|
|
| Saturday, November 22, 2008 09:32 PM |
| On the Viewer - Alice Through the Looking Glass |
 by Fëanor |
This is an odd 1998 TV movie adaptation of Lewis Carroll's famous story which I (poppy?) spotted on Netflix and added to our queue. We watched it the other night. It's relatively rare that you find a movie that is an adaptation of only the second of Carroll's Alice stories; usually they cover only the first story, or both stories at once. But this one is just Looking Glass. It stars a very lovely Kate Beckinsale who, in the frame story, plays a mother who's about to read her young daughter the story of Alice Through the Looking Glass. But Mom is so exhausted she keeps nodding off and the daughter has to wake her up (which is kind of weird. Is she high or what?). Then the daughter claims that what the story says is true, and there is another, different room on the other side of the mirror in her own room. The mother walks over to investigate and soon enough she is through the mirror and living out the events of the book as Alice. Which is kind of weird, as we all know Alice is a little girl, and in fact in this movie she tells the people she meets that she is seven and a half years old, even though she is obviously closer to twenty-seven and a half years old. But whatever; the story is already surreal and insane, so that doesn't make things all that much crazier.
The movie is pretty faithful to the original story, as far as I can remember, although it is missing some of my favorite of the Red Queen's lines (the bit about how you have to run just to stay still, and run twice as fast to get anywhere), as well as the scene with the Lion and the Unicorn and passing the cake before you cut it. But what has been included seems reasonably accurate to the text. The problem is, as I continued to complain while we were watching it, they forgot to make it fun at all. The books are surreal and sometimes disturbing, but they're also comedic nonsense, and really quite wonderful and funny. This movie presents almost every scene in a funereal pace with a tone of elegiac solemnity. The sequence with the White Knight (played here by Ian Holm) is particularly slow, serious, and depressing. The poem he recites, originally completely silly, is accompanied here by a dark, disturbing reenactment filmed in black and white which turns it into something at once boring and unsettling.
Some bits are still funny, of course, and the actors all play their parts well, especially Penelope Wilton as the White Queen, as she actually manages to inject a lot of humor into her performance. Geoffrey Palmer is fun as the White King, and it's cool seeing Steve Coogan as the Gnat and Siân Phillips (whom I remember best as Rev. Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in Dune) as the Red Queen. And of course, as I said, it is pretty accurate to the text, if not to the tone, of its source, and thus captures some of the scenes rather well as far as the words and images are concerned. Still, for my money, the film misses something essential about the book, and ends up being irritatingly sad, serious, and weird. I don't think I've ever seen a film adaptation of Lewis Carroll's books that I was completely satisfied with, and sadly this movie is no exception. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
