With all the turmoil besetting the real world, you’d think there might be more important things to inflate into controversies than the pre-release kerfuffles that have plagued “Snow White.” As it turns out, this is one of the better live-action adaptations of a Disney animated feature. And I say that as someone who mostly doesn’t like them. Yes, I’ve enjoyed a couple (“Cinderella,” “The Lion King”). At heart, though, I still don’t truly get the idea of Disney strip-mining its animated IP — and doing so not because there’s anything inherently appealing about turning painterly fairy-tale cartoons into stilted, less sublime real-life versions of themselves. What the remakes are selling is the theme-park novelty of the transformation: Look, here’s what an animated classic looks like when it’s retrofitted with sets and actors!
All that said, the chirpy, vivacious, just-romantic-enough-to-get-by “Snow White” proves to be an exception to the rule. Directed by Marc Webber (“The Amazing Spider-Man,” “500 Days of Summer”), from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson (“The Girl on the Train”), the film is lighter, more frolicsome, less lead-footed than such clomping live-action Disney remakes as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Dumbo” or “Mulan.” Rachel Zegler, as Snow White, has a pertly appealing glow, and Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen, glares divinely in her darkly purplish cloaked finery (stained-glass crown, nails like daggers, matching black lips and eyes), like the world’s most furious dominatrix. I wish Gadot’s vocal performance were more operatic and less Mata Hari, but she still makes a stylishly intense villain.
But let’s talk about the controversies, which in a rare moment of ideological combustibility come from both sides of the cultural-politics spectrum. Is the casting of Rachel Zegler, an actor of Latin heritage, as Snow White, a character originally named for her complexion, some sort of problem? Just to pose that question is to float a thought at once racist and absurd. So — short answer — no. (In the new movie, our heroine is named for the snowstorm that took place the night she was born.)
And what of the fact that Snow White, abandoned in the woods (where the Huntsman is too kindhearted to carry out the Evil Queen’s order to murder her), comes upon a house where seven cute, quarrelsome 249-year-old short men with Amish beards live in bachelor squalor and become her protectors? The main objection to this has been raised by Peter Dinklage, the actor and proud spokesman for little people who has assailed the “seven dwarfs” concept as cringingly stereotypical and retrograde. I can sort of see what he means, though carried to its logical conclusion that POV would render “The Wizard of Oz” a crime against humanity. In the new “Snow White,” the word “dwarf” is never mentioned, and the CGI versions of the tale’s little people honestly struck me as no more offensive (or reality-based) than hobbits.
Ah, but what of Zegler’s dismissal of the 1937 “Snow White,” which was Walt Disney’s first animated feature — and, in my opinion, still the most poetic and ravishing of them all? Speaking to Variety, Zegler said that in the original film “there’s a big focus on her love story with the guy who literally stalks her. Weird, weird.” She made it sound like the new “Snow White” might toss away the romance right along with the gorgeous fairy-tale matte work. What is “Snow White,” after all, if not a love story?
Actually, the love story remains quite intact. The fabled prince is gone, replaced by a noble ruffian, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who Snow White first encounters when he’s trying to steal potatoes out of the castle scullery. Their flirtation is very contempo Disney — it reminded me of the romance in “Frozen,” where love tussles with the lure of empowerment. I will say that it’s telling that in a film that exuberantly revives most of the key songs from the original “Snow White” (“Heigh-Ho,” “Whistle While You Work”), the filmmakers have given the heave-ho to “Someday My Prince Will Come.” This makes literal sense, since the prince is no longer a character. But what a song to lose! There’s a haunting magic to it, and that layer of magic isn’t there in the new “Snow White.”
Yet our heroine’s emotional journey remains vibrant, as does the story’s enchantingly wide-eyed and sinister design: the Evil Queen’s relationship with her Magic Mirror (the face of her malignant narcissism); and the way Snow White, after her mother, the Good Queen (Lorena Andrea), dies and her father, the Good King (Hadley Fraser), is sent away to war (he never returns), becomes a servant like Cinderella, only to learn who she is in the company of her seven jaunty woodland friends.
With catchy personalities and comically expressive mottled-clay faces, these CGI gnomes bring the movie to life, whether it’s the whimsically pedantic Doc (voiced by Jeremy Swift), the philosophical Grumpy (Martin Klebba), or the incongruously youthful, mute, and big-eared Dopey (Andrew Barth Feldman), who suggests Tom Holland starring in a biopic of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman. There’s also a handful of new songs, by Pasek and Paul, that from the witty “Princess Problems” to the generically enraptured “Waiting on a Wish” hover somewhere between fine and forgettable.
Gadot’s Evil Queen doesn’t just oppress Snow White. She’s a fascist who brings a chill to the land, plundering its riches and trashing the humanity of the people. Does that make her the film’s conscious metaphor for our current regime? You could say that we’ve seen other fairy-tale rulers a lot like this one. Yet movies connect in mysterious ways. Who would have thought that a Disney live-action remake could seem this pointedly political? In the end, the most resonant romantic feeling “Snow White” leaves you with may be: Someday my chintz authoritarian will come tumbling down.
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