Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass

Alice Through the Looking Glass (PG)

USA 2016 123 mins Dir: James Bobin Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Rhys Ifans

If Tim Burton’s inexplicably successful 2010 blockbuster Alice in Wonderland led us down the rabbit hole of despair, then director James Bobin’s follow-up, Alice Through the Looking Glass, at least attempts to restore some semblance of author Lewis Carroll’s characteristic eccentricity, even if it’s ultimately stymied by the desire to streamline Carroll’s nonsense literature into a conventionally adventurous narrative. Still, there’s a degree more zip in both the visual design and performances compared to Burton’s visually ghastly, bombastic onslaught.

It’s also goosed by some provocative gender undercurrents that, despite their half-hearted meshing with the film’s fantasy landscapes, at least display a degree of thought and intelligence. Indeed, Looking Glass is the rare big budget blockbuster spearheaded almost entirely by its women characters, chief among which is our single-minded heroine Alice, appealingly played as before by the versatile Mia Wasikowska.

Returning to England in the wake of her thrilling, ocean-going exploits, Alice finds herself an incongrously adventurous presence amidst the stifling Victorian environment, sneered at by the man whose hand in marriage she spurned and compelled to sell her father’s company, as well as the boat on which she sailed. These sections are quite possibly the film’s strongest, veteran Lindsay Duncan making a strong impression as Alice’s mother who is seemingly helpless to prevent her daughter sliding down the path society has set.

Guided by the presence of caterpillar-turned-butterfly Absolem (Alan Rickman in his final screen performance), Alice ventures back into the helter-skelter world of Wonderland. With the pop-eyed, crazy-haired Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) slipping further into erratic craziness, convinced that his apparently deceased family are still alive, Alice is encouraged to travel back in time to save him. It’s a process that will involve her stealing the Chronosophere from the very embodiment of Time himself (a mincing Sacha Baron Cohen, channelling Christoph Waltz with cogs whirring in the back of his head). As she zips back and forth across a (literal) ocean of time, Alice uncovers the tragic Jabberwocky incident that claimed the life of the Hatter’s father, Zanik Hightopp (Rhys Ifans).

If Burton’s Alice felt like a bad parody of a director trying to recapture his youthful quirkiness, then Bobin is here much lighter on his feet, bringing the sprightly touch from both his Muppets reboot and the Flight of the Conchords to keep things barrelling along at a fair clip. In contrast to the sepia, gloomy horror of the Burton movie the colour palette here is, for the more part, more attractive in its primary pastel shades, the physical sets meshing with the CGI overload much more efficiently. Some of the designs are enjoyably off-the-wall, especially Time’s lair accessed by two enormous clock hands and occupied by minion-like characters called Seconds (very Return to Oz).

It also deepens the emotional arc of Wasikowska’s Alice. Bobin and screenwriter Linda Woolverton resist building towards the previous movie’s eye-rolling, sword-swinging climax but instead focus more on the character’s personal redemption, her quest to save the Hatter a warped mirror of the family dynamics occuring back in the real world. Wasikowska appears more engaged this time and her on-screen relationship with a (slightly) less-manic-than-usual Depp approaching somewhat poignant resonances towards the climax. Also effective is the complexity of the relationship teased between the returning Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and White Queen (Anne Hathaway), a turbulent bond more compelling than anything involving the film’s male characters.

Of course, what this owes to Carroll is anybody’s guess. Instead of revelling in the intricacies of the author’s language and the pleasure of his eccentric constructs, this is still at heart an overproduced, overcranked Disney fantasy adventure with numerous gaudy set-pieces that betray the delicate intricacy of Carroll’s original vision. Not quite Wonderland but not quite Blunderland either, it’s a marginal improvement on what went before but the quest for a big-screen Alice that lives up to the classic 1951 animation continues.