Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Tim Burton's detractors may find themselves supporting Alice in Wonderland, if only because it makes their case against him so simple. It contains nearly all of Burton's usual thematic and stylistic flourishes, but to no end. Had I not walked out of the theater with several short pages filled with notes, I might have assumed that, like Alice, I'd merely drifted off in a nebulous dream/reality world for two hours and left again. Vincent Canby once compared Heaven's Gate to a "forced four-hour walking tour of one's own living room." Alice is like a forced tour of the living room of the protagonist in one of Burton's better movies: it's weird, yes, but it seems drab and uninteresting. In a way, I sympathize with Burton: by this point, so many adaptations, homages, and re-imaginings of Lewis Carroll's novel exist across various artistic media that one must doubt whether any wonder remains in Alice at all.

Alice starts promisingly, revealing an older protagonist than the pre-teen Alice of the original story who openly disdains the social mores that bind her. She does not wear a corset and considers refusing the hand of a sniveling young lord who throws an engagement party for himself before asking her to marry him. This Alice remembers familiar images from a recurring dream -- a smiling cat, a rabbit with a clock, a blue caterpillar -- and receives a shock when she begins to see some of these creatures walking about in the real world. Naturally, she follows the rabbit to its hole, falls in and, well, you know.

Supposedly Burton envisioned his Alice as a re-imagining of the original story, so he takes elements from both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its loose sequel, Through the Looking Glass and invents new ones to make a sort of Return to Oz for Wonderland. But that infamously dark slab of nominal kiddie fare, or at least that appears to have been the plan.

For Alice in Wonderland is a film of buts. Alice is returning to Wonderland, but she doesn't remember the last time so she largely follows the same path she took upon her visit. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken over and subjugated the landscape, but Wonderland still has a light mood about it. Yes, it looks like a Burton film, with tree limbs twisted into the shapes of gnarled hands and straight lines broken into odd angles, but none of it makes in impression. Burton seems to have used his storyline as an excuse to make the place dull, not twisted and evil, but spare and uninteresting. Perhaps that's the point, that a Wonderland without any sense of wonder at all is more inherently unsettling than an astonishing Wonderland that conveys a sense of corruption and mutilation, but the fact remains that Burton made more memorable worlds out of the idyllic estate in Beetlejuice and the suburbs of Edward Scissorhands than he does with a world often likened to a severe drug trip.

Most of the actors appear to have caught wise to the listlessness of the film even as they stood in front of green screens and acted out the disjointed, lethargic script. Matt Lucas (Tweedle Dee and Dum) and Anne Hathaway (the White Queen, who looks like she set aside time to appear in the film between touring with Evanescence) are only memorable because of their costuming and rendering, and, though everyone speaks with a British accent, the truly British actors get relegated to the completely CGI characters (and what is the point of casting Stephen Fry and then giving him maybe 10 lines?). Bonham Carter proves a notable exception, a Brit allowed to appear in person, more or less, who offers the only consistently emotional characterization in the film. Watch the isolation in her eyes, wavering between spoiled egomania and loneliness, or the way her lip quivers when she considers if perhaps she went too far in her quest for power and questions whether it really is better to be feared than loved.

Compare Carter to Depp, who hasn't looked so bored since the Pirates sequels. One can understand why his performance of the Mad Hatter would be all over the place, but playing an oddball does not entitle an actor to carte blanche, and Depp's wildly inconsistent performance undercuts any laughs with too-random asides and questionable attempts at sincerity. Why does Depp slip in and out of a Scottish accent? Why does he think he can get away with hamming it up all over the place and suddenly inspire pity and connection by lowering his voice for a minute? And how could Burton put both Depp, so capable with mad characters, and Crispin Glover, who may actually be insane, not only in the same film but some of the same scenes and draw absolutely no energy from them?

The one bright light of the film -- and this is nothing to scoff at -- is Alice. Mia Wasikowska receives few opportunities to make a fully-formed person out of her character, but she deftly succeeds at hitting the right mood. Wasikowska is at once waifish and fragile in the Victorian fashion yet strong-willed and capable, and her Alice is easily one of the most feminist heroines to appear in any Disney production. The narrative suffers from the speed with which Alice accepts what's happening to her and moves through most of the film simply trusting that she is in a dream, but that confidence at least reflects well on the character and it provides a strong foothold for Wasikowska to break out as a true leading lady, one who genuinely leads; it's hard to repress a "right on" when she ignores a prophecy that dictates her actions in Wonderland and definitively states "I make the path."

Yet Burton neglects his adept starlet, focusing instead on visuals that lack a shred of the creativity, making a drab steppe out of a world ripe for his demented, (occasionally) endearing big-kid sensibility. The entire third act is a complete wash -- even compared to the rest of this bore -- devolving into a slack faux-epic battle that bypasses Alice for The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings and even sucks the spark out of Carter's formerly enjoyable performance. Burton cannot even summon any imagination for the Jabberwocky, simply transplanting John Tenniel's original visual conception of the dragon-like creature without adding a single facet of his own design. And the refreshing feminism of the film finds an odd conclusion, with Alice back in the real world asserting herself in a manner befitting her inner strength even as the film suggests she will spend her adulthood subjugating and pillaging China in the name of mercantilism. How's that for a happy ending?

Alice demonstrates the pitfalls that come with Burton's increasing laziness as a screenwriter, eschewing original stories such as Edward Scissorhands and Big Fish for derivative re-imaginings of other stories that simply lay a template of half-hearted auterial concerns -- outcasts, Gothic aesthetics and daddy issues, which are largely and mercifully absent in this film, at least in the protagonist. I'm at an utter loss to explain how the film can be at once so cluttered, as slapdash as Depp's performance, and so loose, desolate and unappealing. Some films fail because they don't make any sense; the chief flaw of this one is that it makes too much. We're meant to believe, I think, that Wonderland brings out the champion dormant in Alice, giving her that last ounce of self-confidence needed to face the real world, but as I left the theater all I could think about was how much she towered above the land she saved even when she wasn't nibbling on size-altering scones.

Dead Man

Jim Jarusch's '80s filmography was enough to make me an ardent fan, but nothing prepared me for Dead Man. At once a film far beyond his low-key, minimalistic satires and the fulfillment of their possibilities, it applies his unique style to a genre aesthetically antithetical to it: the Western. The Western is a genre about bigness: big settings, big personas and, most of all, big guns. For Jarmusch to make one, even an alternative "acid" Western, seems on paper to be madness.

Instead, it takes the idea of the Acid Western to its extreme. Acid Westerns grew out of the counterculture of the '60s, as well as the genre's appropriation by other countries, specifically the Italians with their spaghetti Westerns. Both genres praised individual strength and personal morality: classic Westerns depicted the individualistic hero as a beacon of general Americana, a reflection of our can-do attitude and a literal representation of pioneering spirit, while the Westerns of the post-Vietnam era presented the individual as the true source of morality in the face of corrupt society, even if the counterculture ideals could not be fully applied as the heroes still resorted to mass displays of violence that only a few seemed to genuinely regret (and none of them half so much as the samurai in Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the basis for the Man With No Name and therefore countless other Western anti-heroes).

Dead Man, however, strips away all notions of nobility in the Old West. Everything that you need to know about the episodic film can be gleaned from its first vignette, a short film in its own right: William Blake (Johnny Depp), a broke accountant from Cleveland, scraped together just enough cash to head out to the frontier town of Machine where he's been guaranteed a job by metal works owner Mr. Dickinson. The roughly nine-minute sequence begins with Blake in a train car surrounding by passengers of his social status. They're all well-dressed, polite, headed out to the West for new and bold opportunities, ideal Western characters all. Jarmusch fades to some time later, and Blake looks up to see a few new passengers of the scruffier variety. This happens again, and suddenly Blake is sitting among disgusting rabble, scraggly beards and missing teeth. A coal-coated boilerman (Crispin Glover) approaches and warns him of heading out west to Machine ("to Hell," as he calls it). As the boilerman continues to caution Blake, the other passengers suddenly open the windows and fire at buffalo roaming the landscape beside the train. "Government reckons they [various passengers of this sort] killed about a million last year." In nine minutes, Jarmusch masterfully takes our idea of the cinematic Western and destroys it, presenting us instead with a group of ordinary people looking not to find prosperity through honest work out West but to taint and rape another part of the Earth after ruining someplace east beyond capacity.

The boilerman's warnings ring in Blake's head as he walks through the decadent town of Machine, and when he arrives at Dickinson's a callous secretary (John Hurt) says with ample derision that Blake's message was postmarked two months ago and the position has long since been filled. That night, a former prostitute takes pity on him when he helps her up in the street and takes him back to her place, only for her ex- (and Mr. Dickinson's son) Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) to pop in and shoot both Thel and Bill, killing her and lodging a bullet near William's heart.

If the film had not yet established its break from the genre to your satisfaction, here the film moves into marvelously, woefully uncharted territory. Blake is rescued by a Native American named Nobody, a man of mixed tribal descent and a European upbringing who tells Blake that he couldn't remove the bullet from his chest and that his days are numbered. Nobody refers to his new companion as "stupid fucking white man" until he at last asks for William's name, only to react with a start. "You're William Blake?" he asks incredulously, "Then you are a dead man!" Nobody is thinking of the poet William Blake, his literary hero and seemingly the one aspect of his Western education for which he is grateful. Suddenly enthused at what he believes to be the incarnation of the poet, Nobody decides to take Blake to the Pacific Coast so that he might return this vessel to the spirit-world, and along the way they will kill any white men who cross them. Jarmusch says that he used Blake's poetry in connection with the Native American history he studied for the film as he thought Blake's style and topics fit nicely with what he discovered about Native Americans and their perspectives, so perhaps he works through Nobody, realigning William Blake's legacy to the Indians by breaking violently from the Europeans.

That's not to say that Nobody is a well-cultured savage looking for revenge; on the contrary, Dead Man contains the fairest depiction of Native Americans I've ever seen in a Western. The materialistic, imperialist whites headed west for money and found harsh, unforgiving terrains. Even so, they subjugated the Indians there simply to claim the land as Manifest Destiny and stuck it out on principle. Perhaps the greatest example of this comes when Nobody sends Blake into a camp of mad fur traders led by "Sally," a cross-dressing, Bible-preaching trader played by Iggy Pop. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in a Jarmusch film, yet it ultimately works brilliantly: the traders tread the line between absurdity and terror, a trio driven mad by the West's desolation that strike us initially as loopy until they reveal themselves as demented rapists.

Blake and Nobody's tripped-out journey shows how easily demons can be awakened in the face of the nothingness of the West. Nobody, witty and kind, is also a merciless killer in battle. Abducted as a child, Nobody was paraded around the United States before being placed on a ship and sent to England to be gawked at and, eventually, educated. Naturally a victim of white racism, his European adolescence alienated him from the Native Americans. That feeling of solitude is perhaps what drives him to push Blake into murder, but it does not explain why he would go out of his way to save the man's life without ever knowing him, nor his general amicability with others. The two men, cut off socially from their peers, must instead connect on genuine, personal grounds, and Blake simply finds that the Indians are more charitable and open than his own race.

Their bond is juxtposed with a trio of bounty hunters sent by Charlie's dad, the metal works owner Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, in his final role), to avenge his son and also, perhaps preferably, retrieve his pinto. The three -- an African-American boy, a loudmouthed fool, and a sadistic cannibal named Cole (Lance Henriksen) -- sleep with one eye open watching each other, but wariness doesn't save the other two from Cole, who tires of both, kills them and roasts them on a fire. Another major white figure is a racist missionary (Alfred Molina) who denies supplies to Nobody that he in turn offers to Blake, then attempts to kill Blake upon recognizing him.

True to his style, Jarmusch uses sparse dialogue in the film, but it speaks volumes, as much, if not more so, than even the most intricate Tarantino riff. As Nobody confuses Depp's Blake with the poet Blake, William Blake's work seeps into the movie, always working within the context of the film and often on several layers above it. When Nobody tells Blake they're being followed, William starts to formulate a plan, realizes he has nothing and immediately asks Nobody what to do. "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow," Nobody responds sardonically. The line is a direct lift from Blake's poetry (far from the only one), but in that one moment we can read much into Nobody and his sense of irony: the eagle of course represents the United States, our proud vision of ourselves, while the crow, the meeker bird and, in the context of the quote, lesser and mediocre compared to the eagle, stands for Native Americans, possibly the Blackfoot that make up a part of Nobody's heritage (you could argue that it stands for the Crow Nation, but I think that's too literal and the Crow don't feature in the film and they were even enemies of the Blackfoot). Nobody's delivery of the line coldly mocks the white attitude toward the natives, and in a larger sense prevents the moment from becoming Hollywood "come together" tripe by pointing out how ludicrous it is for any white people to think this way instead of praising one white person for thinking progressively.

Blake's poetry isn't the only allusion to other works, however, and many of Jarmusch's references are slyly anachronistic. The names of several minor characters mirror 20th century musicians such as Lee Hazelwood or Benmont Tench. Nobody's real name, "He Who Talk Loud Say Nothing," is a reference to the James Brown classic "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing." In fact, I couldn't help but think of Homer's Odyssey in connection to Nobody: in the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus gives his name as "Nobody" so that when he attacks the beast, his screams of "Nobody is killing me!" turn potential helpers away. When Blake stumbles into Iggy Pop's (himself a 20th century musician) camp, he inadvertently lures the rapists into making the first move and sealing their fate by saying "I'm with Nobody."

Jarmusch said he was attracted to the idea of a Western because of its "inseparable connection to America"¹, and Dead Man certainly presents us with a vision of America. However, his West demonstrates the fascism that a celebration of individualism, when married with a sense of the superiority of personal morals over societal norms, can create. Nobody gives Blake hallucinogens to send him on a "vision quest," and part of his alignment with nature results in the death of two U.S. Marshals. When Charlie attacked him in the bed, Blake took three shots to hit a man standing still not 20 feet away. Slowly though, the influence of his surroundings and the people already converted by them reveal how easy it is to take another person's life in the wilderness. Jarmusch's Western doesn't celebrate its connection to America, it unveils our propensity to violence.

Neil Young's scattered electric twang of a soundtrack sets the mood for the picture, gently warping the background in its quieter moments and swelling into grungy, distorted nightmares as Blake's spiritual quest awakens the beast within to send him back to this sinister nature. It's the perfect capper to one of the most unique and rewarding cinematic experiences of my life. I'm never quite sure what constitutes a revisionist Western -- many include the spaghetti Westerns, but for my money Leone and many of the others never drifted far enough away from conventional Western tropes to qualify, save the odd duck here and there -- but either way Dead Man easily slides into my #2 spot behind Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Both are films that dismantle the structure of the Western, bringing it all crashing to the ground, but where Altman did so with regret and mourning, Jarmusch tackles the situation with pent-up rage, a fearsome rejection of the lie Hollywood fed us for decades. I would not go so far as to call Dead Man realistic -- anyone who has seen it knows that it's too out-there for that tag -- but here is a film that seeks to peel away the artifice of the Old West to show us an unforgiving terrain that consumes all those foolish enough to try to conquer it.

¹ http://www.nytrash.com/deadman/deadjj.html#2