Bedazzled Cinderella pretty as a princess
Say what you will about the necessity of a live-action remake of Cinderella: At least Disney hasn’t jumped the gun.
In an age when sequels, spinoffs and reboots follow their originals faster than a bullet — Spider-Man 2.1 joins the Marvel universe in next year’s Civil War, while Fantastic Four gets a 10-years-later do-over this August, followed by a new Batman next March — Disney waited a solid 65 years between Cinderellae.
Wide-eyed waifs for whom the animated movie was their first can now take their grandkids to see this one.
And there’s precious little to carp about in the new release, unless you choose to take exception to the fact that there’s precious little to carp about.
Writer Chris Weitz — missing in action since the critically panned Golden Compass in 2007 — and director Kenneth Branagh (Thor, all things Shakespearean) have delivered a story that doesn’t even push the envelope of its G rating. Bippity-boppity-boo is about as salty as the language gets.
The plot follows the wellworn tracks laid down by Disney in 1950, with a smidgen of additional backstory. Ella is raised by loving parents (Hayley Atwell, Ben Chaplin) who die young, leaving her in the care of her father’s second wife (Cate Blanchett) and her two catty daughters. In a masterpiece (theatre) of upstairs-downstairs casting, poor Ella is played by Downton Abbey’s Lady Rose (Lily James) while one of the stepsisters is Sophie McShera, who plays a kitchen maid in the same TV series. The other is Holliday Grainger from TV’s The Borgias.
Before she expires, Ella’s mother says she has a secret to share: “Have courage and be kind.” (Technically that’s advice, not a secret, but there I go carping again.) She also tells her daughter that she “believes in everything,” which will be proven out when a certain fairy godmother turns out to be not a figment of imagination but Helena Bonham Carter.
Ella grows up serving her stepfamily, who eventually start calling her Cinder-Ella and move her into the attic where she has no company but for some computer-generated mice. All this changes when she goes for a ride in the woods and meets a charming prince played by former Game of Thrones castmember Richard Madden. Not wanting to intimidate her, he describes himself as an apprentice living in the palace. Thus is their relationship, like most great movie romances, founded on a lie.
Cinderella is a frightfully earnest affair, determined to brook no sarcasm or irony. About the closest it comes to self-mockery is when Fairy Godmother creates glass shoes for Cinderella to wear to the palace ball and tells her: “And you’ll find they’re really comfortable.” It’s as if all the cynicism had been carefully scraped away — and, one hopes, saved like rendered lard for other, more caustic movies.
But what the film lacks in winking, it more than makes up for in twinkling and sparkling. There are costumes to dazzle and delight, including a little number for Blanchett in wicked-witch green and a sky-blue gown for Cinderella of such volume that it probably crosses a time zone. (This might also help explain how those shoes manage to avoid turning back into their simpler counterparts at the stroke of midnight.)
Production design is similarly sumptuous — check out the goose-themed chandeliers in Cinderella’s childhood home and the opulence of the palace, all marble and gilt and flowers and candles. Branagh is a little too fond of the overhead crane shot, but it’s hard to fault him when he’s got such sets to shoot. Production designer Dante Ferretti and costumer Sandy Powell — three-time Oscar winners, including both for 2004’s The Aviator — may each receive a fourth for this one.
And so we have a story that plays to its strengths and lets the old-fashioned love story carry the day.