The struggle to bring "Alice In Wonderland" to screen claims another victim in this slow-moving, joyless BBC telefilm, curiously engaging in moments but on the whole off-puttingly concerned with subtext over text.
We first meet dour young Alice (Anne-Marie Mallik) preparing for a pleasant day's outdoor stroll with her older sister. Falling asleep, she finds herself in one strange place after another, meeting a series of odd characters who engage her in opaque conversations while she alternately stares off into space and tries to make out what is happening to her.
"How queer everything is today," we hear her say in the first of many voiceovers. "I wonder if I've been changed in the night."
She has, and so are you watching this frustrating mindwarp of a movie work its fitful magic upon you between excessive languors designed, as director Jonathan Miller tells us in his director's commentary, to capture the "subliminal oddness" of dreaming and its relationship to childhood. It's an adaptation that presents little actual story (expecting you to know Lewis Carroll's text already) but instead a series of setpieces where notable actors appear and do little odd turns. Michael Redgrave plays the Caterpillar as fusty schoolmaster while Leo McKern half-sings, half-mutters his line in drag as the Ugly Duchess.
"Off with their heads" is one of Carroll's famous Wonderland lines. That's Miller's approach, too, having his actors appear sans animal heads. Instead, they offer distrait representations of Victorian-era human characters. This way at least we can see the actors perform their lines, but something of the magic of the source novel seems lost in translation.
Miller uses the camera to capture distorted close-ups of Mallik's arresting visage, staring off, saying nothing, as if posing for the cover of "Rubber Soul." Action unfolds around her without her reacting much at all. The beauty of the summer's-day scenery enchants, even in black-and-white, but many of the shots, like the famous croquet game played with flamingos, run on with no apparent point except discomforting the actors.
Peter Sellers appears here as the King of Hearts, and along with Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter sneaks in some of the "japing fun and games" Miller says he tried to discourage on set. Cook and Sellers were two of the greatest comedy geniuses of their time, and appeared together on screen rarely. Cook, a former "Beyond The Fringe" partner of Miller's, dances and mugs with annoying vigor, apparently well soused and as disconnected as Mallik, but Sellers does manage some funny moments, like when in a final courtroom scene he leads a jury in a singalong and then sighs: "They don't reach verdicts like that anymore!"
The best scene, as many reviewers here note, features John Gielgud and Malcolm Muggeridge as the Tortoise and the Gryphon reminiscing about schooldays being taught "Laughing and Grief" by a Classics professor before dancing the Lobster Quadrille along a muddy, brightly lit beach. Here, at least, Miller connects with his material and the audience simultaneously. The rest of it, as Eugene Kim put it so well in his October 2004 review here, is more like "Alice's Adventures In Marienbad," twisted and tedious.
The production is worth seeing once for Alice lovers, given its highly individual take on the story. British comedy enthusiasts may enjoy it, too, as in addition to the principals a young Eric Idle can be glimpsed a few times in top hat and swallowtail tie. But seen cold, without reading the book, one is left too often asking why this, why that, and, long before its 70 minutes are up, left like Mallik's Alice not caring much about the answers.
We first meet dour young Alice (Anne-Marie Mallik) preparing for a pleasant day's outdoor stroll with her older sister. Falling asleep, she finds herself in one strange place after another, meeting a series of odd characters who engage her in opaque conversations while she alternately stares off into space and tries to make out what is happening to her.
"How queer everything is today," we hear her say in the first of many voiceovers. "I wonder if I've been changed in the night."
She has, and so are you watching this frustrating mindwarp of a movie work its fitful magic upon you between excessive languors designed, as director Jonathan Miller tells us in his director's commentary, to capture the "subliminal oddness" of dreaming and its relationship to childhood. It's an adaptation that presents little actual story (expecting you to know Lewis Carroll's text already) but instead a series of setpieces where notable actors appear and do little odd turns. Michael Redgrave plays the Caterpillar as fusty schoolmaster while Leo McKern half-sings, half-mutters his line in drag as the Ugly Duchess.
"Off with their heads" is one of Carroll's famous Wonderland lines. That's Miller's approach, too, having his actors appear sans animal heads. Instead, they offer distrait representations of Victorian-era human characters. This way at least we can see the actors perform their lines, but something of the magic of the source novel seems lost in translation.
Miller uses the camera to capture distorted close-ups of Mallik's arresting visage, staring off, saying nothing, as if posing for the cover of "Rubber Soul." Action unfolds around her without her reacting much at all. The beauty of the summer's-day scenery enchants, even in black-and-white, but many of the shots, like the famous croquet game played with flamingos, run on with no apparent point except discomforting the actors.
Peter Sellers appears here as the King of Hearts, and along with Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter sneaks in some of the "japing fun and games" Miller says he tried to discourage on set. Cook and Sellers were two of the greatest comedy geniuses of their time, and appeared together on screen rarely. Cook, a former "Beyond The Fringe" partner of Miller's, dances and mugs with annoying vigor, apparently well soused and as disconnected as Mallik, but Sellers does manage some funny moments, like when in a final courtroom scene he leads a jury in a singalong and then sighs: "They don't reach verdicts like that anymore!"
The best scene, as many reviewers here note, features John Gielgud and Malcolm Muggeridge as the Tortoise and the Gryphon reminiscing about schooldays being taught "Laughing and Grief" by a Classics professor before dancing the Lobster Quadrille along a muddy, brightly lit beach. Here, at least, Miller connects with his material and the audience simultaneously. The rest of it, as Eugene Kim put it so well in his October 2004 review here, is more like "Alice's Adventures In Marienbad," twisted and tedious.
The production is worth seeing once for Alice lovers, given its highly individual take on the story. British comedy enthusiasts may enjoy it, too, as in addition to the principals a young Eric Idle can be glimpsed a few times in top hat and swallowtail tie. But seen cold, without reading the book, one is left too often asking why this, why that, and, long before its 70 minutes are up, left like Mallik's Alice not caring much about the answers.