Login
Now I’m not saying that this is up there with Jean Cocteau’s poetic masterpiece La Belle et La Bête, but this is how you reinvent a fairy tale for the big screen. All of the story beats are there, but they’ve been twisted, expanded upon and remain highly sexualized and violent, no Disney-friendly scrub brush has removed any of the psychological complexity here. That’s right, I’m calling you out Mirror Mirror, the first, but by no means best, Snow White adaptation of 2012.
Snow White & the Huntsman truly does focus on the two of them, and twists the story away from the generic, anemic heroine besting the wicked stepmother with the help of numerous friends into a more girl-power tale, beefing up not only Snow White’s personality and presence, but that of the Huntsman as well. Everything is given a harder edge, at once going for an over-the-top visual splendor, which at times has things happening for no other reason than that they look cool, and a Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones dirty/realistic world in which famine and disease are unglamorous sufferings and most people look like they haven’t bathed in days.
All of the ingredients that we think of when it comes to Snow White are here: the pallid heroine, the handsome prince, the brawny huntsman, the nightmarish escape through the woods, the seven dwarves, and, of course, the glamorous, dangerous Queen. And, unlike Mirror Mirror, this actually features the poisoned apple and the death of the Queen. But how it uses them is really very interesting.
Kristen Stewart is pretty, but Charlize Theron is a super-humanly gorgeous being. The movie explains that Snow White is fairer than the Queen due to her capacity to love, care and nurture; it’s a nice side-step for something that always bothered me about every screen incarnation of the tale. No one truly believes that Disney’s animated heroine is more beautiful than the slinky, seductive Queen, at least this movie returns to the roots of the story and gives a reasoning behind Snow White’s eventual ascension as fairest of them all.
A new wrinkle has been added to the story, a town made up of women who live on the outskirts of the kingdom and have damaged themselves so they’re no threat to the Queen. It’s a smart new dimension to the story, and really opens up the world beyond the palace, forest and cottage. This sequence gives us a moment to realize that there is an actual kingdom at stake here, complete with peasants and gentry who are real people with needs, values, fears and dreams.
And the performances add a great deal to the surprising twists and turns it takes to the story. The dwarves as presented here are anything but the seven compartmentalized personalities that we think of them as in our collective consciousness, but a rag-tag group of unique faces and personalities, seemingly borrowed from a British gangster film. There’s a true element of danger when actors like Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone portray normally cuddly little side-kicks.
Chris Hemsworth, brawny, hunky and bruised in equal measures, proves that when a meatier role is offered to him, he may just excel at it. This isn’t an awards caliber performance, but it proves that he may yet have depths and interesting emotional layers to discover as an actor. The Huntsman wouldn’t seem like a role which would require any complexity, but there’s a great arch for his character to go on and Hemsworth nails it each and every step of the way.
Theron as the queen delivers a performance that I am of two minds about. On one hand, she’s given a richer backstory and reasoning behind her evil plotting and vanity. As a child she was told that her only value and contribution to the world was her beauty, so any intelligence (which she possesses) or other qualities were never given a chance to ripen. When needed to strike a withering look, or have moment of naked emotion, to reveal the tremendous hurt, bitterness and anger behind her bitchery, Theron nails the role. But she also has several moments when she decides that drag queen-level high camp and overacting would serve the story well. It’s by turns a fabulous, engaging portrait of a woman with few options forced to trade-in on her good looks at the expanse of her soul, and screaming, flailing diva caricature preening on display. She’s a far better evil queen than Julia Roberts, I will say that much.
And, of course, one cannot talk about this movie without mentioning the sheer visual wonder on display. The world of the film may be surrounding in darkness, and have an overall glacial feeling, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some beautiful special effects for us to feast upon. Snow White’s hallucinations over the dark forest see tree branches turn into black snakes, slithering and twisting in midair, and demonic gargoyles emerging from dead trees. Albino fairies crawl out of birds, or were riding on them depending on how you look at it. And when we meet the great forest spirit, which tiptoes into plagiarism of Princess Mononoke territory for a brief second, the very vegetation begins to spring to life as mushroom’s sprout eyes, moss covered rocks turn into turtles, vines growing on trees turn into green snakes and other such phenomenon. It’s beautiful to look at, but there are times when some images seem done just for the sake of it. I’m still unsure what the queen’s dip into a giant tub of milk only to arise looking like a marble statue was supposed to mean or symbolize, but it sure was a nifty image for the trailers.
