Alice Through the Looking Glass

I only had a passing familiarity with the works of Lewis Carroll, (I had a children's book of Alice in Wonderland and gave a reading of Jabberwocky for my tenth grade English class) so I couldn't comment very authoritatively on the literary significance of this movie. I can say I thought some of the readings were very good...Humpty-Dumpty and the White Knight for instance. But I especially liked Kate Beckinsale's performance. She is very beautiful and talented, and by herself would make the picture worth watching.

I really enjoyed this adaptation. It was far and above better than Disney's attempt to turn what is already a children's book into a 'kiddie' film. It was, with very few exceptions, very true to the book, despite the difficulties associated with converting Carroll's unique style to a screenplay.

Something I've always felt critical to adapting both Alice stories is her precocious nature. There is truly no way a child actor could handle the scope of Alice in any film. I thought moving the story to an older Alice was wonderful. And Kate Beckinsale's performance in that capacity was outstanding. She brought to life the very childlike innocence and naivete of Alice while dealing so very well with interpreting Alice's very opinionated, stubborn and whimsical personality. And visually, she fit the role perfectly. :-)

The quirky nature and self-interpretation in this film is a wonderful way to introduce children to a complex and bizarre children's story. I can only hope that it will be available on DVD someday.

This is the best film version of the Lewis Carroll story that I've seen. Other versions usually employ comedians as actors and their performances are always way over-the-top. This version is really amusing because the dialogs are so deadpan serious. Sort of Pythonesque. I think that is how Lewis Carroll intended it to be done; that is how I read the books. I love the dialog between Alice (Kate Beckinsale) and the White Knight (Ian Holm). They are both so intense and sincere about discussing such very silly topics and that is what makes it so amusing. Kate's reactions to many of the inane things that happen is so subdued. It's perfect.

As someone who has read the Alice book's over and over again (mainly as an adult) I have been consistently disappointed with adaptations, which always focus on the surreal story while ignoring most of Lewis Carroll's brilliant, hilarious jokes. But this version of Through the Looking Glass doesn't give us musical numbers or turn it into a simple children's tale (or, alternately, create a dark, satirical adult version) but instead gives us Lewis Carroll, faithfully. The logic-based jokes, the curious puns, the abrupt insults, are all intact and glorious.

The movie begins as Kate Beckinsale falls asleep while reading Looking Glass to her child and dreams of herself as Alice. To be clear, because this point seems to elude a lot of IMDB reviewers, Beckinsale is playing the 7 year old Alice of the book, not an adult version, and not a pretend-child version. Just an adult dreaming she's a child. While I was skeptical ahead of time, Beckinsale perfectly captures Alice's mix of wonder and bemusement.

The rest cast is consistently amazing and hilarious, particularly the two queens and the two Tweedles, who are hilarious as young toughs even if they do race through The Walrus and the Carpenter so quickly that they ruin most of its jokes.

The story has the dream structure of the book, and if you're looking for a sensibly plotted story that is not something you should expect from the Alice books. It's a dream, and if you're own dreams are less confusing than this one then you have a very ordered mind. Alice jumps from one episode to the next with little reason, and poems fly thick and fast, illustrated in a variety of imaginative ways.

While most of the significant parts of the book are there, there are some cuts and a surprising addition. The Red Queen's classic run through the garden with Alice is gone, as is the entire Lion/Unicorn section (which I'm surprised to see some people inexplicably consider the best part of the book), and some scenes are truncated. Which would be understandable as a time constraint if the movie hadn't added the bit with the wig, which was deservedly cut from the original book and adds nothing. This is the one serious mistake of the movie.

It's true, as some have pointed out, that the special effects are low budget, and if you prefer a visually striking adaptation that cuts out most of Carroll's wit there are many options. But if you want to see a true adaptation of one of the funniest and most imaginative books in all of literature, this is easily your best choice.

Highly recommended.

In 1871, A deacon logician at Oxford published a sequel to his surprisingly popular children's story. In that original, he had dabbled in the mix of logic and mysticism that he thought respectable. Fortunately for him, it was characterized as the sort of nonsense genre created by Edward Lear. But he was deeply disturbed in the years that followed as the Church and what came to be called spiritualism diverged. So to make amends to his God, and to deflate the Kabbalistic origin of the first work, he formulated something with much the same structure and tone, but without the magic.

This work was based on conundrums created by the symmetries in the world. It became as popular as the first. His later works tried harder to distance himself from divination and became tepid Christian allegories. "Through the Looking-glass" was so successful that it and the original Alice are often merged as if they were seamless. The symmetries in the later work are easier to quote, so the looking-glass symbology and structure is re-used and quoted far more than the dangerous and slippery original Alice.

In 1979, auteur Raoul Ruiz made "The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting," a remarkable film, using the Alice structure as a template for narrative folding and a painting as the conflation of both book and mirror.

Based on this, cinematic novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte, wrote a rather complex and ambitious novel. "The Flanders Panel" published in 1990.

In 1994, filmmaker Jim McBride continued on of his two film careers, the one where he starts with extremely ambitious material, making a mainstream film based on Pérez-Reverte's novel. While the novel was inherently cinematic, McBride added an extra dimension: the folds of inner narrative, of dreams and fantasies were mapped onto the body of the on screen detective, with insight conflated with nudity. To accomplish this insofar as he could, he found a quite beautiful and intuitively talented young actress. Like Nastassja Kinski and Asia Argento before her, she grew up in an acting family and genuinely knew how to map narrative on her body, unafraid to be as sexually complex as possible. Together, Kate Beckinsale and McBride made an interesting if not profoundly successful film.

Like Kinski and Jovovich, Beckinsale would go on to make films directed by lovers, films that would shamelessly exploit this talent. But in between her First Alice and her leathered vampire phase, she was Alice in a literal film version of the book. Well, it is not quite literal in that we have to explain why a redheaded sexual being is in this looking-glass world, and plot accommodations are made based on the Pérez-Reverte model.

This film is a disaster, an utter disaster if you take it as it comes. It has none of the magic of the book, though the language and images are used exactly. It has none of engagement that other experiments have with whatever mix of mystery and sex they use. And though it experiments with cinematic inner visions, the devices used are from Terry Gilliam and all utterly fail.

But if you see it in this greater context of Kate's mother, the Lewis Carroll cover-up and deliberately obfuscated magic; if you see it as overtly sexual but with the sex completely hidden: homeopathic seduction, then it works amazingly well. Alice as a redhead!

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.