The amount of flak girls give to the character of Cinderella always astounded me and still does to this day. They say she's anti-feminist and promotes the fallacy that waiting around and wishing for your problems to go away is something all women should do in order to get a "Happily Ever After". I'm here to defend one of my personal favorite Disney Princesses, here, as she doesn't have those qualities entirely. This argument against her ignores the fact that her stepmother and stepsisters kept her isolated in the chateau with little to no interaction with the outside world of the kingdom. It also ignores the fact that while she is on screen, she is always working her ass off and only breaks down when (I must stress this point), when her stepsisters completely shred apart her dress as she was preparing to go to the ball, the one time of year she was allowed to leave (as far as we know as an audience). I've never had a problem with that and the 1950 Disney Classic remains to this day one of my Top 15 Favorite Animated Films of theirs. To put it bluntly, the 2015 re-imagining of Cinderella did a lot of things right, making it (as of February 2017) the best of these remakes by a longshot. However, like it's contemporaries, the film also did a lot of things significantly worse than the original, including a few things that (in my opinion) make the "new feminist" ideals women want in their leads fall back a couple of decades.
Plot: A family lives together in a beautiful chateau in a small kingdom long ago. They all seem happy until the mother passes away of an unknown illness. Some time later, the father remarries a woman named Lady Tremaine and invites her and her daughters, Anastasia and Drizella, to live with him and his daughter Ella in their home. Despite a relatively pleasant lifestyle, things change when the father dies while off on a business trip, prompting a change in tone for Lady Tremaine, who gradually reduces Ella's role in the house to that of a scullery maid and takes complete control of the home, even allowing her daughters to call her "Cinderella". Despite this, Ella maintains a kind disposition.
While out in the fields, she comes across a handsome young man whom she believes to be a servant who works in the Royal Palace. After hitting it off a bit with him, it is announced that a Ball is to be held in the hopes that the sickening King of the land would be able to marry his son off and have a successful transition to him as king. While Ella tries to prepare for the Ball, her stepfamily keeps her so occupied that she cannot work on her dress for the ball. But the mice and birds she had assisted in the past help fashion for her a dress, only to have the stepsisters rip it in several places. Devastated, she is only alleviated by the appearance of her Fairy Godmother, who fashions for her a coach and beautiful dress to go to the ball. She meets the man of her dreams and the two dance the night away until the clock strikes midnight, prompting her to flee the ball, leaving behind one of her glass slippers, prompting the servant (who is actually the Prince) to begin a nationwide search for the girl who would fit this glass slipper.
What's Wrong?: The film's most major flaws ironically come from one of the places fans praise it for the most: the "progressive" take on Cinderella herself. The movie makes her out to be a far more proactive character in the plot of her own movie who utilizes her brains instead of her looks to get her places. The issue with this is the plot gives Cinderella (I know her name is Ella but the name has been engraved into my psyche) numerous attempts to be a more proactive character but instead takes huge steps backward in the hopes of not alienating this Cinderella from the 1950 incarnation. Such scenes that are in this film and absent in the 1950 film include a scene where she goes into town (where she learns about the Ball for the first time) and is asked why she can't just leave the misery she suffers through under her stepmother, to which she replies that she stays because it is her father's house (yet she has no problem abandoning the home when she meets with the Prince?). Secondly, the scene in which the Stepsisters tear apart her dress is a completely watered down version of the original film (where the dress is literally unwearable, but the dress here is still at least salvagable). This, as in the animated film, makes Cinderella collapse emotionally, though it is far from earned in this scene. The last, FAR MORE FRUSTRATING scene is near the climax when, in a twist from the original, Lady Tremaine actually discovers the glass slipper on Cinderella's person and tries to blackmail her into moving into the palace and continuing to dominate over the girl's life, but Cinderella refuses and does nothing to try and escape as the stepmother locks her in her room and plans to sabotage the Prince alongside the Duke in a plot to (and I'm not kidding here) KILL CINDERELLA. Ordinarily, this isn't a problem, but the original film had Cinderella literally begging at the door for her Stepmother to free her and for her friends to help her (even going against her own better judgement to have her dog go after the cat for stopping the rescue attempt). This one, however, does literally nothing in the film's climax until the VERY LAST MINUTE.
The acting in this film is also all over the map. While the leads in the film (specifically Lily James, Cate Blanchett and Richard Madden) all do fairly well in their respective roles, the supporting cast is all over the map in over the top acting and "under the bottom" restrained acting (if that's even a thing). While I fully expected Helena Bonham-Carter to be a good version of Bellatrix Lestrange as the Fairy Godmother, it was actually Haley Atwell's (Agent Carter in both Captain America and her TV Show named after her) performance that annoyed me the most. As I had previously known her in a strong leading role, her incredibly over the top joyous personality as Cinderella's mother rubbed me the wrong way all throughout the film.
Lastly, the callbacks in this film really started to irritate me. Whereas both Alice in Wonderland and Maleficent kept the callbacks to the original at a minimum, this film has plenty of unnecessary callbacks to the 1950 classic, including the pointless and really awkward scenes of Lucifer the cat chasing and harassing the mice (a part that while looked fondly upon by fans of the original, was a detriment to the original in terms of character development for Cinderella and the Prince). Just because you are remaking a film does not mean you need to have constant callbacks to the original (which would definitely become a trend going forward).
What's Good?: Aside from what I've mentioned above, the rest of the film is pretty damn good. The cinematography is just wonderful, and I do give credit to Kenneth Branagh, as his Shakespearean training in directing this show/film comes into full light in this film. If ever there was a person who seemed tailor made to direct a Fairy Tale with depth and realism in it, it would be him.
The characters also seem more real (with some argument against Cinderella herself). They filmed a really sad scene near the beginning that turned Lady Tremaine into the cruel woman she is throughout the majority, as both Cinderella and her father talk about missing her mother, prompting her to realize that no matter how much she loved her husband or how well she treated Cinderella, she would never be viewed as a mother and only as "second place". While I personally gravitate towards the more menacing performance Eleanor Audley gave back in 1950, this more realistic take on her is one I can safely say I had positive things to say about after seeing this. And while it was very easy to build off a relationship based on relatively nothing in the original film, the relationship between Cinderella and the Prince is a very genuine one, hearkening back more to the Disney Renaissance relationships than the ones of older Disney films.
Overall: While Disney's reboot fetish doesn't seem to be going away for a while, if this is the best we are going to get, I guess this will do as a tolerably good film with a few major flaws. It was certainly worth the time I spent watching it, though I will still hold onto my copies of the 1950 film. Maybe it's due to nostalgia or maybe the 1950 film really is on the whole a superior film. All we can say is that this film is far and away the best of the films and until proven otherwise, will be the cornerstone of this new age of Disney film production.
Final Grade: B- or 80
No comments:
Post a Comment