Can you find it in your heart to pity Disney? Me neither. But if ever a film could make you feel sorry for all involved, it is the new Snow White, the animated classic now mostly reimagined as live action. Of course, whatever the company does is grist to the long American culture war. But there were always going to be particular issues when reworking this legacy property for contemporary tastes — the deeply pre-feminist 1937 fairytale once described by Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage as a “backward story of seven dwarfs living in the cave”.
How do you like them poisoned apples? The movie duly arrives pre-mired in controversy. The peasants might look jolly in the happy royal kingdom that backdrops the musical opening, but the casting in the title role of Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) was one early source of tension. There was an ugly online response to an American actor of Latin descent securing the gig; Zegler herself then criticised the more passé aspects of the original movie.
Still, on with the show, where the star — also publicly supportive of Palestine — soon meets her Evil Queen stepmother, played by Gal Gadot. That’s right, the Israeli actor who has vocally defended her country. (Is that sobbing we hear from the Disney C-suite?)
To review the film and not the friction, Zegler brings wit and zip. This Snow White is cartoonish but dusted with human star quality. Real joy lights up her face while teaching a computer-generated dwarf to whistle.
Yes. Around now, it already gets hard to disentangle the movie from the stinks surrounding it. The concerns of Dinklage, who has dwarfism, clearly gave Disney pause. The seven dwarfs remain, and are instantly recognisable. However, amid the live-action cast, they — along with the cute critters of the storybook forest — have been computer animated. Indeed, it was reported last year Disney no longer saw them as dwarfs at all, but “magical creatures”. Thankfully, the phrase is unused on-screen. (Though to underline the point, an actor with dwarfism, George Appleby, separately plays an affable bandit.)
Spoiler: the animated Dopey, Grumpy and co look weird and awful. Beyond that, we can only speculate. Is Disney denying actors with dwarfism work in case their presence offends themselves? Or will audiences finally no longer accept that people with dwarfism have a single personality trait and sleep in multiple twin beds? Both things may be true. So too the fact that the fix is at once the only logical course through the ethical tangle of the project and proof why it should never have been attempted.
More generally, the tone is risk-averse to the point of blandness. (Gadot pulls all the right faces, but her cackle has no crackle.) There are even moments that aren’t totally charmless. One joke might feasibly have come from that comic treasure The Princess Bride.
But the movie’s unease in its own skin is everywhere. A mismatched songbook veers between 21st-century soarers and the vintage chirp of “Heigh-Ho”. The story is a strange marriage of old-world plot points and a less musty take on love and royalty.
Some will doubtless be enraged that the film argues for the fair distribution of apple pie. Creatively, though, it doesn’t read as Hollywood Marxism as much as an earnest effort to meet an impossible brief — remodelling a wholesome modern children’s story from a gnarled and sugar-mad antique released two years before the second world war. The phrase for that is no-win. And if the movie is a mess, well — just be glad you didn’t have to make it.
★★★☆☆
In cinemas from March 21
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