Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998)

Posted on Jul 20, 2005 under Fantasy, Kidvid |

Directed by John Henderson
Written by Nick Vivian, based on the novel by Lewis Carroll
Starring
- Kate Beckinsale
- Ian Holm
- Penelope Wilton
- Sian Phillips
- Geoffrey Palmer

It says something about my life — and not a very nice something — that my friends are people who will say, “Ooh, I just saw a movie that was so bad, I’m going to have to send it to you and make you watch it!” In this instance, the friend (with friends like this, who needs enemies?) was Chad Denton of The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the movie in question was the 1998 version of Alice Through the Looking Glass, starring a pre-stardom Kate Beckinsale and a whole bunch of revered actors who, in Chad’s estimation, Should Have Known Better.

Of course, the hurdles to making a good movie out of either of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are nigh stratospheric. Carroll’s books are classics of whimsical children’s fantasy, but they are also short on what would commonly refer to as “story.” That’s not a criticism; it’s an honest observation. Alice’s adventures are meant to be dreamlike and surreal, and thus overlook such things as dramatic structure. This isn’t a problem when the tales are presented as they were intended to be presented, i.e., a chapter a night read out loud to sleepy children. (Which is what I did in preparation for this review.) But condensing either narrative to the strictures of a motion picture will only emphasize the lack of dramatic momentum; the nonsensical is compressed and concentrated and served to our eyeballs in a whirlwind of discontinuitous non sequiturs. That is, unless the original tales are changed mightily to make conventional stories out of them. Mark my words, whenever you sit down to watch a movie version of an Alice book, either the audience or the book is going to get kicked in the crotch.

But even on top of the perils inherent in such an adaptation, there are some bad creative choices made in this version that further weigh the enterprise down. And the first one comes right as the movie begins: A grown woman (Kate Beckinsale) tucks her daughter (Charlotte Curley) into bed and sleepily lies down beside her to start reading Through the Looking Glass. Of course, she has to explain that a “looking glass” is a mirror (more on such things later), and as she rises to use the mirror in the daughter’s room to demonstrate, the glass shimmers, and she can see into the looking-glass world. She touches the glass…

…and presto! She’s Alice, blue pinafore and all, on the other side of the looking glass.

**“Oh, the script makes ever so much more sense this way!”**

Now in retrospect, one can see how this idea would have been thought a Very Good Idea at the time, in that it alleviates the need to find a child actor of the appropriate age (seven and a half exactly) to play Alice. (Although that very thing has been done at least twice before for big budget versions, and say what you will about the productions, neither Alice was the weakest link.) But the framing device complicates things unnecessarily, and raises more questions than it answers. Being an adult who knows the story of Through the Looking Glass should, one assumes, have an effect on how our Alice reacts to the looking-glass world. But no, the particulars of the framing scene have absolutely no effect on the narrative. Once through the looking glass, Mom never thinks of herself as being anything other than Alice, nor does she behave in any way different than the heroine in the book who didn’t already know the story.

Anyway. We’re off and running, and our heroine shall henceforth be referred to simply as “Alice”. She sees the tiny white king and white queen (Geoffrey Palmer and Penelope Wilton) on the carpet and lifts them to the chessboard; she notes the poem “Jabberwocky” in a book (though she doesn’t read the whole thing); and she trots out into the garden to meet the flowers.

Ah, the flowers. This is another one of those sinking-feeling moments, as one realizes the budgetary restraints beneath which the production will be laboring. The gardens and landscapes are, indeed, beautiful (shot on the Isle of Man, if the credit to the Film Commission of the Isle of Man is any indication), but wherever possible, humans are going to be playing the story’s non-human roles. In this case, it means that the speaking flowers are played by lithe women in body stockings, each wearing a flowered hat at a rakish angle, and sporting the kind of bright, stripy eye makeup that once was the province of Denise on The Cosby Show. (Speaking of which, one of the flowers is played by the requisite black girl, because politically-correct casting is simply to be expected.)

The flowers send Alice to meet the Red Queen, played with a counterintuitive calm by Sian Phillips. (That calm delivery will be our friend for much of the movie; rather than the larger-than-life performances one might appropriately expect for fantasy characters in garish costumes, it seems almost that most actors were instructed to deliver “method” acting, so understated as to seem positively bland compared to the garish visuals.) The Red Queen gives Alice instructions on the chessboard nature of the land, sends her on her way toward being a queen herself, and… DOES NOT RUN WITH HER.

That’s both problematic in itself, and indicative of a flaw that’s going to plague us throughout the movie: Bad choices of what to keep in and what to leave out. The “Red Queen’s Race” is one of the most universally-known scenes in the book, and has taken on a life outside of the story as a cultural reference. To leave it out of the movie entirely seems like part of a bizarre plot to skip over those parts which are the most memorable.

Next, Alice finds herself on a train (delivered there by a vertical “pond ripple” special effect — an addition meant to clearly indicate her passage from one chess square to the next), and from there to a field for her conversation with the gnat. In keeping with the need to play nonhuman roles with human characters, we first see the prop puppet gnat, who is then quickly replaced with a nattily (hah!) dressed actor (Steve Coogan), who again delivers his line with reserved understatement.

“On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.”

Their conversation about the odd insects of looking-glass land ends with him pointing out to her the forest where things have no name — which she does not subsequently visit. (This only exacerbates the problem with the omissions mentioned above; if you’re going to leave out the scene entirely, why bother retaining the dialogue which leads up to it?) Instead, she goes straight on to Tweedledum’s and Tweedledee’s house.

Now, up to this point, the story has been surreal, as it should be; it is, after all, an extended dream. But for some reason, this scene is where director John Henderson decided it was time to upgrade from “surrealism” to “concerted weirdassery”. Dum and Dee (Gary Olsen and Marc Warren) sport mirror-image Clockwork Orange-style eye makeup, and mumble through their lines in a thick cockney burr which completely obscures their words. To make matters worse, Alice begins to demonstrate a wholly ineffective technique for showing her own interior dialogue; she looks over her shoulder and speaks into a distorted mirror, and her voice takes on a reverberating tone. And to make matters than much worse yet, the tale of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is presented in a combination of live-action footage and stop-motion dolls shot in a variety of differently-textured film stock and edited with the bewildering pace of an alternative music video. And of course it’s narrated in that same thick mumble, which is almost entirely drowned out by the jazzy accompanying music, entirely out of character with the rest of the score. It’s as though this single scene showcases every single bad decision that could have been made.

Plus (yes, there’s more to complain about in this one scene), the whole scene hinges on one thing: The old children’s rhyme about Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Which, as you may well guess, children today don’t know. Children back when I was a child didn’t know it. I’m going to venture that children in my father’s day didn’t know it. (There is, of course, the possibility that the rhyme is enjoying a long and fruitful life in Britain, but given today’s global culture, I’m betting against it.) This isn’t a complaint against this particular production as such, but more an observation: As the culture which spawned Carroll’s books becomes more and more distant, those books which were once aimed for children will become less comprehensible to that target demographic. Eventually, they will be removed entirely to the real of “academic classic” rather than “best-loved favorite.” And that means that film adaptations which try to preserve those elements unchanged will get more and more bewildered looks from the audience.

(To their credit, they do include the sleeping Red King, and the contention that Alice is merely a character in that dream. To their debit, this whole conversation is presented in that insufferable Cockney mumble. To their added demerit, Alice spends far, far too long with Dum and Dee.)

It is thus a relief when Alice leaves and meets the now-human-sized White Queen, mostly because we’re finally dealing with two actresses who enunciate. The scene goes pretty much as in the book, with talk of living backward and “jam every other day,” and then Alice ends up in the small shop, where the Queen (who’s also sometimes a sheep) sells her an egg, and then Alice follows the egg out of the shop, skipping the boating scene entirely, to meet Humpty Dumpty (Desmond Barritt). Given the actor’s portliness and the small straw hat perched on his shaven head, this is one of the few occasions in which substituting a straightforward human performer for a more fanciful creature actually works. Unfortunately, someone then decided that the scene should skip entirely the second most recognizable bit from the whole book after the Red Queen’s Race: Humpty’s use of words to mean what he wants them to mean. Great. The two parts of the book that have been adopted into “Darmak and Jilad” cultural metaphor, and they’ve both been jettisonned.

“And clicking on me redirects you to the Electronics department of Amazon.com!”

He does at least recite “Jabberwocky” in its entirety, while a boy in a cardboard-box helmet re-enacts it against a CGI creature who looks not a thing like the Jabberwock. (Here’s an unassailable declaration: The best version of “Jabberwocky” ever done was done on The Muppet Show. Now that Jabberwock looked like the Jabberwock!) Then she’s off (meaning she leaves), and he’s off (meaning he falls from the wall).

After a bare moment passing all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, Alice runs into the White King, who’s keeping a tally of said horses and men on a palmtop computer. Huh? This and the music playing during “The Walrus and the Carpenter” are the only feeble feints toward making this a “new” or “updated” or “modern” version of Through the Looking Glass. We have an Alice who can’t even acknowledge that this entire dream is just like the book she was about to read to her daughter, so why are we adding “clever” little things like this? And when the King points out to her the messenger coming along the road whose name begins with an “H,” she goes into her schoolgirl recitation of “I love my love with an H…” Again, this would have made sense to a child of a century ago, who learned her lessons this way at school. But it makes absolutely no sense to today’s children. It’s an archaism retained inexplicably in a scene in which a palmtop computer is in evidence. Here’s an idea: Instead of cutting those parts that people have remembered and added to the cultural lexicon, why don’t we trim the recitations that are a century out of date?

Oh, and the king and the messenger make a point of mentioning the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown in the town up ahead, yet another reference to children’s poetry that no one today remembers. But having called our attention to it, the movie then skips that scene altogether…

…But then, when she meets up with the White Knight (Ian Holm) in the next scene, she’s in custody of the dish from the plumcake eaten in the missing scene. I don’t get it. Was the scene shot but edited out? Was the movie shot out of sequence, and the budget ran out before they could shoot the lion and the unicorn? Was anyone actually in charge of this production? Inquiring minds want to know.

So. The White Knight. Ian Holm is, without a doubt, a very good actor, and his performance as the White Knight is thus natural enough and understated enough to be… all wrong. As I mentioned before, “method” acting does not fit at all well with the fantastic, flamboyant roles. But thus it is: We get Holm, muttering and pausing and reining in his performance in a role that needs a colorful, larger-than-life approach. He launches into the long recitation of the poem “A Man Sitting on a Gate,” which is of course dramatized for us, and the first thing we note is: He’s not sitting on a gate, he’s standing on a footbridge. (Maybe Humpty-Dumpty wrote the script.) Said man is also Ian Holm, dressed in 1920s garb and wearing silent-movie makeup, and the scene is filmed in faux-scratchy black-and-white. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s been since we pulled the last film-stock trick back with Tweedles Dee and Dum.

“That take was great, Sir Ian. But could we do the next one with a little more ‘Bilbo’ and a little less ‘killer android’?”

Once the White Knight finishes his poem and totters off, we’re on the final lap: Alice meets the wasp in a wig (Ian Richardson). “Wait,” you might say, “I don’t remember this part in the book!” Neither did I, and I had only finished the book two nights before. A quick bit of research told me that Lewis Carroll had originally included this chapter in the manuscript, but his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, persuaded him to cut it, mainly because it was too hard for him to portray a wasp wearing a wig. So you only run across the chapter in modern editions that have restored it, such as The Annotated Alice.

That’s right. We don’t have time for the Red Queen’s Race, or Humpty-Dumpty’s ideas on word usage, but we can go and pick a chapter out of Lewis Carroll’s trashbin to include. And if you think that the original illustrator had trouble presenting a wasp in a wig, how well do you think that these filmmakers did, using a relatively unadorned human actor? Yeah.

Let’s just barrel down the home stretch, shall we? Alice reaches the last square, becomes a queen, is grilled nonsensically by the Red and White Queens, shows up late to her own banquet, exchanges greetings with a joint and a pudding, and finally gets fed up with how nonsensical everything is…

…And then Mother falls out of bed. It has, of course, all been a dream since she lay down to read Through the Looking Glass to ger daughter. There’s no mention of, “Hey, I just dreamed the entire story of that book!” Instead, she tucks her daughter in and leaves for the night. And the daughter scoots under the covers to read the book by flashlight. (And why not? It’s not as if she got any bedtime story — Mom just had a nap on her bed instead!)

The end.

Trying to describe this movie has made me expand my critical vocabulary. This movie isn’t “bad” as normally defined. The basis is an acknowledged literary classic. It looks beautiful. The acting is, as noted repeatedly, top-notch.

**Wow. This is the weirdest Slumber Party Massacre movie, hands down.**

So it isn’t a bad film, but it is a wrong film, in which almost every possible decision as to how to treat the original material were decided to the detriment of the adaptation. I haven’t even mentioned Alice’s hair, which changes entirely with every scene: Straight, curled, in tails, hanging free, pinned up, rolled in cloth curlers… Why? For no reason, except possibly in a misguided attempt to make even less sense. It’s as if nobody involved with the production realized that there’s a significant difference between “surreal” and “senselessly incomprehensible.”

This isn’t a movie about the looking-glass world; this is a movie made in the looking-glass world.