Cinderella

CINDERELLA (Kenneth Branagh, 2015)

Kenneth Branagh’s CINDERELLA is a mostly faithful live-action adaptation of Disney’s 1950 animated story of the girl who rises from the ashes to become a princess. Ella (Lily James) is a charming young woman who abides by her deceased mother’s gentle insistence always to have courage and be kind. When her father (Ben Chaplin) eventually remarries, Ella cheerfully accepts her new stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and bratty stepsisters Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) and Drisella (Sophie McShera). After he dies while away on business, these family members take even greater advantage of her, but she continues to accommodate them while guided by her mother’s words. Her face is often sullied with ashes from needing to sleep by the hearth to keep warm. Stepmother and stepsisters seize on this and dub her Cinderella.

One day while needing an escape from the cruelty she endures, Ella goes to the forest where she meets the prince (Richard Madden). He is enchanted with her but doesn’t get her name. He’s being pressured to make a politically wise marriage but prefers this simple country girl to the elite and powerful invited to his imminent royal ball. To find her again he wins a concession to invite all maidens to attend in the hope that Ella will come. Although her stepmother forbids her to go, Ella’s fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) provides some last minute solutions.

Branagh finds use for some CGI transformations in his version of CINDERELLA, but otherwise he stays true to a solid, old-fashioned vision of this well-known fairy tale. Contemporary interpretations or subversions of the source material are not welcome here, and that is perfectly fine. In fact, the most modern touches, like the morphing of the coach and footmen, look anomalous among the quaint and opulent backdrops.

Branagh made his name in film with Shakespearean adaptations rooted in their period settings. In CINDERELLA he’s particularly adept at staging scenes of castle intrigue in Chris Weitz’s screenplay. With the prince’s father ill and desiring a secure transition of power, the romantic aspect of the royal ball is tested by prudence and strategy. Branagh seems most in his element navigating the negotiations amid the hustle and bustle of the biggest and most important event in all of the land.

The elimination of the songs in this lavish remake represent the most notable deviation from the cartoon. Considering the overwhelming familiarity with the story and the massive success of FROZEN, it’s a curious change not to have this CINDERELLA be a musical. Ella is unerringly true to the principles she was raised to honor. While Ella doesn’t have much agency in her story, James never plays her as though she’s a pushover. It’s also nice to see a protagonist who, when given the opportunity to deliver a comeuppance to her oppressors, chooses to forgive. There’s not a lot of magic in the events of CINDERELLA, but it certainly exists in this touch of grace.

Grade: B-

Dark Shadows

DARK SHADOWS (Tim Burton, 2012)

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp), the dashing heir to the family fishing empire, picks the wrong woman to spurn in DARK SHADOWS.  Angelique (Eva Green), a servant at the Collins manor, reacts badly to his decision to break off their romance.  As a witch, she’s more than capable of getting her revenge.  She causes the deaths of Barnabas’ parents and his beloved Josette (Bella Heathcote).  As if that isn’t punishment enough, Angelique turns him into a vampire and then sees to it that he is locked in a buried coffin.

Almost two hundred years later--1972, to be exact--Barnabas is accidentally freed.  He returns to the coastal town of Collinsport, Maine and finds it to be much different than what he knew.  The changes aren’t just technological and societal.  The family estate is in disrepair and inhabited by eight strangers, as is apt to happen when one is gone for nearly two centuries.  Now calling Collinwood Manor home are matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), Elizabeth’s brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller) and his son David (Gulliver McGrath), the boy’s psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), groundskeeper Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley), maid Mrs. Johnson (Ray Shirley), and newly arrived governess Victoria Winters (Heathcote), who bears a marked resemblance to the love of Barnabas’ lifetime.

Elizabeth is the only one who knows Barnabas’ secrets, so in exchange for being permitted to stay at Collinwood, he promises not to indulge his vampiric impulses on anyone living there.  Barnabas then settles in to restore the family business to its former glory only to realize that the competition is headed by the very woman who cursed him so many years ago.  She’s going by the name Angel now and is a pillar of the community.  Worst of all, her desire to call Barnabas hers has not abated.

From 1966 to 1971 the soap opera DARK SHADOWS ran for more than 1200 episodes.  With so much material to choose from and only 113 minutes to fill, director Tim Burton’s film is best described as being based on the TV show rather than a remake of it, although screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith does his best to shove as much plot in as possible.  DARK SHADOWS has a lot to establish and does so with clarity, but it feels like half of the film is prologue.  (Ironically, the opening scenes in the mid-1700s are efficient in setting up Barnabas and his eternal dilemma.)  Once everything is finally laid out, the narrative struggles to gain momentum.  

DARK SHADOWS gets stuck in neutral because of the uncertainty as to what kind of a film it wants to be.  In keeping with its soap opera roots, it overflows with doomed romanticism and heightened drama.  Long stretches pass in which events and relationships are treated as being deadly serious.  Not enough is invested in these characters, though, to feel the big emotional scale DARK SHADOWS wishes to pull off.

Complicating matters is that the film is also intended to be a comedy.  Burton appears more at ease in acknowledging the ridiculous elements of the story and simply having fun with the supernatural twists and turns.  Depp handles his role with composure and sufficient restraint, making him a humorously refined but still lethal bloodsucker.  Sinking her teeth into the villain role, Green charges her scenes with Depp with sex, danger, and playfulness that the rest of the film resists.  For all of the good these two leads do, the jokes in DARK SHADOWS mostly consist of easy targets related to Barnabas’ puzzlement by modernity.  Director and screenwriter settle for arriving at the mildly amusing when the obvious destination is camp territory.  

The production and art design and Colleen Atwood’s costumes help Burton create a familiar but no less dazzling gloomy world.  Visual effects are put to spectacular use when Green’s skin looks like cracked eggshell.  Burton has lavished a lot of attention on the surface and it shows.  No matter how good it looks, DARK SHADOWS is missing a soul and a heart despite no lack of wanting them.     

Grade: C-