Mirror Mirror, Grimm and Hollywood love for fairy tales
Terrence Rafferty
Fairy tales can come true, the old song goes; it can happen to you, apparently, if you?re young at heart. Whether one believes this hopeful sentiment, and regardless of the age of one?s internal organs, there?s no doubt that fairy tales have for the past couple of years?and into the foreseeable future?been coming pretty regularly to screens both big and small, achieving, you could say, at least the kind of quasi-truth that movies and television can concoct.
Tarsem Singh?s Mirror Mirror, a zippy new version of the Snow White story, was recently released, and yet another retelling, Snow White and the Huntsman, is threatened for this year. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters looms on the horizon too, scheduled for early 2013. And two of the livelier series of the current television season, Grimm and Once Upon a Time, are based on tricky fairy-tale premises. Not all these movies and shows are destined to live happily ever after in the memories of their target audiences, but the entertainment industry, with its childlike trust in the powers of its own magic, believes we?ll be enchanted.
Maybe so, but the characteristic tone of fairy tales and folk tales, which is derived from oral storytelling traditions, is awfully difficult to replicate on screen. Just last year Catherine Hardwicke?s Red Riding Hood and Daniel Barnz?s Beastly (an updated Beauty and the Beast) showed that there are many dangers for filmmakers who venture into these dark woods.
Red Riding Hood tries telling the familiar tale in a more or less traditional manner, setting the action in the usual medieval village and decking its actors out in the customary peasant garb. The big-eyed, big-eared wolf that menaces Red and her granny has been turned into a werewolf, and an alarming lycanthrope-hunting cleric (played by Gary Oldman at his most unfettered) has been added, but the basics of the story remain intact, and Hardwicke, of Twilight fame, keeps the mood properly somber and hushed. But the picture is terrible. There?s no real conviction in it: the younger actors sound as if they?re speaking Esperanto; the older ones look weary and dazed, as if they were struggling to awaken from a long, long spell.
Beastly takes a different tack, transporting an old story to our brave new world, and it?s just about as unconvincing. The classic tale, whose most widely read literary version is the 18th-century story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, has been adapted before, notably by Jean Cocteau in 1946 and by Disney animators in 1991. Barnz sets the action in a Manhattan prep school, where an arrogant, good-looking rich kid is transformed by a witch into an ugly guy. He has to learn to be a good enough person for the sweet heroine to love him in spite of his looks.
Cocteau?s film is, of course, an impossible standard. It?s the greatest fairy-tale movie ever made, and there isn?t really a close second. Jacques Demy?s graceful, candy-coloured Donkey Skin (1970) is the distant runner-up, a movie that treats an exceptionally disturbing story with a disconcertingly light touch. (It?s about a princess trying to escape the clutches of her father, the king, who wants to marry her.) And Neil Jordan?s 1984 Company of Wolves, a Little Red Riding Hood reimagined by him and Angela Carter, is both scarier and more erotic than fairy-tale pictures usually allow themselves to be; it captures some of the violent terseness of the Grimm brothers? style, and it is distinctly not for children.
The world from which fairy tales and folk tales emerged has largely vanished, and although it pleases us to think of these stark, simple, fantastic narratives as timeless, they aren?t. Thanks to video games, computer graphics and the general awfulness of everyday life, fantasies of all kinds have had a resurgence in the past few years. But the social realities on which the original fairy tales depend are almost incomprehensibly alien to 21st-century sensibilities; they reek of feudalism. And the lessons they?re supposed to teach our young don?t have much force these days. Kids learn to be skeptical almost before they?ve been taught anything to be skeptical of.
Mirror Mirror works hard to let the audience know that it?s aware of its own silliness. Although the story is set in a vaguely medieval fairy-tale kingdom? easier to conjure now, with digital effects?the tone is cheerfully, unapologetically anachronistic. The mean queen seems to have stepped out of one of the riper episodes of Desperate Housewives, while practically every line in the picture is delivered like a sitcom zinger. (Was there really so much insult humor in the Middle Ages?) And the story has been altered to reflect more contemporary notions about the roles of men and women. Snow White is a much more can-do kind of princess than the passive heroine of yore, and this Prince Charming is quite a bit less masterful. He can?t stop Snow from saving him, when he believes that he should be saving her. ?It?s been focus-grouped,? he protests, to no avail.
The TV series Grimm and Once Upon a Time are, surprisingly, more thoughtful than any of the recent fairy-tale movies have dared to be. Maybe the succession of weekly episodes more closely approximates the regularity and one-thing-after-another quality of bedtime stories.