From @SenatorShaheen and Angelina Jolie: Here’s how to ensure Afghan women are protected after the U.S. withdrawal https://t.co/pqpXZNc7qw
— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) May 13, 2021
The sexual politics of Disney’s “Maleficent” are a complicated business. The most important thing, or at least the basic thing, is that the moviemakers took a villainess and turned her into a sympathetic character. “Maleficent” is an update of “The Sleeping Beauty,” which, to name the three versions especially relevant to the new movie, is a seventeenth-century tale by Charles Perrault; a nineteenth-century Russian ballet—probably the most honored of all nineteenth-century ballets—choreographed by Marius Petipa to a score by Tchaikovsky; and a 1959 Disney animated feature. Unsurprisingly, since these renditions come from different centuries and different media, they vary in many details (I will favor the details of the ballet in its modern versions), but on one point they emphatically agree: an innocent princess, Aurora (her name means “sunrise”), is condemned to death, or to a permanent coma, by an evil fairy, supposedly because, by mistake, the fairy was not invited to the princess’s christening party. A lot of readers and movie- and ballet-watchers will notice that, at the party, the invited guests are all dressed in pretty clothes and have nice manners, while the evil fairy wears a slick black garment, simultaneously deluxe and sinister, and arrives at the palace in a carriage drawn by rats or the like—circumstances that raise a doubt as to whether her exclusion was, in fact, due to a clerical error. Might she not be a reiteration of an old trope: Eris, the goddess of discord, who threw the golden apple, thereby precipitating the Trojan War? Might she not be that thing we’ve all been told about, the thing than which Hell hath no greater fury: a woman scorned?
In the new movie, the fairy’s wrath is given a backstory. We meet two children. One is Stefan, a regular country boy. The other is a girl he has encountered in the woods: Maleficent, with a sweet, round, normal face but also, curiously, wings. The wings are not dainty little things, like something on an Advent card. They are big and brown, and, as I remember, they are taller than Maleficent. She zooms around on them wildly. She is not vain about them, however; she thinks they are just part of her body. To us, on the other hand, they are magical, making her both beautiful and weird. Her name (invented for the 1959 animated movie) is another double message. It means “evil-doer”—a prophecy of what will happen in the film—but many people will associate it with some pretty, old-fashioned girl’s name, such as Millicent or, more likely, with “magnificent.”
Maleficent and Stefan are friends. But the king of the territories neighboring Maleficent’s goes to war with her and loses, whereupon he declares that whoever can kill her will succeed him as king. Stefan goes to visit Maleficent and brings his dagger, but he can’t bring himself to murder her. (Think of Snow White and the huntsman.) So he does something almost worse: he drugs her and cuts off her wings. Blessedly, we don’t see this happen. We only hear, once Maleficent awakens, her horrible cries—low, guttural, unstoppable—rising out of the woods. Angelina Jolie, who plays the adult Maleficent, has said that it was clear to her and to the writer that the removal of the wings was an image of rape. I am certain that someone involved must also have had clitoridectomy in mind. A piece of the girl’s body, and a source of power and happiness, has been sliced off. The wings are taken to the castle and hung in a glass case, like a display in the Museum of Natural History.
Stefan, as promised, becomes king. He and his queen produce Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning), and then begins the real story, the story of Maleficent’s emotional life. (Reportedly, fifteen minutes were cut from the beginning of the movie in order to get to this business faster.) Frightened by a death curse that Maleficent has laid on the baby, King Stefan sends Aurora away, to be reared by three fairies, lovable but silly old ladies. While they are off doing whatever they do, Aurora is watched over by—yes—Maleficent. Maleficent didn’t mean to get involved in this. Early on, she says to one of the cute little girls who plays the young Aurora, “I do not like children.” This is a meta joke. First of all, the child actress whom Jolie is speaking to is her own five-year-old daughter, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt. Second, Jolie demonstrably does like children. She and her mate, Brad Pitt, are famous philoprogenitives. They have six children, three of them adopted,and she has been a leader in international child-protection movements. From another angle, too, she has a special relationship to motherhood. As she explained on the Op-Ed page of the Times last year, she recently had a double mastectomy, because she had learned from genetic testing that she was at a very high risk for breast cancer. A big-time, gorgeous movie star, announcing that she has had both of her breasts removed: Is this something that Marilyn Monroe would have done? It is not.
Which brings us to the next point. Jolie, who often plays a sexy little item—in several of her early movies she was one of those “Nikita” types, with the short skirt and the lethal weapon—becomes, in “Maleficent,” the very opposite, a mater dolorosa. The evil spell hanging over Aurora is such that, if she is pricked by a spindle, she will fall into a deep sleep and will revive only by “love’s true kiss.” Maleficent, now fond of Aurora, tries to get every spindle in the kingdom removed from Aurora’s reach. When that doesn’t work—Aurora is pricked, and she succumbs—Maleficent gets in touch with Prince Phillip, a nice young man from a neighboring kingdom. He and Aurora met once before, and they liked each other. Now here he comes again; he kisses her, and we await the promised result. Her eyelashes will flutter, her bosom will rise and fall. But they don’t. This is the film’s wittiest and most politically forthright moment: kiss, wait, wait, nothing. Maleficent gives up. Clearly, Aurora will sleep forever. Before leaving to return to the woods, Maleficent leans over the body of the sleeping girl and plants a farewell kiss on her brow. And Aurora wakes up! That is “love’s true kiss”: not romantic love, the thunderbolt, but a steady, daily love. And not necessarily from a man, who you think will magically save you, but from a woman, who perhaps will unmagically save you just by having loved you, quietly, for a long time.
It is to Jolie’s enormous credit that she is able to put this wholesome revisionist message across without righteousness or sentimentality. Her performance is less a matter of words than of small physical details: tilts of her lovely head, topped, here, with a pair of Minoan-bull type horns; gleams of the eyes, plunging to great, green depths; and, of course, adjustments of the famous Duchampian cheekbones, whose angularity was greatly enhanced for the occasion by the Disney makeup people. Jolie manages to be both soft and sharp, poignant and yet still a little slithery. (Those horns are covered in black leather, or something close.) This is a quite a trick, but perhaps not for Jolie. In her early years, she was a wild thing. She told interviewers that she had tried every drug she could find, that she was bisexual, that she was interested in B.D.S.M., and so on. She showed off her many tattoos. Now, at thirty-nine, she is a special envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Perhaps it wasn’t so hard for her, in “Maleficent,” to be both a badass and a paragon.
The film’s moral tolerance extends to its other characters. The treatment of the men is especially interesting. King Stefan falls to his death from one of the castle’s high parapets, but, God knows, he had it coming. As for the rather goofy Prince Phillip, his ineffectual kiss is not laughed at, and when we last see him and Aurora they seem to be happily getting to know each other. In the meantime, Maleficent has acquired a sort of lieutenant, Diaval, who is a shape-shifter. His default position is as a raven, but he can pretty much be whatever she needs: a dragon, etc. In the end, Maleficent’s wings are restored—they sense her presence in the castle and escape from their vitrine to reattach themselves to her—whereupon she and Diaval zoom off, pulsing, into a white sky. God bless them! Above all, God bless Maleficent, who wasn’t sure, until the end, that she wanted to do all those good deeds.
