Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Mar 2, 2010 23:03:38 GMT 12
Tim Burton and Bonham Carter:
A match made in Wonderland
The king and queen of Kookiness have infused new life into
the strange world of Lewis Carroll, writes William Langley.
Telegraph.co.uk | 7:23PM GMT - Saturday, 27 February 2010
THE ODD COUPLE: Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter. — Photo: GEOFF PUGH.
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here."
When he wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865, Lewis Carroll couldn't have guessed that the real madness had hardly begun. The book was received well, but with an understandable measure of bafflement in Victorian England, and it wasn't long before people started to ask what it was really about. The theories — increasingly desperate in nature — have been piling up ever since, and not many of them sit comfortably with the idea of a children's story about a little girl falling down a rabbit hole.
We've had the psychosexual fantasy explanation, the bourgeoisie-baiting preface to Marxism, the feminist parable, and the drug trip. But what the book has really been waiting for these 145 years was someone mad enough to spot its much-misused movie potential. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, released next Friday, may be a less than entirely faithful telling of the original, but it's hard not to sense that Carroll has, at last, found a kindred spirit.
All the Burton trademarks are there: the strangeness, the surrealism, the overpowering air of dense noir, Johnny Depp, and, naturally, Tim's English muse and lady love, Helena Bonham Carter. The pair met nine years ago on the set of his much-panned remake of Planet of the Apes, when Burton, despairing of the film's progress, spotted Helena in full monkey costume and told her what a natural she was for the part. The romance was slow to ignite for other reasons, one being Tim's engagement to Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie, but love finally triumphed, and the pair ended up together in London.
Together after a fashion, that is, for they live apart, in adjoining houses in a prime Hampstead street, linked (according to the more fanciful reports) by a tunnel, filled (according to even more fanciful reports) with bats, creepy-crawlies and candelabras. Helena denies the tunnel story, describing instead a simple "airlock" arrangement, through which they pass when necessary. But what is certain is that the houses are very different. "Mine looks like something out of Beatrix Potter," Helena has said, "but if you go over to his house, you're in a totally different place. He's got dead Oompa Loompas lying around, and skeletons, and weird alien lights. It's like going from the land of the living to the land of the dead."
Here, with their two children, Billy, seven, and Nell, two, the King and Queen of Kookiness co-exist in apparent bliss. "He always visits," she says, "which is very touching. He's always coming over." Sometimes they even sleep together. Why only sometimes? "There's a snoring issue," she confided recently. "I talk, he snores. The other thing is, he's an insomniac, so he needs to watch television to get to sleep. I need silence."
That these two should have unconventional living arrangements is less surprising than that they should be together at all. The attraction of opposites is one thing, but Helena, 43, the plummy-voiced, porcelain-complexioned, parasol-twiddling prime adornment of the Merchant-Ivory era, and Burton, the ghosted impresario of Gothic chic, seem barely to belong on the same planet.
Burton grew up in Burbank, California, where his favourite childhood game was staging axe murders on the family lawn. His father Bill was a parks inspector, and his mother Jean ran a cat-themed novelty shop. From an early age, their son thirsted after the dark, the macabre and the outré; spurning the epics and blockbusters of the era, he spent his weekends watching low-budget horror films. His boyhood idol was Vincent Price, the smoothly sinister Prince of Darkness, around whom his first film, the six-minute Vincent, was based. He began as an animator, working for Walt Disney, but eventually broke through as a director with Beetlejuice, a bizarre journey through an imagined afterlife with a suburban couple whose car crashes off a bridge.
Intrigued by his knack for making offbeat "sleeper" hits on low budgets, Burton was hired by Warner Brothers to direct Batman. His choice of Michael Keaton, previously regarded as a cute and cuddly comedy actor, to play the Caped Crusader caused outrage and threats of a global boycott among the fans. Burton, resisting pressure from the studio, refused to back down, and the movie, with its nightmarishly creepy evocations of Gotham City, became one of the biggest hits of the late 1980s.
By this time, Helena was well established as Britain's foremost piece of screen posh, even if her de rigueur outfit of corsets, frills and a demure blush on each cheek tended, occasionally, to detract from the quality of her performances.
A great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, the Liberal prime minister between 1908 and 1916, she grew up in a well-to-do London family, and was headed for Cambridge University when an appearance in the pages of Tatler brought her a film offer.
Within a few years she was a star, albeit a painfully insecure one, racked by the feeling that her rise had been too easy. "I didn't know what the hell I was doing," she has confessed. "I thought, ‘F**k, I can't do this’. I felt I was totally bluffing it." She broke free from type with a much-debated nude scene in Wings of a Dove, which won her an Oscar nomination, and embellished her fame by starting a relationship with Kenneth Branagh.
It is with Burton, though, that she has done the bulk of her best work – as Emily in Corpse Bride; as murderous pie maven Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd; and now as the megalomaniacal Red Queen. Set 10 years after Alice's first fall down the rabbit hole, the movie tells of her return to Wonderland, and mission to save its inhabitants from the Jabberwock. Mysteries abundant unfold, although the big one of what Carroll meant by it all remains reassuringly intact.
"If any one of them can explain it," said Alice, "I'll give him sixpence. I don't believe there's an atom of meaning in it."
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/7332336/Burton-and-Bonham-Carter-a-match-made-in-Wonderland.html
‘Alice in Wonderland’ — Tim Burton's imaginary friends
“Storyboard” — If you're going to tumble down a cinematic rabbit hole with a filmmaker, who better to
go with than Tim Burton? The director who has brought Willy Wonka, Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward
Scissorhands to the screen now takes a crack at the surreal characters of Lewis Carroll in a film, opening
March 05 (March 04 in NZ), that may be titled "Alice in Wonderland" but is more like a sequel, with its
title character (portrayed by Mia Wasikowska) making a return visit to the land of tea parties and
talking cats. Here, Burton gives a sense of whom she meets there.
“Mad Hatter” — Johnny Depp's latest has made a specialty of hiding his leading-man cheekbones within
oddball disguise and the latest is a google-eyed hat maker who's gone around the bend. The shock of
tangerine curls jutting from beneath his hat and his orange-rimmed eyeballs hint at the story lineage
of his madness; orange-tinted mercury was once used in the manufacture of felt in Victorian England
and it seeped through the scalp skin with some nasty side effects. Burton liked the idea of orangeness
for another more personal reason. “There is something really scary about orange hair. Every performer
in my childhood who had orange hair, it seemed to signify that they ... were not to be trusted and
could be dangerous. Bozo, Carrot Top, Ralph Malph...”
“Bloodhound” — Burton's film introduces an entirely new character to the screen: the Bloodhound. The
role is handled by veteran British actor Timothy Spall, who worked with Burton on “Sweeney Todd”.
Spall may be best known as Peter Pettigrew in the “Harry Potter” films and the malicious toady
Nathaniel in "Enchanted”. “He's exciting because he's always doing something different”, Burton
says. “He's always working and doing some interesting project”. The bloodhound's presence may
be “a reaction against the Cheshire Cat”, Burton says. “The film felt a bit feline- and rodent-heavy,
perhaps, and I think the Bloodhound adds a certain little gravity to it. When you see all of the
characters, the animal ones, together, he added a little balance to it”.
“Tweedledee and Tweedledum” — The director pulled out a surprising cinematic reference when asked
about his version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum: “I kept thinking about the twins in ‘The Shining’,”
he says of the chilling Stanley Kubrick horror film. “But really any kind of twins. There's always
something scary about them, in a way. Or there can be.” Burton said the strange, corpulent version
of the Tweedles was shaped largely by the performance of the actor who plays both, British comedian
Matt Lucas, who did a “great job” tapping into the eerie nature of the brothers. “It's kind of a mix of
animation and him. It's a weird mixture of things which gives his characters the disturbing quality
that they so richly deserve”.
“The Red Queen” — The first thing you notice about Helena Bonham Carter in the role of the Red Queen
is the size of that noggin. “Oh, it's true, I can't even look at Helena anymore because now her real head
just seems like a small orange — like she's got some shrunken head,” Burton deadpans. But when he looks
at the Red Queen, he thinks of two people — one of his own relatives and the infamous real-estate
baroness known as the “queen of mean”. “She reminds me of pictures I've seen of Leona Helmsley.
There's a tiny bit of elements of my mother in there too, for some strange reason. And Helena brings
her own things to it too.”
“Cheshire Cat” — “The Cheshire Cat was a character I had a very specific image of and it's because I just
have this thing about cats,” Burton says. “The Cheshire Cat taps into what you might call my hatred of
cats. Stephen Fry did a great job of getting that creepy quality. You know, this weird kind of floaty,
too-focused, creepy — he did it great. He has this thing of getting up close and just sitting there and
staring at you, like a cat. It just kind of sits there.”
• “Alice in Wonderland” (2010).
The eternal wonder of Alice in Wonderland
Spirited and suspicious of authority, Lewis Carroll's greatest
creation has much to teach us today, says Philip Hensher.
Telegraph.co.uk | 6:50AM GMT - Tuesday, 02 March 2010
A middle-class child, even one born in the 1960s, had one thing drilled into him or her. When a grown-up was good enough to entertain you as a guest, you produced a ritual phrase when you left: "Thank-you-for-having-me-I've-had-a-lovely-time." Possibly the same phrase survives, even now, among old-hat tendencies of parenthood.
So imagine the delight for a child when he read, in a book published 100 years before he was born, a seven-year-old heroine's thoughts on leaving a tea-party. "At any rate I'll never go there again. It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life."
The hosts — a Mad Hatter, a March Hare and a Dormouse — behave abominably, first offering their seven-year-old guest wine, and then telling her there isn't any. "Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it," Alice says, before an argument breaks out about who has behaved worse.
Even as a child, one could see that social encounters had rules, and that these were being joyously broken on every side. The two Alice books are wonderful rude assaults on propriety and authority, but they are now very old, and unquestionably somewhat demanding books. Have they gone into the sort of antiquity that a child will no longer understand or appreciate? Or do we need their spirit and clear-sightedness more than ever before?
Tim Burton's ferocious film of Alice, which opens this week, reminds us of the continuing life of these great classics. They have always been stage and film favourites. With their episodic structure, and numerous vivid walk-on parts, they have often been used to offer star actors cameo roles. In the Burton adaptation, Barbara Windsor is the Dormouse, Johnny Depp the Mad Hatter, Matt Lucas Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and so on.
In a celebrated television adaptation of 1966, Jonathan Miller cast Leo McKern as the Ugly Duchess, Michael Redgrave as the Caterpillar and, unforgettably, Malcolm Muggeridge and John Gielgud as the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. These theatrical adaptations began in Lewis Carroll's lifetime. But what of the books — these often difficult, complicated books, full of abstruse philosophical ideas and learned vocabulary? They may no longer be children's books: they might never have been.
WH Auden, one of many serious admirers of the Alice books, wrote that there "are no good books which are only for children". Certainly, the ideas and reversals of logic in the books, as well as many of the allusions, sail right over children's heads. Probably not one reader in 10,000 now recognises what any of the many poems are parodying.
Alice, as well as being foul-tempered and exceedingly bossy, is a freakishly well-read seven-year-old, reflecting on what she had "so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials". Even she is bewildered by legal arguments about whether you could cut the Cheshire Cat's head off, seeing that there is no body to cut it off from, and learned discussions about whether "I say what I mean" is the same, in terms of logic, as "I mean what I say".
Students of logic have revelled, over the past 150 years, in that discussion, which takes place at the Mad Hatter's tea party. The founding text of linguistic semantics is Humpty Dumpty's assertion, in Through the Looking Glass, that "When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less," after Alice objects that "‘Glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’." The books are on Humpty Dumpty's side in this argument, not on Alice's.
One of their main joys is in their fantastic punning. When the Mock Turtle says that they called the turtle who ran the school under the sea Tortoise — "We called him Tortoise because he taught us" — it will make even a small child laugh. The conger-eel who taught "Drawling, Stretching and Fainting in Coils" may be one for the parents. This aspect of the books, and Humpty Dumpty's explanation of "Jabberwocky", inspired James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and indeed allusions to Carroll run right through that austere masterpiece.
The books appeal to children because of their naughtiness, and their completely disrespectful attitude to anything resembling authority. Before Carroll, most literature written for children was heavily didactic and aimed at improving children. Alice is different. "I've a right to think," she says "sharply" to the Duchess, who is rather too keen on drawing absurd "morals", as pre-Carroll children's literature tended to: "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." Alice speaks rudely to the Queen of Hearts, and when the Queen yells "Off with her head", deals with her by saying "Nonsense!"
Is Alice a cynic? Certainly, she takes a much more tough-minded view of the world she finds herself in than most modern child characters would be allowed to. When the Duchess's baby turns into a pig in her arms, she cold-heartedly abandons it, reflecting sensibly that "if it had grown up, it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think."
She contradicts queens to their faces. She is snobbishly amused that anyone should mistake her — Alice! — for a housemaid — "How surprised he'll be when he finds out who I am!" And the comedy in her conversation with the Caterpillar comes from both characters assuming, angrily, that the other ought to be answering to them.
Much of this high-handedness undoubtedly derives from Lewis Carroll's model, Alice Liddell, whose whole family was formidable, starting with her socially ambitious mother. When Alice in the book complacently anticipates a time "when I'm a duchess", there may be a dig at the Liddells, who invited and obtained the attendance of Prince Leopold at the wedding of their eldest daughter. It is not often remembered that Mrs Liddell had forbidden Charles Dodgson, the real mathematician and Christ Church don, the company of her daughters some years before the Alice books were written. Is there some resentment at exclusion, in addition to a well-advertised nostalgia, in these books?
Dodgson, these days, would undoubtedly be on the sex offenders register, with his enthusiasm for photographing naked little girls. His tastes were deplorable – the Liddell sisters could look after themselves, but the Victorian culture of artistic paedophilia destroyed many other lives, such as Ruskin's object of fantasy, Rose La Touche. Nevertheless, Dodgson's obsession with little girls does seem, unusually, to have had an empathetic side. The Alice books are full of a sardonic rage against authority when it is unaccountably and wilfully exerted, and the Red Queen is at once governess, mother and, as lawyers say, the Crown.
That hasn't dated one iota. In the 21st century, the authorities are insisting on their right to photograph us naked before allowing us to travel. They attempted to detain civilians for months on end without bringing any criminal charge. They hope to oblige us to carry identity cards to show to figures of authority, perhaps in case, like Alice on more than one occasion, we forget our own names.
They are behaving, in short, like Victorian governesses with their mantra "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Perhaps in the age of Guantánamo Bay, the Queen of Hearts's dictum "Sentence first — verdict afterwards" does not seem quite so evidently nonsensical as it did 100 years ago.
There are insistent political allusions in the Alice books, most famously when (in Tenniel's illustration) Disraeli and Gladstone appear in the railway carriage in Through the Looking Glass. But the most enduring of its messages is the one that says that power, exerted unjustly, can be countered by the word "Nonsense!", by the shaking of the Red Queen until she turns back into a kitten. That is a message which goes on having some significance to a small child being ordered about, as well as to a citizen in 2010.
The most subversive sentence in either Alice book is this: "‘That's the judge’, she said to herself, ‘because of his great wig’." The logician, the unimpressed child, and the perpetrator of nonsense wonderfully join in that word "because"; and we see that a judge is just a man who has put a big wig on.
These books teach children that one day, they will step across a brook and find that a crown is, in the end, quite easily acquired with all its apparent authority and power. They can still teach the rest of us that, too.
• Video: Alice in Wonderland trailer.
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7350085/The-eternal-wonder-of-Alice-in-Wonderland.html