Though Wonders Abound, This ‘Alice’ Falls in a Hole

Things get curiouser and curiouser. How fitting that NBC’s “Alice in Wonderland� should arrive just as Dennis Rodman joins the Los Angeles Lakers.

As Alice says: “I used to read fairy tales. I never thought I would end up in the middle of one.�

One of NBC’s brighter ideas has been its late-’90s spin through a Rolodex of classics, with “Gulliver’s Travels,� “The Odyssey,’ “Merlin� and “Crime and Punishment� preceding this visually dazzling but ultimately tedious stretch on the rack with Lewis Carroll’s multilevel fantasy--titled “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland� when published in 1865.

It’s gorgeous but grueling.

This is essentially an English child’s-eye-view of adult foibles, one coming after Alice is drawn by a white rabbit into a bizarre wonderland of changing shapes and sizes where, Carroll informs us, nothing is what it seems. Or appears to seem. So it’s probably not important that Tina Majorino, while crisp and pleasing, is a bit too adolescent for Alice.

Freudians and others long have speculated that “Alice in Wonderland� reveals more about Carroll--his feelings about little girls and mature women, for example--than about anything else. And whatever the case, Peter Barnes’ NBC script notwithstanding, Carroll’s Victorian satire has faded through the years.

Nonetheless, his puns and parodies are delivered in whimsical Play-Doh monologues and dialogues that stand on their own as absurd fun and can be shaped to mean just about anything you want them to mean.

Perhaps the most complete “Alice� ever produced for the screen, and hands-down the longest, this one has in Martin Short (the Mad Hatter) and Miranda Richardson (Queen of Hearts) two of three performers (the third was Helena Bonham Carter) who made the “Merlin� highlight reel, as Frik and Queen Mab/Lady of the Lake, respectively.

In “Alice,� sadly, Richardson delivers so many irritating shrieks as the tyrannical queen with yens for croquet and decapitation that you’re thinking, “Off with her head.�

All nose, ears and teeth, however, the squealing, mugging Short is so exotically overstated as the straw-hatted hatter--even giving him a bit of the Ed Grimley side-step at the March Hare’s tea party staged ingeniously by director Nick Willing--that you’d like to bottle his virtuoso nonsense. Some of the other casting is also inspired, including Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat and Peter Ustinov as the Walrus.

The look is just smashing, meanwhile, playing at times like an acid trip left over from “The ‘60s,� but one whose rainbow of special effects does grow monotonous after a bit. These three hours are exactly what they seem, in other words. Very, very long.

* “Alice in Wonderland� airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on NBC. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for children under 14).