Snow White and the Huntsman

Charlize Theron as the movie's saving grace.

    It seems we’re in the middle of a fairy-tale movie revival.  2010’s Alice in Wonderland recast the titular heroine as a mail-wearing, sword swinging leader of men, Julia Roberts put her spin on Snow White’s evil queen earlier this year in Mirror, Mirror, and Angelina Jolie is poised to take on Sleeping Beauty’s villainess Maleficent in a 2014 release of the same name.  Is the public hungry for live action morality tales?  Has nostalgia gotten the best of Hollywood producers?  Or are these movies just trying to make a quick buck off properties people are already familiar with?  If Snow White and the Huntsman is any indication, it’s probably the latter.  This isn’t a bad movie, but too much of it feels perfunctory and derivative, as though it went through one too many focus groups before seeing release.

    Snow White and the Huntsman shares many things in common with Disney’s 1937 cartoon classic: there’s a handsome prince and a bunch of dwarves and a poison apple and so forth, but this is not your father’s, or rather your grandfather’s, Snow White.  In this much darker version, the princess Snow White (Kristin “Vampire Bride” Stewart) grows up locked away in a tower where she’s been imprisoned by a wicked queen (Charlize Theron).  She escapes, of course, and the queen dispatches the beer-swilling Huntsman (Chris “God of Thunder” Hemsworth) to collect her.  And the game is on!

    Or at least it would be if the movie didn’t become so tedious so quickly.  Part of the problem is the performances.  As Snow White, Kristin Stewart is mostly a dud.  Other characters keep talking about how Snow White is pure and good and innocent, but Stewart looks vaguely irritated throughout the entire movie, as though wondering whether she’s doomed to play fantastical damsels for the rest of her career.  She also betrays a lack of dramatic chops in a later scene where she gives what’s supposed to be a rousing call to arms but what plays more like a strange bellowing fit.  Chris Hemsworth brings a dependably brawny swagger to his role as the Huntsman, but the movie never slows down long enough to develop him or his would-be romance with Snow White.

    One performance that does work, and works in a rather grand way, is Charlize Theron’s as the evil queen.  Theron is the movie’s secret weapon and easily the best reason to see it.  She purrs with menace as she seduces the king, Snow White’s father, before betraying him to claim the throne, explodes with scorching anger when displeased, and generally gives great high bitch.  At the same time, Theron adeptly suggests the fear festering at the root of the queen’s ambition, and with the help of a few well-placed flashbacks turns her into the movie’s most interesting character.  The special effects team pitches in to give her a number of eye-popping powers that add to her evil majesty.

    When not focused on showing us how the queen can transform into a flock of ravenous birds or commune with her liquid chrome mirror, the visual effects awe and underwhelm in about equal measure.  First-time director Rupert Sanders is clearly a man of considerable vision, but he doesn’t always get to express it.  An early stretch of the movie set in an evil forest looks blotchy and dark; whatever interesting art design may be there is blotted out by the muddy photography.  But a later section, set in an enchanted glen filled with playful sprites and cheerful woodland critters, looks terrific, like a live action version of the cartoon original married with the surreal visuals from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.  I particularly enjoyed the clump of mushrooms that opened their eyes to peer at Snow White as she passed by.

    Enchanting as that interlude is, the movie moves all too swiftly toward its conclusion, which consists of a medieval siege of the queen’s castle that draws incredibly unfavorable comparisons to far more impressive sequences in movies like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.  Why fantasy flicks would even attempt something like this in the wake of those movies I’m not sure.  More satisfying is the final confrontation between Snow White and the evil queen, but Kristin Stewart is less than convincing as a fierce warrior and it’s probably a bad sign that I was half-rooting for the queen to win.

    Looking back, I’m left asking myself just who this movie is for.  The main characters are female, but young girls will likely be put off by the morose action.  Likewise, young boys probably won’t find enough of it.  This version of the Snow White story is too different from others to trade in nostalgia, and the whole production just isn’t done well enough to attract people simply looking for a good time at the movies.  Like me, I think that most people will leave the theater feeling indifferent, so maybe the moral of this fairy tale is just not to see it.