The movie Alice is also stricken by her beloved father's death as Dodgson said he had been. Her Wonderland dream is an escape from social strictures back to the freedom of childhood, and not imprisonment but liberation. Emotionally, though, her Alice is a bright child, a preteen in a late teen's body, as if she had suddenly sprouted by nibbling a magic cake.
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Wasikowska, the Australian who was superb as a suicidal teen on the HBO series In Treatment, brings a soft-focus regality to her role. And upping Alice's age removes the whisper of pedophilia that the 20th century applied to the love that Charles Dodgson, the Oxford math professor who was the real Lewis Carroll, lavished on the real Alice Liddell, the 10-year-old for whom he extemporized the original story on a canoe trip in 1862. It's not a crime for a film to turn a girl into a young lady: Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz was 16, about twice the age of the book's Dorothy. In the book she is "seven-and-a-half, exactly" here she's 19 and meant to wed a pruny nobleman. (See the top 10 movie performances of 2009.) The film is better at reveling in eccentricity than at replaying Excalibur. This twist legitimizes the feature-length running time but also risks turning this jovially anarchic enterprise into your standard action-adventure. In assuming this challenge, she becomes a female Frodo, Wonderland's Joan of Arc. One was to transform Carroll's episodic tale into an epic quest, based on the poem "Jabberwocky." Alice must seize the vorpal sword and slay the fearsome Jabberwock. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton and Burton made two big changes to the text. (See the great British thespians of Harry Potter.) There's a lilt to her malevolence she keeps fey at bay. Iracebeth is as much a spoiled child as an evil monarch, pouting as she demands a pig for a footstool, and Bonham Carter plays her as a parody of Bette Davis in her Queen Elizabeth roles. Bonham Carter (Burton's partner offscreen) sports blue eye shadow that could have been applied by windshield wipers. Anne Hathaway, as the White Queen, is given crimson lips, platinum hair and, alas, no redeeming quirks. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter matches his flaming red hair with red eyeliner, as if he'd been crying for years he's a gentleman ghoul out of Johnny Weir's closet. Some actors lend their voices to CGI characters: Alan Rickman to the Caterpillar, Stephen Fry to the Cheshire Cat, the 92-year-old Gough (in his fifth Burton film) as the Dodo Bird.
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