You see it for one thing: Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen. Because Charlize Theron is a master of her craft, marvellous to watch, her choices clean and intelligent, and her role as written is the most interesting in the part of the film. And, to be frank, even she gets a little kabuki with it before the end.
What Kristen Stewart has to offer as an actress is a tough vulerability, a sort of street-urchin stubbornness, and a very particularly modern-day honesty communicated through her own peculiar brand of petulant underplaying, all of which combine to make her a much-needed surrogate through whom girls of a certain age experience themselves. In fact, these qualities have made her a star amongst a particular demographic. That someone decided they would also make her a good fit to play Joan Jett was a solid inspiration, and that worked out rather well. That any human would think they made her a good fit to play the Female Embodiment of Purity and Innocence is baffling to the point of dementia.
Her bearing and body language make it impossible to buy her as anything but a 21st-century girl, and her innate toughness makes scenes like the one where she quiets a fierce bridge-troll through sheer force of Innocence and Purity (a scene which ought to have been utterly charming, since the CGI troll is so utterly charming in his response to her) frustrating, to say the least. More problematic is the great resurrection towards the end, where she rises from the dead to give an "Agincourt" speech which inflames the army of Good Guys to fight and die for her cause. What it needs is a Cate Blanchett, and Stewart, for all her amiability, has nowhere near the charisma to pull it off.
Much of the story is difficult to swallow, and not the parts you'd think. I, for one, have no problem with the idea that a magpie Snow had saved as a child returns to lead her through her prison-break and to a magical white horse which bears her to safety. That is exactly the kind of thing one expects in a fairy tale. What I DON'T buy is that after spending ten years locked without a moment's respite in a dungeon her muscle-tone is such that she can outrun, outride, and outswim an army to find her escape. Should her skin not be diseased with lack of sunlight, therefore nullifying any "beauty" issues the Evil Queen might be harboring? And, having spoken to almost no one in all those years, should she not be, if not a little gibberlingly mad (a la Amy Acker at the beginning of her role in Angel), at least completely socially inept? She walks out of that cell like she's only been in it a day or two. You scoff at my persnickity attitude, but consider how easily this all might have been solved: the Evil Queen is more than adept at magic, and might easily have placed Snow in a sort of Rumplestiltskin/Sleeping Beauty magical sleep from which she might awake with (magically) renewed vigor. I swear: good film-making is all in the details, and if you're making a fairy tale, put yourself into that fairy tale space, will you?
But let that pass. Although there is no discernible chemistry between Snow and her Huntsman, Chris Hemsworth, it turns out, is an utterly dependable actor. He owns the power of presence to play Thor, the droll humour to deliver the wisecracks up to his inevitably spectacular death in Cabin in the Woods, and now the easy confidence to slip, when it's demanded, into the scenery as Snow's strong-man sidekick. The dwarves, when they at last appear, turn out to be Eddie Marsan, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Bob Hoskins and some other fellows I should probably recognize, all effectively CGIed into short, stocky miners. They're an enjoyable lot, without having all that much to do.
The fairy tale morphs as it goes on, kyping bits from the lives of Sleeping Beauty and Joan of Arc, and the coronation at the end is an almost embarrassingly underwhelming finale. Any common script-girl could tell you what this audience is interested in seeing is not Snow crowned queen, which we assume is inevitable, but Snow finding true love with her Huntsman, which is more problematic, royal entanglements being regulated as they are, and this we never see.
In the end, this story belongs to the Wicked Stepmother, who has been brilliantly embodied as the epitome of Female Rage at centuries of patriarchal oppression, and, more tellingly, centuries of secret female collusion with the enemy. The skewed, dishonest factor lodged near the heart of the movie is that, at loggerheads with the script, the film-maker secretly values Rage over Innocence, and so the character of Snow loses power in ambivalence while the Evil Queen is ultimately only defeated by her own self-loathing.
No comments:
Post a Comment