I always love it when contemporary film makers do a period piece and think they are shocking the hell out of us when the heroine is “modern, free-thinking, headstrong and a proto-feminist.” I think that Rachel McAdams used that exact line to describe her Irene Adler character in the recent “Sherlock Holmes.” And we all remember Kate Winslet’s feisty class-busting Picasso-collecting friend-to-poor-artists schtick in “Titanic.” For the last quarter century evry female lead from Maid Marion to your average Jane Austen heroine has been played as a butt-kicking, wise-cracking testicle-crushing combination of Germaine Greer and Xena, Warrior Princess. In the case of “Alice” its fair to remember that Tim Burton has always had problems creating credible grown-up male figures (so does Johnny Depp) and is far more comfortable with modernist post-pubescent female characters. That’s his privilege and good luck to him but Burton’s world-view is starting to get a little old.
