This review is one of the most insightful I've read.
Angelina Jolie redeems 'Maleficent' and Charlize Theron almost saves 'A Million Ways to Die in the West,' by… http://t.co/l0HyEUQ72q
— Grantland (@Grantland33) May 30, 2014
grantlandToil and Trouble
Angelina Jolie redeems ‘Maleficent’ and Charlize Theron almost saves ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’
by Wesley Morris on May 30, 2014....
Both Snow White movies were in some way also about older actors ceding the floor to younger actors — Roberts to a missing-in-action Lily Collins; Theron to Kristen Stewart. It just seemed too soon for what essentially felt like a concession. I say, just do the Shakespeare. Like a lot of films since The Little Mermaid, both movies also wanted to address the “princess problem.” They wanted to turn the princesses into tough cookies. There is feminism in these movies, but it’s on crutches. Their most appealing ingredient isn’t the ingenue but the hatefully jealous older star.
That’s the hook for Maleficent, too: Come watch Angelina Jolie be awful to Princess Elle Fanning. Jolie hasn’t appeared in theaters since 2010 with Salt and The Tourist, which means she hasn’t been in an (arguably) good film since Changeling in 2008. So the invitation to watch a star who has always struck me as canny about her image fall into the evil-queen trap seemed like one that should be refused. But Jolie knows what she’s doing. It’s as if she has seen the cartoons and the attempts to redress princess politics and deduced that what’s been missing is feminism that can stand on its own two feet — that what’s been missing is her. She makes this movie something to see. I might feel that way even if she acted more than she does, but her return from a prolonged absence only enhances the mystique of a star we only think we know.
In Maleficent, she arrives a happy, airborne fairy with antelope horns, gargoyle wings, and high, digitally adjusted cheekbones that Henry Moore could’ve sculpted. There’s a war on between humans and woodland creatures. She’s the commander and vanquishes the king’s forces. As a girl, Maleficent befriends a human boy named Stefan, who dreams of living in the royal castle. And, as a man (Sharlto Copley), he becomes so mad for power that when the king falls ill and asks for proof of Maleficent’s death, Stefan betrays his old friend to secure the throne. He steals Maleficent’s wings. And Jolie, aided by the hysterics of James Newton Howard’s score, wails in anguish. When King Stefan’s daughter, Aurora, is born, Maleficent crashes the christening, in a helmet and cape, and puts the baby under that ridiculous spell. Three dingbat pixies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple) disguise themselves as peasants and raise the baby in a cottage outside the kingdom, while Maleficent hangs back and plays pranks on them all.
The movie’s screenplay is credited to Linda Woolverton, who’s been writing scripts for Disney since Beauty and the Beast. It’s as if she has fused Game of Thrones with different versions of Sleeping Beauty — by Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Disney. The result doesn’t make any sense. The other iterations did — more than Maleficent does, anyway. But there’s a method to the writing’s badness. To tinker with the politics of the story, the movie has chosen to tie itself in a dramatic knot: There’s really no conflict between Maleficent and Aurora, whom Fanning plays as a carefree teenager. The girl loves the woman, who learns to love her back.
It’s King Stefan and his army who have it out for Maleficent. (Copley’s become the most elastic embodiment of nastiness; it’s never the same villainy twice with him.) She seems perfectly killable, but they try chaining her up. For sport. For torture. On the one hand, it’s perfectly obvious what Maleficent is up to. But considering how flagrantly the movies have gone out of their way to celebrate misogyny, this one might have too much subtlety to be construed as blatantly feminist. Although, by the time Aurora discovers what her father once did to her surrogate mother, what else could this movie be?
Frozen does more with similar ideas (coldness and innocence and the resuscitative power of love) and without any of the defensiveness. Boys like that movie not because it’s feminist, per se, but because it’s fun. The feminism just looks like the way it is. Maleficent’s director, Robert Stromberg, is an effects artist and designer making his first movie, and revisionism is almost all he has. Some of the silhouettes and production-design ideas have the exciting ominousness of silent-era expressionism. But the movie doesn’t work — as a tract or as entertainment — without Jolie.
While her stardom has come almost entirely from her years of shooting at people on the run, this is Jolie in a new mode. There’s a vibrancy here that’s new for her. Over a year ago, the news broke that she underwent a preventive double mastectomy. I don’t want to overemphasize a connection between that decision and a reconsideration of her onscreen femininity, but here she is using one of those Hollywood contraptions to capture another dimension of her own womanliness. And she’s extraordinary. This is studiously calibrated, respectfully edited movie-star acting. There isn’t a false close-up or cutaway. There’s barely any camp. She’s personalized her acting. You watch her screaming because of Maleficent’s stolen wings and think, for a moment, about Jolie’s surgery and her six children and the movie she directed in Bosnia. She had to do all that living in order to reinterpret an angel of death. Good parts turn her solemn. She’s better in crap.
If we accept that there’s something formative in exposure to so many princesses, shouldn’t it hold that for generations of moviegoers there’s also something damagingly formative about the evil-queen experience? Jolie is the perfect star to address the problem. She’s of the Faye Dunaway school — pitched somewhere between Network and Supergirl. Dunaway herself was of the Crawford school, having played her in Mommie Dearest, a career-immolating evil-queen part that makes the queen Crawford co-inspired for Snow White seem like Shirley Temple. Jolie seems to know the history and feel a duty to correct it. You feel a little absurd being moved by something as shoddily put together as this. But it likes these women — even the nincompoop pixies. It believes in its star. There are a couple of scenes in which Fanning looks at Jolie with radiant, admiring affection you can feel. She’s not looking at an evil queen. She’s gazing at a superhero.
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