Alice Through the Looking Glass – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by James Bobit
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) are unquestionably at the summit of canonical children’s literature.  Harry Potters and Hunger Games come and go, but Carroll’s creation is unique in its use of fantasy to address the true nature of childhood – not only its innocence and wonder, but also its cruelty, its perversity, its injustice.  That’s why Alice remains as fascinating today as she did a century and a half ago.  It’s also why nobody in particular seems to be awaiting this oddly belated sequel to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) – despite that film’s billion-dollar gross.

Burton’s Disney-backed film stripped Carroll of all provocation, pegging a hectic round-robin of would-be merchandisable characters to a desperately preachy and banal narrative about the importance of being oneself, staying true to one’s destiny, and blah blah blah.  Burton has absconded behind a producer’s vanity credit for Alice Through the Looking Glass, and left directing duties to Muppets alumnus James Bobin – but the new film doubles down regardless on everything that was tiresome about its predecessor.

Since Burton’s film plundered characters, if little else, from both Alice books, Bobit’s has little untapped Carroll to work with.  Instead, it cannibalises various other Disney franchises, beginning with an overblown sea-battle transparently intended to invoke the Pirates of the Caribbean films.  Mia Wasikowska’s Alice, you see, has become a ship’s captain, but – through various inane plot contrivances – she finds herself summoned back to “Underland” to assist in a nebulous quest involving the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp, perfectly dreadful) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, blessedly underused).  What ensues is largely an addled re-tread of the first film, with even more heavy-handed sermonising about the importance of friendship, family, and various other distinctly non-Carroll values.

Wasikowska can be a luminous presence, and she acquits herself valiantly here, although there is a certain note of pinched embarrassment creeping in around the edges of her performance.  As before, her job is mostly to play straight-woman to assorted digitally created or enhanced whatsits, and to gesture towards revisionism by doing drastic things like wearing trousers.  Of course, in time-honoured faux-feminist tradition, Alice’s strength of character is ascribed entirely to the influence of a saintly, and deceased, father – while her mother (a wasted Lindsay Duncan) hovers anxiously in the background.  The film’s slavish adherence to Hollywood’s ongoing oedipal fixation doesn’t end there, either, as the Mad Hatter now gets to indulge his own tiresome father issues, while the White and Red Queens squabble over their need for parental approval.

Thankfully, Helena Bonham Carter is on hand to reprise her role as the Red Queen – the high-camp highlight of the first film, and the one instance in which the sequel’s paucity of invention pays off.  There’s a Black Adder-ish mischief to Bonham Carter’s brutally inane monarch that almost suggests a genuine anti-authoritarian spirit (if one can banish the memory of those depressing photos of Burton and Bonham Carter hanging out with the Camerons).  Of course, some of the fun is leached away by the film’s predictable insistence on providing a trite backstory for this humanoid air-horn, but among the chintzy digital upholstery of everything else, she continues to strike a pleasingly piquant note.