Alice in Wonderland
March 4th, 2010
This isn’t about picking apart Burton’s space-time continuum. This is about wonder itself. Fantasy films need a main character who acts as our guide; through them, we feel wowed, cowed, lost and brave. Plop in a dull lead and we’re walled off from feeling anything. This isn’t Wasikowska’s fault—she’s lovely and game—but a shocking lack of inspiration from Burton who simply refashions Lewis Carroll into The Wizard of Oz. Smart, head-scrambling nonsense? Nah, just give us two battling witch-queens who make a teen girl settle their war. Burton dropped his creative genius somewhere in Sleepy Hollow and like a restless madman in the Hollywood asylum has spent the last 10 years obsessively drawing crooked trees.
Burton’s best films—Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands—have been the ones where he helped brainstorm the story. And both were set in the present-day mundane, farms and suburbs that showcased their big emotions and imagination. This last decade, he’s wasted his efforts on picking stories he seems to see as shortcuts: Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice that come complete with their loony worlds. All Burton has to do is add crooked trees. And that’s all he does.
Of course, his foliage is a package deal that includes starring roles for Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, who always give Burton their all. But with Depp, Burton has to know what to ask: brains or Wonka? (He goes full Wonka.) Here, Depp feels completely set adrift, veering from revolutionary hero to dance machine. Bonham Carter, however, seems to be the only actor on set who thinks for herself, and her Queen of Hearts is wicked fun. She’s a hydrocephalic mean girl fighting insecurity—when she’s feeling weak, someone’s gonna lose their head. Crispin Glover as her Knave is a great stroke of casting. Hathaway’s White Queen doesn’t get a punchline, but there are hints she’s every bit as creepy as her sister.
Nearly every second of Alice feels boggy and preordained. We’re never in doubt that Alice will do whatever she has to do—which is, for this dull Alice, whatever everyone else in Wonderland prophecies she must. We’re looking for something, anything that totally goes off the rails, and the only moment that does is when the Hatter hits on Alice. We’re jolted awake in alarm (flashbacks of him tea-partying it up with the child don’t help). On Friday, Burton will make many kids’ first introduction to Alice and her Wonderland—a tragedy. In the spirit of Carroll, I’m all for adventure, but this weekend, I’d rather they stay locked up at home.
When Roman Polanski was arrested last September, he was in the middle of post-production on his latest, this lean political drama about a scribe hired to shape the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) about to be indicted for war crimes. No matter: Polanski simply re-routed his office to the Swiss chateau where he was under house arrest. That the resulting flick turned out to be fantastic feels like a taunt, but it’s truly just a very good director turning out a very good film, as is his usual course of action. (Besides, the real jab belongs to California Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza, who insisted last month that Polanski return to the States for sentencing.) But lets turn attention to talents who deserve it—and there’s a lot of them, starting with writer Richard Harris who adapted his novel The Ghost into this moody, callow thriller, and star Ewan McGregor who follows up The Men Who Stare at Goats with yet another hapless innocent caught in an espionage snare. As the ghost writer, or simply “the ghost,” as he calls himself, McGregor follows his agent’s command (and the quarter-million paycheck) to a remote island where Brosnan, wife Olivia Williams and Brosnan’s assistant and mistress Kim Cattrall are hiding out from the media. Everyone wants a copy of Brosnan’s rough draft, much to McGregor’s confusion—it’s as boring as a VCR manual. Even before he starts killing dull paragraphs, the atmosphere is fatal; Brosnan’s last aide and writer recently took a deadly tumble off a ferry boat. But as the hawks circle Brosnan’s political career, McGregor finds himself targeted by people with their own agenda. Within five minutes of signing his contract, he’s punched in the stomach and robbed. And from there, the hits keep coming. Like the Swiss clocks that must have watched over his editing suite, Polanski’s flick ticks away relentlessly—at 128 minutes, the film doesn’t make us impatient for a second.
Martin Scorsese’s latest is a puff of smoke, the type of classic Hollywood mystery hailed as art when done by auteurs and dismissed as ham when done by anyone less esteemed. You could switch the credits and the kudos would follow—it’s branding. Since Scorsese is behind the lens, Shutter Island will be deemed art. But this is thick, satisfying ham, and recognizing it as such doesn’t make it less of a meal. (Though luckily for him, at 138 min. of moody lighting and thundering music and forceful camera work and great acting, we’re feeling full and forgiving by the time the last reels make us roll our eyes.) Leonardo DiCaprio, no longer a heartthrob but a full-on Humphrey Bogart, stalks the halls of an aloof, island mental ward for the criminally insane in search of an escaped murderess (Emily Mortimer). He’s tailed by his partner, Mark Ruffalo, his memories of his dead wife (Michelle Williams) and his memories of “liberating” Dachau, which tangle around him like a noose and have given him an interest in government-sponsored inhumanity. This being 1954, the year of the McCarthy-Army hearings, he’s got plenty of material. But with the entrance of two secretive psychologists (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) and rumors of a lobotomization lab in the old lighthouse, the mystery gets bigger and murkier until it swallows DiCaprio whole. Adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from the Dennis Lehane novel, Shutter Island plays like a thriller from a simpler time before audiences expected shocking twists (now so standard, nothing’s shocking). It’s handsome and chilly—it doesn’t envelop you, it just invites you to come along for the ride. Oddly, one of its faults is that the acting is almosttoo good. We feel duped by its sincerity and betrayed by its sympathy, particularly in the last half hour, which sighs when it should scorch. Scorsese has proven he can shoot a good-looking classic thriller, but Hitchcock knew when to get nasty.
Demi Moore and Parker Posey play sisters united by their dad’s immaturity but divided by their own. As the responsible, pragmatic blue-collar wife and mother, Moore can’t respect younger sis Posey for living like a spoiled toddler—and she can’t get over her jealousy that Posey married a rich man (Christian Camargo) who enables her self-centered frailty. (Largely because he’s too self-centered and frail himself to notice—he’s the son of a great modern artist, something writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein knows well.) When dad Rip Torn is stricken with an Alzheimer’s-esque disease, Posey returns to the homestead and perkily insists she’ll lend a hand, though Moore’s hopes stay flatlined; instead of babysitting one infantilized adult, now she’s got two. Three, if you count dad’s new girlfriend Ellen Barkin, who pretends she’s a nurse but clearly has a drug habit that she funds playing doctor on street corners. Lichtenstein’s last feature, the vagina dentata drama Teeth, was a horror flick with sociological ambitions. This is sociology with a jolt of humdrum horror, especially when Barkin devours a chicken clenched in her filthy nails. True performances keep it from feeling too sassy or too schmaltzy; the characters aren’t always convincing, but they’re acted with such conviction that we accept their world, at least until the credits roll. The nice surprise is Posey and Moore’s sister act. Sure, they look alike (though it’s a casting coup that Moore plays dowdy), but the two share a real intimacy in their scenes, casually fussing with the other’s hair or storming over the other’s sentences with a familiarity that feels homegrown. Hollywood needs more strong female writers and directors, but until Kathryn Bigelow breaks through that glass ceiling and drags up her posse, at least Hollywood’s strong female actors have in Lichtenstein a young talent who gives them the roles they deserve.
The Greek gods made for great storytelling because they had outsized powers and petty grievances. These Gen-Y demigods are no different. In the ’90s, Zeus (Sean Bean) decreed that Olympian parents could have no contact with their half-breed offspring, thus creating a whole generation of kids with daddy issues. Among them is Percy (Logan Lerman), a teen who’s just learned that he’s the son of Poseidon of the sea (Kevin McKidd) and Sally of Manhattan (Catherine Keener). And Uncle Zeus has just accused him of stealing his lightning bolt, triggering a war of the gods set to detonate on the summer solstice. The unwieldy title tips the studio’s hand that they’d like to make a franchise out of Rick Riordan’s popular novels—they’ve even hired director Chris Columbus for some of Harry Potter’s luck—but this first installment isn’t a knockout. Lerman is a handsome kid and a fine dramatic actor, but his Percy is so slim on brains and wonder that we’re just passively along for the ride. As Grover, Percy’s satyr bodyguard, Brandon T. Jackson (Alpa Chino in Tropic Thunder) has that missing spark, even if we groan at watching a goat-legged hipster get busy on the dance floor. And if you’re willing to forgive a flick that gives Athena a daughter (Google it), Alexandra Daddario has a lovely Grecian sternness to her face and she slings a sword like she means it. After the trio meets up at a camp for demigods (which is crowded to the brim—looks like abstinence-only education doesn’t work on Olympus either), they set off to convince Zeus and Hades (Steve Coogan) of Percy’s innocence, an odyssey that sees them confronting Medusa (Uma Thurman) in a twee statuary shoppe and getting sidelined by the pleasures of the Lotus Casino in Vegas (my favorite nudge to the ribs). Oddly, the CGI wizardry on display is bottom of the barrel—if you’re going to half-ass making a hydra, you’d be better off with Ray Harryhausen’s claymation.
Dracula loves his job. Frankenstein’s a grunt. But the Wolfman has a unique torture—he’s human enough to hate killing, but too savage to stop. He’s the only movie monster who wonders if suicide is painless. To its credit, Joe Johnston’s grim adaptation stares death head-on, even making a bleak joke out of a bullet to the head. The woods are dark, the villagers violent, the mood malevolent, and through them tromps Benicio Del Toro’s doomed Lawrence Talbot, the gloomy sole surviving son of Sir John (Anthony Hopkins, in full Michael Caine sell-out mode, minus Caine’s grace and good humor). Pops is a former adventurer who brought back from his explorations an animal skin smoking jacket, enough taxidermy to fill a mansion, a manservant named Singh (Art Malik) and a callow cruelty that’s nearly Social Darwinism, the hot trend of 1896, except you doubt he gives a hoot for reading. Yes, this flick frames Lawrence as the prodigal son, a point dear old dad makes by quoting the Bible. He’s also driven home as Hamlet, both as a Shakespearean actor before he’s bitten and after when he gets into the bitter business of wondering to be or not to be. Still, entrails outnumber allusions. And while The Wolfmannever has you in its claws, it’s a serviceable thriller with great period design and a pleasing determination to stay as dark as we dare. It’s not Lawrence’s fault that he kills in a blackout rage, but we can’t root for him while he’s tearing the heads off a double-decker bus of civilians. In fact, we rarely like him at all—he can’t even stand himself. English actress Emily Blunt is the movie’s one beacon of warmth. The fiancée of Lawrence’s dead brother, she enlists his help to find his killer. Though she’s unfailingly polite and tragic, toward the film’s climax you believe that she and Del Toro could have had a glimmer of happiness if neither had been betrothed or bewitched. But this is the rare blockbuster that offers its characters—and its audience—no shelter.
It’s a cliché to say that acting is prostitution, though both are asked to mimic love for pay. Still, for both, it’s rare to believe it—even if just for 90 minutes. Nicholas Sparks, the John Grisham of romance novelists whose books seem to be optioned before they leave Microsoft Word, has had great luck getting Hollywood to cast leads who sizzle. Chemistry—not plot—made The Notebook a guilty modern classic. And director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) has graced him with Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum, two very pretty twentysomethings who enter this movie from opposite directions, connect like magnets and spin out of control. Seyfried plays a South Carolina undergrad who’s just nearly too perfect. The third time they meet, Tatum—a laconic Army Special Ops man—calls the charming, teetotalling shampoo commercial out for having no faults. Tatum doesn’t seem like he’s acting. The first few scenes he’s a strong and silent statue—clearly Seyfried sees something in him that we don’t. But what makes Dear John unusual is that we do learn to understand him when we meet his dad (Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins) who Seyfried quickly pegs as mildly autistic. Dear John’s first half works because the characters’ lives feel rich and full: these aren’t two rom com workaholic Manhattanites. And under the golden glow of their first two weeks together, we see Tatum open up and Seyfried deepen. After love, however, is when things get tricky. Set in the spring of 2001, this is a period piece from our new past. When the Twin Towers fall, Tatum feels pressure to reenlist. After his first leave, Hallström fumbles the our sense of time, making a year and a half feel like months and making the characters’ painful decisions feel rushed and arbitrary. When movie mechanics wedge into their romance, we check out. But there’s enough love in this love story to make us feel for a son and his father, and Tatum’s attempts to connect with his dad—so disconnected from everyone—are heartbreaking.
