Disney’s new “Snow White” is perfectly adequate, though the scene when our heroine stands alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chanting “no justice, no peace” did admittedly give me pause. Yes, this live-action redo of its 1937 feature-length animated film has been called out as woke, but by the end, the overall damage from Snow White’s liberation struggle proves minimal. She still smiles and sings, whistles and works, rejects evil and rescues seven potential incels. Snow White no longer trills about a prince, true, but heteronormativity still has its happy ending. Huzzah!
If somehow you’ve missed the most maddening of the nitwit controversies that have been swirling around Disney’s latest remake, good for you for having a life. It is — and has been — a dispiritingly familiar spectacle of bigotry and rank nonsense, with the ugliest twittering centered on the casting of the young Latina actress Rachel Zegler (“West Side Story”), who wasn’t deemed pale enough by trolls to play the title role. Of course the 1937 character is animated and she doesn’t look white as snow, either, because people don’t unless they’re in whiteface.
Criticisms of Disney aren’t new, of course, and have reliably come from film critics as well as pundits from both sides of the political spectrum. Disney’s “Aladdin” (1992) ushered in a new age of princess diversity with an Arabian royal named Jasmine, but the film itself fumbled representationally. Critics slammed some of its images as well as song lyrics that were excised from later editions of the movie. As Disney expanded its princess portfolio, it continued to generate praise and criticism for both avoiding and sometimes reinforcing stereotypes, including in “The Princess and the Frog” (2009), which showcased its first Black princess.
The Snow White in the new movie isn’t coded as anything other than sweet and spunky. Like her predecessors, she comes with the usual princess prerequisites: a royal patrimony, a dead mother, a killer stepmom and a guy waiting, at times riding in from the wings on a white horse. As in the original film — the studio’s first full-length animated feature — this Snow White is born to a King and Queen who are expediently sidelined. The Evil Queen (as she’s called), who’s played by Gal Gadot with less animation than the typical cartoon royal, talks into a mirror and doesn’t like what she hears. She subsequently makes life miserable for Snow White, who remains spirited enough to sing while mopping.
Zegler has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs. Directed by Marc Webb and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, Snow White 2.0 dusts off Disney’s take on the Grimm fairy tale, modernizes it with girl empowerment and tosses in a bit of “Les Mis”-style storm-the-barricades uplift. Oddly, while the prince in the first film shows up only near the start and end, Zegler’s Snow White has to deal more forcefully with her insipid love interest, presumably to pad the story. He’s a smiler, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who’s been demoted to a commoner and leads a merry band of dancing-and-singing thieves.
One of the more striking things about the 1937 film is that as the title “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” suggests, the story largely concerns her relationship with the seven miners. Some friendly critters guide Snow White to the miners’ storybook cottage where she bustles about, cleaning and cooking for Doc, Sneezy and the rest. In effect, before she can have her happily ever after, she continues practicing the housekeeping skills she honed under her stepmother to become a mother-wife to some unthreatening male companions. Shortly after the original Doc says to “search every cook and nanny,” the old Snow White cheerfully steps into those roles. The new Snow White, not so much.
Well, that’s progress, I guess, though it’s also true that Disney’s remakes often introduce new problems. That’s teeth-grindingly true here of the dwarf characters, whose bodies were created with a combination of performance capture, puppetry and computer generated imagery, using actors to voice them. The results are, er, grim. The delicate, flowing lines of the original’s animation style softened every edge to beautiful effect and made even potentially scary moments inviting for tots. The eerie photorealistic look in the redo, by contrast, emphasizes every craggy line and tumescently bulbous nose; weirdly, Grumpy (voiced by Martin Klebba) looks like a ragged, very angry Dermot Mulroney.
In an essay pegged to Disney’s unhappy 2019 live-action version of “Aladdin,” the critic Aisha Harris wrote in The New York Times that “shoehorned-in progressive messages only call more attention to the inherent crassness of Disney’s current exercise in money-grabbing nostalgia.” That was true then and it remains the case with “Snow White,” which is neither good enough to admire nor bad enough to joyfully skewer; its mediocrity is among its biggest bummers. That’s unsurprising. Most of Disney’s live-action remakes have been suboptimal, which makes its formulaic exploitation of its archives and our memories even more frustrating. Given that Zegler’s Snow White is capable of charting her own destiny, it seems time to cut her loose from fairy-tale land and its baggage so she can find out what true sovereignty is like.
Snow White
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.
