Fairy-tale revisionism is everywhere these days. A pair of primetime TV series, ABC’s Once Upon a Time and NBC’s Grimm, recast fairy-tale icons in modern TV genres (soapy seriocomedy, crime drama). Updated versions of Alice in Wonderland, Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast have hit screens in the last couple of years, and there’s a Hansel & Gretel action-horror movie coming next year. And the story of Snow White gets a facelift in two films this year: Snow White and the Huntsman, slated for June, and Mirror Mirror, now in theaters.
I don’t object that many of these reimagined fairy tales are more adult in tone than their beloved Disney incarnations. As J.R.R. Tolkien has pointed out, the association of fairy tales with childhood is an accident of history. The Grimm brothers didn’t see themselves as collectors of children’s stories; they were stories for everyone. I do take issue, though, with Hollywood’s current obsession with “dark,” “gritty,” “edgy” fare threatening to crush any sense of wonder and fantasy.
What a joy, then, that Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror offers a gorgeous, fantastic fairy-tale world bursting with extravagant imagination and splendor. From the elaborate spires and onion domes of Snow White’s castle, inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família church in Barcelona, to the rustic forest home of the seven dwarfs in a hollow, uprooted tree stump, Mirror Mirror isn’t just spectacular, but visually inspired.
Other potential pitfalls in postmodern fractured fairy tales include aggrieved feminism and sexual suggestiveness. As a father of three daughters, I can appreciate a level of healthy feminist revisionism, with heroines taking more active heroic role than fairy-tale princesses have traditionally done. Sometimes, though, it can be taken to obnoxious extremes, like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, with its tale of oppressive patriarchy snuffing out young girls’ specialness. Then there’s Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, with Twilight-y sexuality incongruously situated in a medieval nightmare world of religious repression.
Here Mirror Mirror is somewhat mixed. There’s some unnecessary rude humor, and the prince (Armie Hammer) is a somewhat comic figure who repeatedly gets robbed and stripped to his long johns — to the obvious delectation of the queen (Julia Roberts). Happily, the prince’s chemistry with Snow (Lily Collins) is more innocent, and if they wind up crossing swords in the forest, it’s the most playful swordfight since Antonio Banderas’ and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s duel in The Mask of Zorro.
Purists may balk at Snow White as yet another action princess, though at least she doesn’t become an armor-clad Joan of Arc figure, like Burton’s Alice (and, apparently, the heroine of Snow White and the Huntsman). And where Alice’s heroics were ultimately about her own self-actualization (especially not being forced into an undesirable marriage), Snow’s hero’s journey is focused on a noble cause, implicit (though not developed) in the source material: righting the wrongs suffered by her people under the cruel queen’s reign.
At the same time, Mirror Mirror’s saving grace is that it never takes itself too seriously. It’s a gorgeous if disposable romp that tweens and older fairy-tale fans will enjoy. For younger children, I think there’s an age for purer, more traditional fairy tales, before we start deconstructing them.
Worth Watching’s Top 5 Fairy-Tale Films
Beauty and the Beast [La Belle et la Bête] (1946)
Disney’s better known animated musical version is a justly celebrated masterpiece — but Jean Cocteau’s dreamlike French language adaptation is the truest and richest screen adaptation of the story.
The Princess Bride (1988)
One of the most oft-quoted movies of a generation, Rob Reiner’s beloved swashbuckling tale of a beautiful princess, a noble pirate, and a blackhearted prince is one of those rare satiric gems, like The Court Jester and Galaxy Quest, that doesn’t just send up a genre, but honors it at the same time.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938)
Hollywood’s first feature-length animated movie is still one of the most magical. With characters unselfconsciously inhabiting a singsong world of music and rhyme rather than bursting into showstopping musical numbers, Snow White resists all the post-modern deconstruction of Enchanted and its ilk, still casting a potent spell.
Star Wars (1977)
An orphaned hero meets a bearded, robed wizard, gains a magic sword, ventures into a dark fortress, and rescues an imprisoned princess. George Lucas’s groundbreaking blockbuster updated the trappings, but the charm of this space-age fairy tale is inseparable from its innocent sense of wonder and unironic vision of good and evil.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The quintessentially American fairy tale, MGM’s joyous musical take on L. Frank Baum’s story ranks among our earliest and most defining experiences of wonder and fear, of fairy-tale joys and terrors, of the lure of the exotic and the comfort of home.