By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter
Two remakes this week; a second go-round for Disney with “Alice in Wonderland,” and a polished reworking of 1973’s, “The Crazies.” While “Alice” aims high, the “Crazies” hits harder.
Tim Burtons’ “Alice in Wonderland,” is actually the third English speaking version of the Lewis Carroll classic made here. (There have been others, overseas.) Paramount first tackled this meandering fantasy back in 1933, generating a wealth of publicity in connection with the casting of Alice. They alleged to have auditioned seven hundred professionals and amateurs before settling on Charlotte Henry, a relative newcomer. Debuting at Christmas time, featuring a bevy of well known actors, and incorporating fabled episodes from both “Alice,” and the sequel, “Through the Looking Glass,” it still failed to captivate the mass audience.
Walt Disney was always intrigued by the material, and early in his career produced a couple of shorts with the title character in the lead. But the real labor went into his Alice from 1951. He was determined to contrive a narrative that honored the satire at the film’s core at the same time it pleased children with its luscious premise; a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole and ends up in an unpredictable “wonderland.”
The Disney artists were given significant latitude in creating the movies’ look. The script, largely episodic, tried to convey the essence of the novels. But like the Paramount from the thirties, its satire, which had a lot more to do with the 19th century than the 20th, proved too remote for audiences. Disney later conceded that he and his team failed to find the emotional core of Alice, and consigned the film to TV, quite extraordinary, as his general procedure was to broadcast only excerpts from his animated features, like “Pinocchio,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” and then, strictly as a prelude to their re-release in theaters.
I saw Alice, several times, on Disney’s TV show. Long before seeing it in color I remember being mesmerized by the striking images and the lightning fast editing. The animated Alice, beautifully realized, seemed adrift in wonderland, which was totally out of synch with anything in my world. The entire experience got “curiouser and curiouser,” without making much sense.
Disney’s Alice was a noble experiment, but anchored to impossibly dense material it was probably unsuitable for children and too arcane for many adults. The same can be said for Tim Burtons’ expensive and elaborate update. This time Alice is 19, awkward lower middle class, and struggling under the yoke of the Victorian social mores in the 1860s. Faced with an unappealing marriage proposal, a subterranean tumble spares her from having to make an unpleasant decision. It’s a promising set up, and Mia Wasikowska is an open minded and sympathetic Alice.
The scenes that follow her fall, that detail her drug induced transformations, are captivating as a metaphor and a starting point for her journey. Tweedledee and Tweedeldum, among her first distractions, happily inhabit a middle ground between the classic illustrations on which they’re based and seamless CGI effects. Then comes Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham Carters’ Red Queen, probably the films’ most wondrous elements. Depp, a frequent Burton collaborator, and Carter, his wife, get the flashiest parts, and they’re both as puzzling and magnetic as you’d expect.
But then the problem of story intrudes, and the movie stumbles. Carroll didn’t really care about forward momentum, leaving screenwriters and directors the burden of contriving a middle that moves to a satisfying conclusion. But the movies’ promising set up, that introduces Alice as a woman struggling with her identity, is almost cavalierly abandoned. Alice’s age, verging on adulthood, provides her little other than athletic ability. As it lumbers forward the lavish design fails to compensate for routine plotting that mimics every other fantasy/ spectacle where a hero or heroine is called to perform on the battlefield. And it suffers in comparison to most.
The trippier aspects of both the early Paramount and the animated Disney, celebrated by the drug culture of the sixties, are passed over by Burtons’ overly literal storytelling. Stripped of its satirical brio, the movies’ content isn’t rich enough to captivate adults. And though I’m way outside the demographic, I can’t see the sophisticated, hard edged characters holding the attention of young children. Talking dogs and rabbits are commonplace these days.
Burton, one of our foremost stylists, had an interesting take on “Sweeny Todd,” although I think the film lost something by making its leads younger than the originals in Sondheim’s’ brilliant theater piece. His early features, “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” and “Edward Scissorshands,” work better because the characters complied more readily with Burton’s idiosyncrasies. His remakes, like “Planet of the Apes,” and “Sleepy Hollow,” suffered because their source material wasn’t as malleable. “Alice,” among his most ambitious projects, occupies an awkward space somewhere between the tepid remakes and the sturdier, stand alone originals.
As it began I had high hopes that Burton might completely reinvent Alice and her world. That was probably too much to expect. Now, can we please leave Lewis Carroll’s’ work to the students of history and politics, its rightful heirs?
George Romero wrote and directed “The Crazies” in 1973, at a moment when distrust of the military, stoked by endless bad will from the Viet Nam war, reached an apex. Now, almost 40 years later, in the wake of another war that’s put a bad taste in our mouths, the movie has been revisited. The story is the same, dressed up with better production values and performances by some very good actors. And while it doesn’t resonate on levels the best horror films reach, it’s effective as a waking nightmare about military might gone haywire.
When a drunk interrupts a little league game with a loaded shotgun, the local sheriff, (Timothy Olyphant,) is forced to shoot him. Shortly afterwards the cops wife, (Radha Mitchell,) a doctor, becomes puzzled by the listless behavior of a rural farmer. When the farmer burns down his home, killing his wife and child, the sheriff goes looking for a connection, and soon identifies a problem with the drinking water. But before he can stop down the local system, his town is set upon by a gas masked strike force. Things rapidly turn deadly, on a frighteningly large scale.
The situation is hackneyed, but it’s spiked by a host of refreshing incidents. The sheriff is ahead of the audience, which helps. And as the community faces a full scale assault, the writers have contrived scenes of nerve jangling tension.
After the picture sets up the problem, the issue shifts to escape. It opens up the original, which, budgeted at around $250,000, was limited, even back in the seventies, when money went a lot further. The whole movie is shot with a soft, dreamy focus , complemented by slightly burned colors, that recall the way a lot of B movies looked in the 70s, in the same way the story more or less mimics Romero’s original.
There’s a terrific scene where a car full of escapees gets stuck in a car wash. The claustrophobic feeling of riding with the passengers as the car slowly progresses through a wash cycle is exponentially amplified by the possibility that “crazies” are waiting at the other end. A scene where a small boat passes over a large, submerged aircraft is a chilling precursor of the disaster to come.
As the noose tightens on the town, scenes pay off with the sort of bloodletting we’ve come to expect from the genre, so the weak of stomach should be warned. The violence, while unrelenting, is subdued by current standards. Still, the R rating is well earned.
Romero hit the right nerve when he created his watershed “Night of the Living Dead.” Made in 1968, for pennies, it played havoc with the tensions that beset the nuclear family of the time. That had been done before, but not with the same cutting brutality. Exacerbating the nervousness was a nagging bit of racial commentary, that added an additional layer of discomfort.
Romero’s original “Crazies,” liberally borrowed from his “Living Dead.” A lot of it took place in a farmhouse, where the characters faced off against each other at the same time they confronted an onslaught of crazies from their own community. The remake, while expertly directed by Breck Eisner, is less about personal squabbles and more about the spectacle of a complete breakdown in civil society.
The horror movies that stay with us, from “Dracula,” to “Rosemary’s Baby,” to “The Exorcist,” to Kubrick’s “The Shining” are bound up with our most intimate and for the most part, inarticulate anxieties. As we examine them, we usually find the influence of Freud or Jung on their conceptual schemes. And finally, these dark shadows, that live in the basement of our conscious lives, are what take us by the throat.
The problem with “The Crazies,” is that it’s most disturbing aspects are mainly on the surface, a surface we’ve visited many times before. It’s most effective terrors are the product of the filmmakers’ techniques. We leave the theater disturbed, but for the most part because we’ve been expertly manipulated by professionals who know how and when to goose us. The fear, palpable in the films’ best moments, is more physical than psychological. You look over your shoulder, to see if your neighbor might be coming for you, but not to yourself, where the real terror lives.
