Reviews
by
Anne Thompson |
March 29, 2012 3:09 PM |
"Mirror Mirror" means a lot to producer/distributor Relativity Media,
which needs hits in order to survive. That's why the $60-million PG
flick is aimed so squarely at a mainstream family audience. Visually, it
looks like a movie directed by Tarsem Singh ("The Immortals"), but it
doesn't feel like one. The movie will play young. Very young.
For one thing, Singh is relying on an all-too familiar Grimm fairy tale
(reworked by Marc Klein and Jason Keller), which is at best fitfully
amusing, thanks to Julia Roberts (who literally has bee-sting lips),
Nathan Lane and the Seven Dwarfs, and most of the time, makes you wish
you were watching "Tangled" instead. This princess stuff is Disney turf.
No one does it better.
While the producers did hire Disney composer Alan Menken to write the
score, it's uninspired and treacly. This is yet another case where live
actors mixed with clever VFX (the dwarves run, leap and fly on cool
accordion stilts) don't come close to giving us that soaring Disney
magic. Some of the animation fakery (the gorgeous opening intro, the
evil Queen's ageless mirror) works better than the rest of the movie,
which just feels fake. "Mirror Mirror" has no new take on this story
(didn't the Red Queen already play live chess in "Alice in
Wonderland"?), and veers from irritating to dull.
Lily Collins' Snow White is a doltish drip; we don't believe that Armie
Hammer's handsome buffoon of a Prince Charming is in love with her
(remarkably, Hammer survives this movie), nor the Seven Dwarfs for that
matter. The Queen's feelings toward her step-daughter almost make sense.
Why is the gang of seven thieves teaching her to fight and rob? So she
can be slightly more acceptable to a modern audience? In one scene she
clashes swords, pitifully, with the Prince. It's unbelievable. (The
Playlist
interviewed Collins and Hammer here.)
The tone veers all over the place. The best thing in the movie is the
Bollywood closing number, which holds a clue to the kind of daring the
movie lacks. Singh has plans to
take a very different direction on his next, "Eye In the Sky."
Who can blame him? While the often incoherent filmmaker has always
favored style over content in the past, he was never this insipid.
A smattering of reviews is below.
Roger Ebert:
"'Mirror Mirror' is a sumptuous fantasy for the eyes and a pinball game
for the mind, as story elements collide and roll around bumping into
each other,..It's almost uncanny in some scenes here, how Lily Collins
(daughter of Phil Collins) looks like Audrey Hepburn,..She's all sweet,
all innocent, but Julia Roberts steals the show with her imperious and
autocratic Queen. All of this is in place and looks great, but the
dialogue is rather flat, the movie sort of boring, and there's not much
energy in the two places it should really be felt: Between the Queen and
Snow White, and between Snow and the Prince. The story is a listless
tale that moves at a stately pace through settings that could have
supported fireworks."
Variety:
"Poised between revisionist fairy tale and smirking sendup, this gaudy,
over-frosted cream puff of a movie half-heartedly positions its famous
heroine as a dagger-wielding proto-feminist, yet ultimately suffers the
same fatal flaw as Julia Roberts' evil queen: It doesn't really care
about anything except how pretty it looks."
Christy Lemire:
"Julia Roberts chews up the scenery and spits it back out again with
great brio in her first truly villainous role as the evil Queen in
'Mirror Mirror.' And oh, what scenery it is,..Basically, the scenery IS
the movie,..Collins has a lovely screen presence — she's got this young
Audrey Hepburn thing going — but she lacks a certain oomph, even after
her character has learned to fight and supposedly found her inner
strength. Roberts rules her at every turn, even when she flashes that
iconic smile in cruel fashion. She seems to be reveling in playing a
role that's such a departure; that sense of joy only sporadically finds
its way to the rest of the film."
Roger Moore:
"If only they'd put more 'Heigh Ho' into the script, found more funny
things for Nathan Lane (the queen's aide) to say and do. If only Roberts
had had the guts to play mean (This is an image-obsessed movie star
pulling her punches.). If only they'd found a Snow White with some spark
to her. 'Mirror Mirror' leaves us with those 'if onlys,' and reminds us
that the original incantation missed the big point. Casting 'the
fairest of them all' can't save you from a heroine as dull as her
character's name."
TheWrap:
"Somewhere between the pitch meeting and the movie's opening, this
sadly earthbound fairy tale lost its happy ending. 'Mirror Mirror' is
minor minor,..Part of 'Mirror’'s problem is that the screenplay,
credited to two writers and with a third getting a story credit, is all
over the place. At times, it seems that the movie is a satire about
anxiety over aging, as the Queen frets over who’s the fairest in the
land. But it also hints at a political agenda, as when the villagers are
told that the onerous taxes collected by the Queen are being used to
keep them safe, and at being about feminism, as when Snow White and the
Prince battle for the upper hand while bickering or crossing swords."
|
3/30/2012 @ 12:27PM
|182 views
HOLLYWOOD,
CA - MARCH 17: Actress Julia Roberts arrives at Relativity Media's
'Mirror Mirror' Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on
March 17, 2012 in Hollywood, California. (Image credit: via @daylife)
I
told you the other day
about the movie “Mirror Mirror” being held from critics until the last
minute. It opens today and unless a lot of children under the age of 10
see it, “Mirror Mirror” is headed to DVD and cable rather quickly. It’s
scored a low 52% rating on Rotten tomatoes.com with 43 positive reviews
and 40 negative. The positive ones came mostly from small bloggers.
Reviewers from large news organizations were not amused. “Mirror Mirror”
joins “Larry Crowne” as the second big Roberts disaster in a row. But
“Eat Pray Love”-which made money–was intolerable.
Roberts is well past her glory run of films she made with partner
Elaine Goldsmith Thomas in the 90s–from “Pretty Woman” and “Erin
Brockovich” to “Notting Hill” and “Runaway Bride.” Those days are over.
She went from being fetching and cute to brittle and self-important. She
and Goldsmith-Thomas, who’d been her agent and then her producing
partner, parted company long ago. Roberts also had a notorious falling
out with Susan Sarandon during the making of “Step Mom.” Another recent
film, “Duplicity,” was completely incoherent.
In today’s
New York
Times, reviewer Manohla Dargis says Roberts looks very amused with
herself. Well, at least someone is. “Mirror Mirror,” which had a review
embargo until last night, looks great–all sterling computer graphics–but
it’s a witless, tiresome, one note joke. Roberts is completely
self-aware as an actresss. Where Glenn Close was a perfect Cruella de
Vil, and
Meryl Streep
was tantalizing in “Prada,” Roberts just keeps winking at the camera,
and hamming it up. It’s a wonder she didn’t gain weight from all the
scenery she chewed. Luckily, most of it wasn’t real.
Here’s a clip from a Charlie Rose interview with Roberts. FFwd it to
around 4:40. I always thought it was interesting that she never credited
anyone else with choosing her films or developing material during her
run of hits. She thought she did it herself. And now those people are
gone. “Mirror Mirror” according to
Dorothy Pomerantz‘s
excellent report here yesterday, cost $80 million, not including another $20 for promotion.
http://youtu.be/sGSmR1SfRb0
And in the other corner, a contrarian view from Guy Lodge.
Tarsem's latest opens in theaters today
Friday, Mar 30, 2012 9:58 AM
Guy Lodge
- Critic's Rating A-
- Readers' Rating n/a
"I bet you think you know this story. You don't -- the real one's
much more gory." With this crisp opening couplet, Roald Dahl announced
his imminent desanctification of the Grimm Brothers' "Snow White and the
Seven Dwarves," one of six done-to-death fairytales given a black-comic
makeover in his 1982 bestseller "Revolting Rhymes."
Dahl's book was itself a tangy kid-lit response to Angela Carter's
ingenious adult sexualization of that dusty literary canon in her
essential 1979 volume "The Bloody Chamber"; working at opposite ends of
the scale, both writers were making a concerted effort to reclaim these
darkly symbolic stories, originally targeted to grown-ups, from their
sweetened, child-oriented colonization by Disney. Bar the occasional
valiant but underseen effort, however -- Neil Jordan's Carter adaptation
"The Company of Wolves" among them -- it was a while before Hollywood
arrived at a similarly subversive memo, particularly as Disney revived
their commercial fortunes at the end of the 1980s by returning to the
pages of Andersen and Perrault, their traditionalist approach
interrupted only by happier endings.
By the time the theoretical spirit of Dahl had entered mainstream
cinema, it had curdled most unappetizingly: the sloppy, biliously
spirited 2001 smash "Shrek" earned a lot of undue credit for its
alternately cynical and scatological disrespect of fairytale tropes, but
the absence of any moral or ideological fiber in their place made for
an increasingly vapid and joyless subgenre. (And that's before we even
touch the likes of "Hoodwinked!.")
There's only so long one can titter at oh-so-naughty character names
like "Farquad" before one craves a bit more perspective, a bit less
guile, or both -- particularly with filmmakers like Catherine Breillat,
Julia Leigh and even Darren Aronofsky playing rather more inventive,
romantic, spiritually loyal games with the fairytale form, though still
within the adult bracket.
It'd be a stretch of both the truth and the film's very intention to
say that "Mirror Mirror," Tarsem Singh's lithe, literate, extravagantly
daffy redesign of "Snow White," quite fulfils that lofty brief -- it's
girlier and more good-natured than anything from the Dahl school of
storytelling, for starters, though with its scattering of macabre visual
gags and morally corrupt septet of dwarves, I'm willing to bet there's a
dog-eared copy of "Revolting Rhymes" on the bookshelf of writer Melissa
Wallack. But for all its parodic 21st-century nudges, it's also an
authentic fairytale, at least three parts swoon to one part snark,
unapologetically reclaiming the genre from "Shrek" levels of smugness.
There's the merest threat of a false note in the film's opening
beats, but it's a momentarily alarming one: "They called her Snow
White," Julia Roberts narrates, her familiarly spiky tones tinged with
creamy contempt, "because it was the most pretentious name they could
come up with."
It's a reasonably smart line, one that gently announces a wink-wink
postmodern perspective while still sounding more or less in character
from Roberts's bored, haughty Wicked Queen. (After all, if we're
likening magic-kingdom royalty to contemporary notions of celebrity,
"Snow White" is just the sort of affected moniker Hollywood's great and
good assign
their offspring, inviting similar sneers.) But even
as it got the required chuckle, this blithe intrusion of 21st-century
irony sets up prickling concerns that we are, once more, pitching
ourselves far above the source.
No sooner are such concerns established, however, than they are
thrillingly banished by the exquisitely animated shadow-box prologue
that follows. Tidily filling in the nuts and bolts of the Snow White
legend for younger viewers that haven't yet made its acquaintance --
both responsible and responsive to its audience, this is the rare
revisionist fairytale that doesn't take its public-domain source as a
given -- with an elegantly revolving diorama of layered, stylized
tableaux from multiple schools of past illustration, it's a knockout
sequence in isolation. More crucially, however, it sets up the storybook
meter and heightened visual fancy that are to be the cornerstones of
this adaptation; even when it shifts into frenetic comic riffing,
"Mirror Mirror" remains bound by its obligations to magic.
That Tarsem, the advertising-schooled oddball whose astonishing
visual concepts are rarely tethered by logic or practicality, should
prove such a delicious fit for the genre is hardly surprising. To
various degrees, his three previous features -- "The Cell," "The Fall"
and last year's swords-and-sandals-and-fetishwear spectacular
"Immortals" -- have all been fairytales to one degree or another,
precoccupied with parallel realms and dream coding.
After flirting (okay, fucking) with Greek mythology in his last film,
the similarly entrenched universe of European folklore was an obvious
follow-up destination, and it's been suitably, rewardingly Tarsem-ized:
the director's singular panoply of culture-clashing motifs, his
saturated blood-and-mustard palette and, of course, his enduring mask
fetish are splashed liberally across Tom Foden's dazzling, CGI-brushed
production design, which expands the expected Gothic spaces of past
screen renditions with vast, gilded orientalism and the occasional witty
flash of bare-boards theatricality.
It's hard to think of a contemporary director whose auteur
credentials are represented quite so assertively by his story worlds. It
harder still to imagine his future work without the similarly defining
contributions of the late Eiko Ishioka, whose jaw-droppingly catholic
costumes -- touching on everything from commedia dell'arte burlesque to
block-colored Asian warrior wear to laser-cut Hollywood glamor, complete
with a closing nod to Disney's own iconic Snow White gown -- represent a
stunning sign-off to an extraordinary career; if a posthumous Oscar nod
doesn't materialize, serious words need to be had with that Academy
branch.
The bigger surprise, then, is that Tarsem should be so comfortable
with the frisky farce that makes up much of the film's second half, its
unashamed silliness cresting with a potentially disastrous, but finally
riotous, sequence in which Armie Hammer's appealingly dim Prince
Charming is possessed by the spirit of a slobbering puppy; the
director's work has always toyed with absurdism, but never copped to it
quite so openly or gleefully.
Still, to credit Tarsem's bouncy pacing and the neat emotional
throughline of the script -- Roberts' narration turns on a clever
literary somersault about whose story "Snow White" even is -- for
keeping the soufflé from falling is to undersell the invaluable
contributions of an imaginatively chosen cast, who tussle far more
playfully with their helmer for control of the scenes than any
remarkably attired Tarsem ensemble to date.
Roberts especially, more alert and mischievous than she's been in
anything since "Erin Brockovich," is having a blast. Her gawky
sweetheart charm makes her an unlikely choice for high-camp villainess
duty, but her strikingly venomous line readings (in, admittedly, a
touch-and-go accent) and stroppy body language swiftly prove the wisdom
of casting someone who might well have played the wide-eyed princess 20
years ago: it's that much clearer why the Queen would feel personally
affronted by Lily Collins' milky charms. (Further points to Roberts for
being a good enough sport to undergo a black-hearted makeover scene that
pokes wicked fun at her profession's own vanity.)
Roberts doesn't have it all her own way. Collins belies her wan
appearance to emerge as a surprisingly game heroine; her interaction
with the endearingly characterized dwarves, notably one (an excellent
Martin Klebba) whose name in the 1937 Disney rendition would have to be
Skeezy, gives the character spark beyond her slighty rudimentary
proto-feminist assignation.
Better yet is Hammer, revealed here as a comedian of expressive
elasticity and calculatedly slack timing, whose forte clearly lies in
goofily undermining his immaculate WASPish hotness: "Someone get the man
a
light covering," a blushing, twinkly-eyed Roberts barks to
an orderly as the Prince enters her court, sheepishly shirtless. It's a
million miles from Angela Carter, but this subtle sexing of characters
in an otherwise fluffy family
petit four is a welcome sign that Tarsem's fairytales have some blood running through their veins.
For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.
Of
all the ways American pop culture defines itself in the early part of
the 21st century, myths -- larger than life, older than time --
supersede them all. World-creation (usually based on the rules of a
world someone previously created) is what we consume, as one glance at
the "Lord of the Rings"-ish enthusiasm for HBO's just-launched second
season of "Game of Thrones" demonstrates.
