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Since Tim Burton’s uneven Alice in Wonderland made a billion dollars worldwide at the box office, fairy tales are just so hot right now. How else to explain two different versions of the Snow White story hitting the big screen within a few months of each other? Well, Hollywood saw a movie that made a ton of money and wanted a piece of the pie, and the stories are in the public domain, so there’s no pesky writer to pay royalties too.
And on the surface of things, Tarsem Singh’s version should have been the better of the two. Narrative coherence was never his strong selling point, but a feverish, hallucinogenic visual splendor and ripe, overly zealous pageantry are. And a fairy tale seems like the perfect vehicle for his brand of visual overload. But something went terribly wrong in the marriage between material and director.
Mirror Mirror does everything wrong that you could possibly think of with the source material, simultaneously gutting it of the darker, sexual undertones and lifelessly doing nothing interesting or clever to bring a fresh vision to it. It lobotomizes itself and places us in a world as fully realized and blatantly artificial as Fantasy Land in Disney Land.
Perhaps if it hadn’t committed the cardinal sin of being so unbelievably boring I could find myself being kinder to it. But with a glorious, quirky animated introduction that retells the origin of Snow White, her father and how the Wicked Queen came into power through puppets and a pop-up book wonderland my expectations were set too high. Once we realize that Julia Roberts is going to be employing a now-you-hear-it, now-you-don’t British accent and trying her best to toss off sarcastic bon mots (which is not where her gifts lie as an actor), we know we’re in trouble.
Here is a Snow White who is sweet, pure, kind-hearted and in-touch with nature. And here is an Evil Queen, who is not evil, so much as vainglorious, bratty and insecure. Disney’s animated variation could have, and would have, taken this version out with one withering glance and snide half-smile. The balance is off. Fairy tale villains are so engaging, more so than the heroes, because they relish in their evil. They take a great amount of pride in being disturbed, highly sexual and violent beings. They are pure id turned towards our darkest impulses. To remove the venom from the Queen is to neuter the story.
So why did I give this movie two stars instead of half of one? Well, that animated introduction is just beautiful to look at. And Lily Collins and Armie Hammer try their best to make something happen with their characters and the film at large. There’s (maybe) one fresh idea in having the magic mirror transport the Queen to an alternate realm where a version of herself, the nice(r) one, resides and tries to talk her out of her schemes and machinations. And the costumes from Eiko Ishioka are mind-blowingly beautiful and, alternately, completely and utterly ridiculous at the same time. I’ve long been a fan of her costume design work, and this movie is no different.
So those things kept me interested, while the poor CGI (the Beast at the end of the film is cartoonish, rubbery creature that is both hideously designed and horrifically animated), lackluster storytelling (it feels far longer than its 106 minutes), and unnecessary alterations to the storyline (no huntsman, no eating a poisoned apple, nothing that really makes Snow White, well… Snow White, aside from a basic framework and some names), cheap amusement park-like sets and general tedium bored me to tears.
There you have it. Watch Mirror Mirror for the introduction and the costumes. Or, just Google the intro and look at the production stills of the characters. Either way, as long as you avoid the confounding choice to end the movie with a Bollywood style musical number, which I still think doesn’t make any sense.
