VERDICT: Disney’s umpteenth live-action remake of an animated classic turns out to be another bad apple.
Like death and taxes, Disney’s plundering of its own history has become inevitable, so it was only a matter of time before they desecrated the corpse of the legendary feature film that launched the studio into the stratosphere. The current Snow White arrives already exhausted by itself, offering a cavalcade of bad ideas, whether it’s staying true to the source material or attempting to drag it into the 21st century.
A perfect example of the tug-of-war between past and present emerges in the movie’s use of the word “fair”: the wicked queen (Gal Gadot) still asks her magic mirror if she’s the “fairest of them all” — never mind that it’s a term that equates beauty with pale whiteness — while Snow White (Rachel Zegler), so named because she was born in a blizzard, uses the word as a way to aspire toward equity and justice. As with so many of the ideas on display here, Snow White can’t have it both ways or even decide which way it wants.
Snow White’s royal parents were the kindly rulers of what the movie presents as a socialist agrarian utopia, with farmers and bakers sharing their bounty. But after the death of the queen (can’t have a Disney movie without at least one dead parent), the king is bewitched by Gadot’s scheming sorceress, and she sends the man off to his doom so she can plunge the kingdom into literal and figurative darkness, forcing the local farmers to beat their plowshares into swords and to join her army.
When the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia) refuses to carry out the evil monarch’s order to slay Snow White, he sends the girl running into the forest, where she’s befriended by birds and deer and ultimately sheltered by a septet of miners; this version assiduously avoids the use of the word “dwarf.” But when Gadot (literally credited as “Evil Queen”) disguises herself and gives Snow White a deadly apple, only the kiss of the girl’s true love, a prince of thieves named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap, The Front Room) can save her.
A musical not beholden to its template, all but two of the great songs from the original movie have been jettisoned. In their place is a pack of forgettable new ditties by the clonking and mystifyingly popular songwriting duo Pasek and Paul (The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen).
The two original songs that are included — “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work” — are marred by the appearance of the seven little gentlemen, who are disturbing hybrids of craggy human faces on small animated bodies, resulting in some of the most unwatchable uncanny-valley animation this side of The Polar Express.
Zegler, so effective stepping into the shoes of Maria in Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, is adrift here, saddled with terrible songs and a mostly passive character, even though the screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train) tries to turn the Grimm brothers’ heroine into a beloved revolutionary sweetheart who will remind the kingdom of what they lost when the Evil Queen took over. It doesn’t help that Snow White’s iconic red, blue, and yellow gown works better in a cartoon than in real life. (There’s a whole joke in Deadpool vs. Wolverine about this very phenomenon.)
Speaking of outfits, legendary costumer Sandy Powell puts Jonathan into what might be called Medieval Grunge, complete with a plaid hoodie, which only underscores the generic 90s-YA energy that Burnap brings to the role; he’s like an amalgam of every boy who dated Rory on Gilmore Girls. Gadot squeezes some campy fun out of her early scenes, giving Gabor sisters via Drag Race All-Stars, but the performance proves too one-note.
And she’s not a strong enough singer to delectate in her wickedness during her one big musical number; an experienced trouper like Meryl Streep (in Into the Woods mode) or Christine Baranski could have made a real meal of the moment.
Like so much of contemporary fantasy cinema, Snow White exists in a weirdly artificial netherworld, and not just where the seven dudes are concerned. Castle corridors look like video-game staging grounds, and even the camera sweeps seem coldly artificial and mechanical under the eye of director Marc Webb (the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies).
If there’s an upside to the existence of Snow White, it means we’re one movie closer to Disney eventually running out of animated classics to retool. To borrow from a song that didn’t make it to this remake, “I’m Wishing” they’d just knock it off already.
