Cinderella

Cinderella is the third release in Disney’s recent, rather questionable effort to remake their classic animated films as PG-rated, non-musical, live-action movies (or CGI/live-action hybrids, to be more accurate). But unlike the previous year’s Maleficent, which retold the story of Sleeping Beauty from its villain’s point of view and uncovered much new thematic ground, this serviceable picture offers few pleasures and no new insights.  Director Kenneth Branagh—who gave us two of the best Shakespeare movies ever made [Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993)] brings as little flair to this by-the-numbers family blockbuster as he did to the lackluster franchise pictures Thor (2011) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). Granted, the movie’s lack of irony or any forced, grafted-on adult humor is refreshing, coming after so many contemporary family films that reject sincerity in favor of desperate attempts to be hip, caustic, or satirical. But without that modern aesthetic or any other novel ways to explore the themes in this material, the film amounts to nothing more than an unnecessary and inconsequential re-creation of a classic movie that still plays wonderfully in its original form.

It doesn’t help that unlike the previous two Disney animated features to get this new live-action makeover—Alice In Wonderland (1951) and Sleeping Beauty (1959)—the 1950 version of Cinderella is a near-perfect film. All three animated pictures offer many visual pleasures, memorable songs, and distinctive characters and feature important technical innovations, but Alice and Sleeping Beauty lack narrative fortitude and thematic resonance. Those films feel riper for reinvention than Cinderella, which has already been analyzed, criticized, embraced, rejected, and otherwise explored in all forms of media since 1950.  Perhaps it is because popular culture has so thoroughly reexamined this story (especially as it’s known through the Disney version) that the studio, Branagh, and screenwriter Chris Weitz (Antz, About a Boy, The Golden Compass) simply went back to the original movie. But it still begs the question of why we need this live-action variant.

One motivation for a remake could be potentially juicy casting. I think it’s fair to say that at least 60 percent of the motivation for remaking Sleeping Beauty was so Angelina Jolie could incarnate the villainous Maleficent. The combination of how Jolie’s physicality and screen presence merged with the original animated character’s design and the actress’s off-screen experiences with motherhood and her recent double mastectomy enhanced the remake’s inspired feminist themes more than justified a new live-action version.  But while the idea of Cate Blanchett playing the wicked stepmother in a live-action Cinderella might induce similar excitement, the reality falls extremely short. Branagh, Weitz, and Blanchett find little subtextual material to mine. They choose not to repeat the approach of making her sympathetic, like Jolie’s Maleficent, and therefore are left to try and find ways to make her more credibly devious and manipulative than her animated counterpart.

Helena Bonham Carter, as the Fairy Godmother, displays all the same frantic, unmotivated, and exhausting performance quirks that have characterized nearly every role she’s taken on in the past two decades. What happened to this once-great actress? She and Branagh should go back and watch their old movies, then have a long talk about where they both went wrong. 

Lily James (best known as Lady Rose Aldridge on the TV show Downton Abbey) plays the titular would-be princess. While the lovely James cuts an impressive figure in her impossibly tight corset and is very good at making astonished, wide-eyed faces whenever Cinderella witnesses feats of special effects or nasty behavior, she otherwise brings little to the role. Consequentially, this updated version comes off as far more antiquated and shallow than its 1950s predecessor—which is still the quintessential example of false expectations and limited gender roles that culture critics love to disparage.

One thing I will say for the new version is that it's lovely to look at and features a few amusing surface delights, but everything in the film is entirely disposable. There’s no magic fairy dust in this version, just an abundance of pixels.  I can’t imagine kids wanting to revisit this movie—which features no songs and no anthropomorphic mice—instead of returning again and again to the magnificent original animated classic.