Cabbages, Kings, and Wild Things
At the climax of Le Petit Prince, our young protagonist tells a garden full of roses just like the precious one he has on his comet, “Vous êtes belles, mais vous êtes vides” – “You are beautiful, but you are empty.” This is the sentiment that filled my mind watching Tim Burton’s new film, Alice in Wonderland, at the 3D IMAX with my roommates last week. Contrariwise, Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, which I rented with my friend Juliana, is beautiful and bare, but still full. Which was somewhat more surprising, as picture books aren’t made to be turned into two-hour movies, nohow!
Where the Wild Things Are is, however, surprisingly faithful to the book on which it’s based. Sure, it adds scenes and names and various events, expanding the handful of words into a script, but it brings out the spirit of the original, preserving the simple story of Max, a frustrated boy who gets sent to bed without supper and runs off to become king of the Wild Things.
The main difference between the book and the movie is that the book is for small children first, adults second; the movie is for older people, despite carefully constructing a six-year-old’s viewpoint. I’m far more patient with movies now than when I was six, and I still found it slow-paced and difficult to sit through – everything is lovingly shot, with long, gorgeous sequences in which little “happens”, and, as Juliana put it, the movie seems intended to make its audience feel uncomfortable, emotionally and intellectually (perhaps physically, too, although I suppose that depends on your seat), until the very last scene. The themes are sophisticated and sobering, of acceptance of imperfection and of one’s own inability to make things better, and the tension comes from trying to make sense of the metaphors, hoping to attach meaning to the dreamlike visions on the screen.
But I think the matter of meaning is where Jonze really strikes gold. Many mainstream movies like to tell us what things mean upfront – it’s not too hard to figure out the significance, say, of Mufasa’s ghostly appearance in The Lion King or of Jack and Rose’s romance in Titanic. Mufasa appears to spur Simba to go back to the Pridelands and take his place as king. He’s the force for growing up and taking responsibility instead of running away from your problems. Jack and Rose’s romance is about taking joy in life and love instead of doing what other people tell you is “proper”. But Jonze doesn’t spell everything it out for you: what are these Wild Things? Are they like members of Max’s family? Are they Max? Are they Max’s feelings? And what’s the whole deal with people getting eaten? What’s that supposed to signify?
The great part of Where the Wild Things Are is that the Wild Things are all these things. And more. And instead of being overwhelming and confusing and disorienting, it’s fascinating. Just like real life, there’s always a meaning you can grasp at, but you have to look for it, and once you have it between your fingers, it’s gone again. In the end, all you can hang onto is how the movie makes you feel.
Meaning, on the other hand, is exactly where Alice in Wonderland falls down. One of the most delightful things about the original Alice books is how very little sense they make. They’re episodic in the silliest way, travelogues through funny logic land, charming with their ideas and wonder but not pushing anything like a plot or character development. Yet somehow, whenever a film adaptation is made, the filmmakers seem to feel that it’s necessary to take away this dreamlike meandering and make it all “mean” something. Usually, this takes the form of showing a brief scene of conflict before Alice heads off to Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (usually combined indiscriminately, although that’s really the least of any problems) and foreshadowing all the strange people Alice will meet with their real-life equivalents.
In Tim Burton’s version, this well intended meaning-transplant surgery uses yet another trope that I find annoying: jeez, those Victorians sure restricted women’s freedom, but that’s okay, because once a woman got it into her head that she wanted to be independent, every good person suddenly remembered that they had the political opinions of the twenty-first-century left wing! Indeed, none of the movie’s villains can quite decide whether they have teeth: the Queen of Hearts’s castle moat is filled with decapitated heads, but she’s ineffectual and silly, making all the most ridiculous villain mistakes (clearly, someone‘s never read the Evil Overlord List). Her troops do slash and cut with nasty weapons, and the Knave of Hearts is suitably menacing (did you expect anything less from Crispin Glover?), but for all their bluster, they never actually hurt anyone. In fact, the biggest injury is received by several members of the wicked side who get an eye gouged out at various points in the movie.
A charming absurdist slideshow becomes a wannabe Narnian battle, with hit-you-over-the-head war-movie lines (“The Queen… she has my wife and pups…”), cheesy insertions of classic Carroll lines (with parts jarringly cut out), and ancient prophecies that drive the plot. I understand that Burton was trying to rework the Alice stories into a “what if the real story had been…” scenario, but I think it was poorly done. It feels more like a theme party: here’s the story we really want to tell, but let’s dress it up with an Alice costume because it’s so pretty and fun. I don’t think the story would have lost anything from being told about a set of original characters in an Wonderland invented entirely by Burton, and that says a lot. Carroll’s work is a celebration of the nonsense of logic and norms and language – to staple on a plot is to undo exactly what has made Alice in Wonderland such a timeless classic. Ironically, the addition of explicit, clichéd meaning makes it mean exactly nothing.
The 3D IMAX effects are suitably jaw-dropping, and the actors all deliver – I was particularly impressed with Mia Wasikowska as the titular character, who more than holds her own against the likes of Johnny Depp, Stephen Fry, Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman. And I did enjoy seeing a woman as the heroic knight-in-armour who must obtain the mystical sword and slay the dragon. But all that wasn’t enough to distract me from the feeling that I was watching Alice, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. See it in theatres, and marvel at the spectacle and the woooo, shiny!, but don’t expect anything it has to say to stay with you any longer than the 3D glasses you have to give back as you exit.