Removing Snow White’s Heart
The Snow White live-action remake is like being force-fed stale gummy bears.
Grade: F
Once, I heard that after he died, Alexander the Great’s brain was yanked out through his nostril with a hook. That sounded inviting after a mere half an hour watching the live-action remake of Snow White (and the Seven Dwarfs) (the remake omits the second clause of the original film’s title) and the film goes for an hour and forty minutes.
Whatever merits the film has are swamped by its mise en scene. Unlike Kenneth Branagh who recreated 19thcentury fashion and architecture for his live-action remake of Cinderella, director Marc Webb has clothed his cast and populated his sets in Snow White in garments and with castles and huts that look copied from a child’s storybook images of medieval Europe. Add to this the suspicious gloss to all the colours, dark or light, that sting your eyes the same way a cheap candy wrapper does. The film looks like it was designed by an AI. Suspension of disbelief is a Herculean task when watching this film.
Rachel Zegler is the one faultless gear in this spluttering machine. You won’t care that she doesn’t have “skin as white as snow.” When she turns around and sees the Huntsman with his knife drawn and he turns the blade towards her throat, Snow White just stands there, her eyes turning wet but not breaking into tears. You can see the cry of terror spiked with despair Zegler is holding bravely within her pursed lips. “Why?” is all she says when she opens them. Why does this man want to kill her? Why is he going to kill this kind child who’s never done him any harm? This is what lies behind those pursed lips and those wet eyes not “How dare you?” or “Please spare me!” Zegler can act with the innocence coupled with bravery that is the essential quality of Snow White. She’d already proved this in her debut in Spielberg’s West Side Story but here she has a character whose very archetype is suited to her talent.
If only her director and writers understood her character. Webb and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson have tried to update Snow White’s story but have only succeeded in losing it. It’s no longer about “Someday my prince will come.” Prince Charming is gone but replaced by a bandit who one minute says he’s fighting to dethrone the Evil Queen and restore Snow White’s father to the throne, you’ll be wondering if this is an intentional or unintentional knock-off of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, and the next minute says he’s an amoral thief who just cares about saving his own skin. The song “Someday my prince will come” from the original film is gone and replaced with “Waiting on a Wish.” Zegler doesn’t sing about waiting for true love to come along but how Snow White’s waiting for the day when she’ll stop being a servant ordered about by the Queen and becomes the woman she wants to be. You may be sympathetic to this reimagining of Snow White along the lines of the more independent and stronger second-generation of Disney heroines (Mulan, Belle, Jasmine), but this sympathy will run dry quickly. Unlike those heroines, Snow White doesn’t do much to become whoever it is she wants to be. She spends most of the film in hiding from the Queen and in the climax she just walks up to the castle to…do what exactly? Tell the Queen she’s a bad person and expect her to run away in tears? Did it occur to Webb and Wilson to have Snow White raise an army and dethrone the Queen? She could do that but then she wouldn’t be Snow White. The fact is, Snow White’s story is “Someday my prince will come” no matter how regressive it might be to define a woman character as waiting for a man to come along. Snow White’s story is the story of a young woman of pure beauty, inside and out, and who remains kind and innocence despite all the evil she is subjected to and eventually her endurance is rewarded in the form of her true love coming to take her away to a golden palace in the clouds. It’s not unlike how Oliver Twist’s unfailing goodness was eventually paid off with a lucky break. By removing “Someday my prince will come”, Snow White removes the heart of its heroine’s story and fails to replace it with anything substantial.
Snow White is like being force-fed stale gummy bears. With the exception of Zegler, it’s a Dadaist collage of good ideas and bad ideas averagely executed and historical and pop culture knockoffs leading to a Picassoesque upside down cake.