Alice: A Look into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2009) Review

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(More customer reviews)You know a documentary is not off to a promising start when the narrator repeatedly mispronounces the name of the subject of the documentary. (Lewis Carroll's real name, Dodgson, was pronounced with a silent "g": that is, "Dod-son".)
The narrator also mispronounces the name of Carroll's most famous illustrator, saying "Te-NEEL" instead of "TENN-i-el" (that is, rhyming with "perennial").
At another point, he actually refers to Carroll as "Liddell". He mispronounces "ideologies" as "ideal-ologies."
At another point, he talks about a rainstorm in which Carroll and his child friends were caught as inspiring the "valley of tears" section of ALICE. The VALLEY of tears?! I assume he means the "pool of tears".
In another place he refers to Carroll's habit of figuratively "marking with a white stone" the happy days in his diary as a "Biblical" symbol. It was actually a pre-Christian Roman custom.
He also refers to Carroll's famous boat trip with the Liddell sisters as taking place on "Independence Day" -- July 4th. The fourth of July isn't actually a holiday in England. Independence Day is an American holiday.
All this typifies for me the whole sloppy, lazy approach taken in this rather shallow exploration of the lives and relationship of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. When the narrator mispronounced a word -- or accidentally called the subject of the documentary by the WRONG NAME -- couldn't they be bothered to record a second take? Was the director not paying enough attention to even notice that it happened?
In addition, "facts" are repeatedly introduced, but not supported. One typical example: "Father William is thought to be based on Jowett ..." Thought by WHO?
Several longish tangents are devoted to the lives of Watts, Wordsworth, and Blake -- as it is asserted they were an influence on Carroll -- but those sections really add little to our understanding of Carroll. It would have been sufficient to say in one sentence that, say, "Carroll was parodying the many familiar moralizing poems of Isaac Watts."
About a third of the documentary consists of the narrator recounting in unnecessarily tedious detail the whole familiar story of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" -- throwing in occasional interpretive "facts" supposedly related to the writing of the story (though some of these are questionable and mostly unsupported as well).
The few plusses about the DVD are that it shows many nice and interesting photographs of Victorian Oxford -- though it is rarely explained what they are, and they tend to be shown repeatedly. (At one point a photo of John Ruskin is shown in a section that has nothing to do with Ruskin, and it is not said who he is. It is as if the filmmakers thought, "Well, here's an interesting Victorian-looking man" -- and that was good enough for them.)
Also, the special features include quite nice prints of the 1903 and 1915 silent film versions of Alice. Those are the reason I am keeping this DVD.
Otherwise, you would do better to find and read several of the good, illustrated biographies of Carroll available.

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The books, written by a mild stuttering bachelor lecturer of mathematics, that told the adventures of a little girl who fell down a rabbit hole into a wonderland, and later, went through a mirror into a looking-glass world, have sold more copies than any other book except The Bible. Alice was the name of that little girl, who not only became the heroine of these tales, but was also the name of the child who inspired the writer, Lewis Carroll, to exercise his genius.This program examines the coming together of the writer and his muse, the society they inhabited, and their relationship that is still the subject of much controversy, as well as the effect it had on their subsequent lives.SPECIAL DVD EXTRASAlice in Wonderland (1915 Version)Alice in Wonderland (1903 Version)

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