film’s expressionistic art design and its parade of grinning and grimacing performances. And if you’d never heard of Tim Burton or Lewis Carroll, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland should for the most part–in its own uneven, herky jerky way—dazzle and distract. With managed expectations, you’ll be loudly entertained for a while and still escape with your grander dreams intact.

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