Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/25/07
As I understand it, the history
of the Disney Princess goes something like this: for about 50 years
between the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the era
of Beauty and the Beast, little girls everywhere dreampt of themselves
wearing awesome gowns, having woodland critters as their friends and, most
importantly, being swept off their feet by a Prince Charming with whom
they would live Happily Ever After. Then, right around the time the
ever-profitable Disney corporation caught on to how promotable the notion
of the “Disney Princess” as a kind of asexual Bond Girl was, the country
was catching up to the idea that singing to woodland critters and waiting
for Prince Charming were not skills that were going to get a woman into
the White House anytime soon. So began a tug of war each subsequent
Traditional Disney flick has tried to stay on the right side of:
fantasy vs. empowerment. While the largely human-free Pixar revolution
has called Time Out on this eternal struggle for the last few years, it's
back with a vengeance in Enchanted, which sends a Disney Princess
through a magical portal into The Real World. There, the movie has
a lot of fun with the contradictions between the two universes, and utterly
fails to say any of the many meaningful things it so desperately wants
to.
In a typically cheerful Disney
Animated World, Giselle (voice of Amy Adams) lives in a tree with a bunch
of wacky animals while pining away for True Love's Kiss. Meanwhile,
Queen Narissa (voice of Susan Sarandon) can only hold the throne so long
as her stepson Prince Edward (voice of James Marsden) does not marry.
But one day, he takes time out from slaying Ogres (well, grabbing them
and tying them up at least, this IS a kid's movie) to join Giselle in a
duet and the next day, they are to be married. Having none of it,
Narissa disguises herself as an old hag before the wedding and shoves Giselle
down a well to a world “where there is no Happily Ever After”. You
guessed it, that hole leads to the sewers beneath New York City, and Giselle
(now both the voice and body of Amy Adams) emerges in her big ol' dress
looking for a kind person to point her toward The Castle. Instead,
she ends up latching onto cynical divorce lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey),
who's given up on crazy things like true love and fairy tales. He
tries to raise his daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey) with tales of Madame
Curie (if only he'd stop telling them at a point before the famed physicist
dies of radiation poisoning...) while hoping to propose Perfectly Reasonable
Marriage to his girlfriend Nancy (Idina Menzel). Just about the time
Giselle begins to melt Robert's cold heart, Edward (again, now the entire
James Marsden package) shows up to take her back to Happily Ever After.
But does she really want that anymore? And will his scheming sidekick
Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) allow it even if she does? I know this
much, there's no way this ends without a ball, a slipper, an appearance
by the Wicked Stepmother, and True Love's Kiss.
Disney's quite fortunate
that Enchanted rolled down the assembly line at the precise moment
when Amy Adams' career was taking off: her guileless charm is absolutely
perfect for a cartoon character come to life. She also proves to
be a fine singer, and that's a good thing because the best parts of Enchanted
are the musical numbers written by Disney regulars Alan Menken and Stephen
Schwartz. Of particular note are two wonderful scenes. In the
movie's comic highlight, Giselle summons the local animals to help her
clean her new friend's apartment, only to find that every critter living
in New York City is some kind of vermin like rats, cockroaches and pigeons.
But that doesn't stop her from leading them in a cheerful number that ends
with a horrified Robert shoeing them away. Then there's its' romantic/magical
highlight, a musical number she leads in Central Park about the nature
of love that everyone around her (well, not Robert, who's too cynical)
finds themselves spontaneously joining in on. Marsden is a hoot as
the vain Edward: he's willing to make as much a fool of himself as
the movie will allow, and it allows quite a bit. Dempsey's got the
whole sad-eyed love interest thing down, and Sarandon makes a wonderful
wicked stepmother.
Where Enchanted stumbles
is that, having set down these basics, it cannot find a way to untie that
Princess/President knot I mentioned earlier. I certainly get how
no woman who'd met a three-dimensional human man could maintain her interest
in the slab of square-jawed self-absorption that is Edward. It's
just that the movie can, and in its' rush to make sure everyone
ends up with a happy ending and a dance partner, finally says absolutely
nothing at all about whether it's better to live a life or a dream.
The final scenes stumble desperately over themselves trying to make everything
work, but for all their sound and fury, there's not much action, and what
there is relies on Giselle developing spontaneous superpowers she has because,
well, she's a girl. And Girls Rule! Also a drag on the enterprise
are the other supporting characters who come along from the animated world:
the movie's bothwaysism extends to Spall's henchman so far that it even
has him writing a bestseller at the end about what he's learned.
Be honest: have you ever been happy to find out at the end of a movie
that one of its' character went on to write a bestseller? Didn't
think so. And while the talking chipmunk who follows Edward has a
few cute moments in our world, in theirs he's utterly insufferable, kinda
like a Disney version of The Simpsons' Poochy, the EXTREME new friend
Itchy and Scratchy viewers couldn't stand.
Because the charming time
we spend in Giselle and Robert's company far outweighs that which the movie
spends stumbling over itself, I still liked Enchanted on balance.
Its' climax doesn't so much collapse as simply fail to coalesce, and it
does contain a giant dragon, albeit one that talks too much. Those
who Geek Out on the Disney Cannon will likely love the movie beyond all
reason, and there's enough here to entertain anybody who still likes to
think that goodness and happiness have a place in a world determined to
tear them down. If it makes you feel any better, tell your daughters
about Eleanor Roosevelt on the drive home. |
