I really cringed at the start of this, I’d been looking forward to it ever since mid-May when I started reading the two books by Lewis Carroll and it happened to be on TV early one morning. I decided to save it till I’d actually finished the second book, though. First of all, obviously, Kate Beckinsale at 25 is way too old to be Alice. But that in itself didn’t worry me – I loved, for example, Fiona Fullerton in the Seventies version of the first book (okay, she wasn’t quite so much older, but she was still no pre-teen). What made me cringe is that she’s presented here at first as a mother reading the Looking Glass story to her daughter (who, incidentally, is far more suited to the Alice role though you don’t really get a great sense of her acting ability).

But despite the inexplicable bookending (which, I’ve gotta say, even that’s saved by Beckinsale calling the little girl “Humpty” in the end like Alice in the book calls Dinah, though it doesn’t have the same tight connection to Humpty’s line about looking upon a King, re: “a cat may look at a King” from the first book – sorry, can you tell I’ve been reading the annotated version much? lol), and despite the at times awfully cheap and shaky TV production values, this is stunningly faithful to the text – in fact to the point where I genuinely wonder who it was made for. Virtually none of the nonsense and talk is diluted, and it’s a kind of blessing and curse at the same time.

But whether I enjoyed it or not (the jury may still be out), it still deserves a lot of respect – and that it even ends on that mesmerising acrostic (“A boat beneath a sunny sky … Still she haunts me phantomwise … In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die … life, what is it but a dream?” – I’m absolutely crazy about this poem right now), read alternately by Beckinsale and the little girl, really almost made me want to go and read the book again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 2:23 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as adaptation, Alice, cuties, fantasy, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.