This Alice turns Wonderland upside down

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Miniseries takes Alice to a topsy-turvy sci-fi Wonderland. ( )

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Toronto actor Caterina Scorsone plays a grown-up Alice in Wonderland. (JAMES DITTIGER)

Through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole: Alice is audacious, ambitious, amazing, ambiguous, alternative. And meta.

However you describe it, the two-night, four-hour miniseries starring Toronto native Caterina Scorsone as Lewis Carroll's most famous, idealized heroine is not the Alice in Wonderland of childhood fairy tales, but something altogether different: a re-imagining of the classic Carroll tale, a vision of Carroll's Wonderland as it might have evolved over the past 143 years.

"It has to be funny," Alice's British-born writer and director, Nick Willing, explains. "The original is very funny. This version has to be full of surprises. It has to have a very, very strong visual flair. This is a much racier, tougher, sexier, more driven adaptation than others you might have seen. It's a classical story with elements of a thriller, with twists and turns and surprises. Basically, we drew upon the kind of surreal aspects of that world, (added) the surprises of a thriller, and wove a very powerful love story throughout."

Willing is an old hand at this.

Ten years ago, he crafted a more faithful, down-to-earth version of Alice in Wonderland for NBC and Channel 4 in the U.K. That miniseries, featuring Tina Majorino in the title role and a supporting cast that included Martin Short, Miranda Richardson, Robbie Coltrane, Peter Ustinov and Ben Kingsley, won four Emmy Awards.

But Willing cautions the new adaptation is similar in name only.

Alice is a radical departure from that Alice in Wonderland, as different from the Carroll classic as Willing's 2007 miniseries Tin Man was from The Wizard of Oz.

Willing adapted the classic story The Wizard of Oz as a post-modern miniseries starring Zooey Deschanel as a small-town waitress who is pulled into a magical realm called the OZ (Outer Zone). Tin Man's surrealist reinterpretation of an established classic was nominated for a Critics' Choice Award, despite a mixed critical reception.

The new Alice was produced and filmed earlier this year in Vancouver for the U.S.'s Syfy cable channel. Alice debuts Sunday at 7 p.m. on Canada's Showcase specialty channel.

The revisionist reimagining is set in a fever-dream world of apparitions and allegorical figures. Alice appears at first glance to be a fairy tale about obedience and subservience in a fantasy world, but deeper down, it's an allegory about fear and rebellion in the real world.

In Alice, a secretive organization called the White Rabbit abducts people from the real world so they can entertain the Queen of Hearts, the capricious ruler of Wonderland, an otherworldly fantasy city of twisted towers and casinos made out of playing cards.

Alice is an assertive, strong-willed young woman who finds her way to Wonderland after the man she loves vanishes one night, kidnapped by the White Rabbit to serve at the Queen's pleasure. It's only a matter of time before Alice's wilful ways clash with the Queen's sense of order and decorum.

Kathy Bates plays the Queen of Hearts, Harry Dean Stanton plays Caterpillar, and Matt Frewer plays the White Knight. Alessandro Juliani (Felix Gaeta on the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica) plays 9 of Clubs.

As with Dorothy in Willing's Tin Man, Alice is recast as a modern-day woman who finds herself in a fantasy world where modern conventions and morals don't apply.

"Obviously, she's not a little girl," Willing says. "She's a woman with all the kind of female problems that come from falling in and out of love."

Willing makes no apologies for Alice's dense, some might say impenetrable, blend of metaphor, allegory and parable, even though he knows literary purists will want to take off his head, as the Queen of Hearts did with her enemies in the Carroll original.

"The original paints a very rich palette, you know," Willing said. "One of the interesting things about the book is that it's written for children. It was written in 1860, and yet it's still very fresh today. The language is similar to modern language today, really, I think, because he was writing it for kids to understand. That's one of the reasons why the language of the book lives on, year after year after year, because it still delights children today in a way that perhaps other Victorian writings haven't done."

The Cheshire Cat will make an appearance at some point during Alice's four hours, Willing promises.

"A version of the cat does appear, yes," he said. "But not in the way you might expect."

-- Canwest News Service

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 3, 2009 E5