Published: 7:23PM GMT twenty-seven February 2010
Comments 7 |
The peculiar couple: Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter Photo: GEOFF PUGH "But I don"t wish to go in between insane people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can"t assistance that," pronounced the Cat: "we"re all insane here."
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: 50 contribution Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton: filming starts Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter in Tim Burtons Alice In Wonderland Brideshead Revisited: Sacred and scurrilous From Alices Wonderland to a Roman Wonderwall: underlineW hen he wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865, Lewis Carroll couldn"t have guessed that the genuine stupidity had frequency begun. The book was perceived well, but with an distinct magnitude of confusion in Victorian England, and it wasn"t prolonged prior to people proposed to ask what it was unequivocally about. The theories increasingly unfortunate in inlet have been pier up ever since, and not most of them lay absolutely with the thought of a children"s story about a small woman descending down a rabbit hole.
We"ve had the psychosexual fantasy explanation, the bourgeoisie-baiting prologue to Marxism, the feminist parable, and the drug trip. But what the book has unequivocally been watchful for these 145 years was someone insane sufficient to mark the much-misused movie potential. Tim Burton"s Alice in Wonderland, expelled subsequent Friday, might be a less than wholly true revelation of the original, but it"s tough not to clarity that Carroll has, at last, found a consanguine spirit.
All the Burton trademarks are there: the strangeness, the surrealism, the powerful air of unenlightened noir, Johnny Depp, and, naturally, Tim"s English troubadour and woman love, Helena Bonham Carter. The span met 9 years ago on the set of his much-panned reconstitute of Planet of the Apes, when Burton, pessimistic of the film"s progress, speckled Helena in full gorilla dress and told her what a healthy she was for the part. The intrigue was delayed to light for alternative reasons, one being Tim"s rendezvous to Elvis Presley"s daughter, Lisa Marie, but love in the future triumphed, and the span finished up together in London.
Together after a fashion, that is, for they live apart, in adjoining houses in a budding Hampstead street, related (according to the some-more illusory reports) by a tunnel, filled (according to even some-more illusory reports) with bats, creepy-crawlies and candelabras. Helena denies the hovel story, describing instead a elementary "airlock" arrangement, by that they pass when necessary. But what is sure is that the houses are really different. "Mine looks similar to something out of Beatrix Potter," Helena has said, "but if you go over to his house, you"re in a all opposite place. He"s got passed Oompa Loompas lying around, and skeletons, and uncanny visitor lights. It"s similar to going from the land of the vital to the land of the dead."
Here, with their dual children, Billy, seven, and Nell, two, the King and Queen of Kookiness co-exist in strong bliss. "He regularly visits," she says, "which is really touching. He"s regularly entrance over." Sometimes they even nap together. Why usually sometimes? "There"s a snoring issue," she confided recently. "I talk, he snores. The alternative thing is, he"s an insomniac, so he needs to watch radio to get to sleep. I need silence."
That these dual should have radical vital arrangements is less startling than that they should be together at all. The captivate of opposites is one thing, but Helena, 43, the plummy-voiced, porcelain-complexioned, parasol-twiddling budding decoration of the Merchant-Ivory era, and Burton, the ghosted impresario of Gothic chic, appear hardly to go on the same planet.
Burton grew up in Burbank, California, where his budding childhood diversion was entertainment mattock murders on the family lawn. His father Bill was a parks inspector, and his mom Jean ran a cat-themed newness shop. From an early age, their son thirsted after the dark, the horrible and the outr; spurning the epics and blockbusters of the era, he outlayed his weekends examination low-budget abhorrence films. His boyhood statue was Vincent Price, the uniformly sinister Prince of Darkness, around whom his initial film, the six-minute Vincent, was based. He began as an animator, operative for Walt Disney, but in the future pennyless by as a executive with Beetlejuice, a weird tour by an illusory torture with a suburban integrate whose car crashes off a bridge.
Intrigued by his knack for creation offbeat "sleeper" hits on low budgets, Burton was hired by Warner Brothers to approach Batman. His preference of Michael Keaton, formerly regarded as a lovable and cuddly humerous entertainment actor, to fool around the Caped Crusader caused snub and threats of a tellurian protest in between the fans. Burton, facing vigour from the studio, refused to behind down, and the movie, with the nightmarishly creepy evocations of Gotham City, became one of the greatest hits of the late 1980s.
By this time, Helena was well determined as Britain"s inaugural square of shade posh, even if her de rigueur outfit of corsets, frills and a kind glow on each impertinence tended, occasionally, to lead astray from the peculiarity of her performances.
A great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, the Liberal budding apportion in between 1908 and 1916, she grew up in a well off London family, and was headed for Cambridge University when an coming in the pages of Tatler brought her a movie offer.
Within a couple of years she was a star, despite a painfully uncertain one, racked by the feeling that her climb had been as well easy. "I didn"t know what the ruin I was doing," she has confessed. "I thought,"F---, I can"t do this. I felt I was all bluffing it." She pennyless free from sort with a much-debated bare stage in Wings of a Dove, that won her an Oscar nomination, and detailed her celebrity by starting a attribute with Kenneth Branagh.
It is with Burton, though, that she has finished the bulk of her most appropriate work as Emily in Corpse Bride; as ruthless cake maven Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd; and right away as the megalomaniacal Red Queen. Set 10 years after Alice"s initial tumble down the rabbit hole, the movie tells of her lapse to Wonderland, and mission to save the inhabitants from the Jabberwock. Mysteries abounding unfold, nonetheless the big one of what Carroll meant by it all stays reassuringly intact.
"If any one of them can insist it," pronounced Alice, "I"ll give him sixpence. I don"t hold there"s an atom of definition in it."
