Numbness stalks the ‘Maleficent’ audience
enI have never seen “Bambi” — I’ve seen the relevant parts, but never straight through — because when I was “Bambi” age, my parents knew that if I saw that movie I’d have the child equivalent of a nervous breakdown. The fate of Bambi’s mother traumatized at least two generations of children. In the mid1960s, grownups talked more blithely about Kennedy’s assassination than of that unthinkable animated hunting incident.
That was then. Friday, Oct. 18, marks the opening of “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” which depicts a fairy getting taken out of a jar and dissolved. Oh, you might ask, what was it doing in a jar? Actually, lots of fairies are in jars in this new “Maleficent,” all of them awaiting experimentation. A creepy scientist is trying to figure out what chemicals to use in order to kill them.
Then there’s a nice fairy godmother type who is gassed and dies inside a pipe organ, and lots of large woods creatures that are vaporized while flying in the sky, and human beings wiped out in a wave of destruction on a battlefield.
Yes, this is a children’s movie with a death toll.
Yet, it’s safe to say that no child watching “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” will be in the least traumatized, not because people are not as nice as they used to be, but rather because the movie makes sure that no one cares about any of those individuals.
Indeed, if there’s a lesson in all this antiseptic carnage, something the film might impart to developing minds, it’s the notion that some people matter and others don’t. The filmmakers could double or triple the number of dead fairies, people and wood creatures, and it would be of no consequence — so long as a set cadre of valued characters remains untouched.
But, you might ask, where is the movie’s emotion? The emotion here is not emotion per se, but a kind of sentimentality that we recognize in place of emotion. The princess (Elle Fanning), a human, was raised in the woods by Maleficent, and we understand their motherdaughter bond. We don’t feel the love, or see it, or even really believe it, but we recognize its counterfeit as standing in for the real thing. We might even prefer the counterfeit, because it makes no emotional demands on us. We don’t have to feel anything. We just have to respond with a surface goodwill.
Basically, all we have in this film is the pretext for a battle scene.
The original “Maleficent” was much better, a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” from the standpoint of the villain, which gave Angelina Jolie a chance to play the kind of role she excels in — that of a strong, distant, dignified person who finds her feelings and carefully lets down her guard. In this second installment, the world of the woods is about to join with the world of humans in the marriage between the princess and the human prince Philip (Harris Dickinson).
Unfortunately, Philip’s mother, the queen, doesn’t want peace, but rather has a master plan to murder every fairy and woods creature in existence. Fortunately, the queen is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, one of the best and most underrated screen actresses in the Englishspeaking world, so she doesn’t phone it in with some generalized portrait of evil. She internalizes this hatred, gives it a history, and makes it deep and personal. This makes Pfeiffer as interesting as anyone could hope to be in an otherwise uninteresting role.
As for the rest, a lot of bombs go off. A lot of woods creatures are shot out of the sky with iron bullets. Viewers are asked not to care about all this, and viewers will succeed and not care about anything or anyone in the movie. But the saddest thing about “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” is that it’s not bad, but typical, that this emptiness — this immersion in mass numbification — is the modern style.
Yet as children’s entertainment, it’s insidious all the same. This isn’t Wile E. Coyote blowing up and coming back in the next scene, because that meant he wasn’t dead. Nor is this a generation getting a memorable and inevitable education in the pains of real life. This is a generation getting lessons in how to go dead inside.
True, one movie won’t make a difference, and maybe a thousand movies like this can’t stunt human feeling. Still, there’s nothing good to say about the effort.