In this pessimistic, our cynical world it is easy to hang up on the negative, so let’s try to be positive. There is nothing wrong with Disney’s Live-Action-Remake by “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” It could not be fixed by making it 26 minutes shorter, 88 years ago and in hand -drawn animation.
There is also nothing wrong with Rachel Zegler’s performance. The star “West Side Story” has gone right out of the classic cartoon, with a pitch perfect song, place on physics and a theatrical, emotional performance that reason. Zegler received endless, cruel insults from so-called Disney fans who opposed her casting-from reasons that went from racist, to racist for other bad reasons, too-but she is the only participant in this production that completely understood the assignment and gives “Snow White” to the actual, meaningful life.
Marc Webb’s remake takes the story of the original movie, which no one can say was not thin and cushion it a bit. There are more musical numbers, most of them forgetfulness and some quite embarrassing and a little more plot. Snow White (Zegler) is still a sad princess who lives with an evil queen (Gal Gadot), who still has no name. The evil Queen envies Snow White’s Beauty and sends a Lackey to kill her. He’s going to take Snow White’s heart back in a box, but instead he brings an apple, because … He’s not so smart, I guess? He knew the queen was enough freaky to ask for a human heart but he thought she would never want to look at it?
Snow White escapes into the forest and into homes for seven magical nightmares with CGI heads that look like sun-dried orange peel that carries too much foundation. Their faces are caricatures straight out of a promenade sketch stand, exaggerated in ways that spit on nature when they were made in three dimensions. They are happy, sleepy, newly, bashful, grumpy, dopey and doc, and they are textbook examples on why some remakes are probably a bad idea. If this was the only way that the great senses of Disney could imagine realizing these characters, alleged without crime, during the 2000s, they may need some new senses.
Snow White also meets a dashed love interest, not a prince this time, named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap). He is a heroic Robin Hood figure, steals from the Queen and gives to himself and her happy men – but hey, they deserve it more than she does. It is Jonathan who challenges Snow White to become politically active and actually put a stop to the tyranny of the evil queen. Which she does by asking her politely to stop and later go down on a street and do chit chat. If that’s all that was required to end fascism, we would live in a completely different world right now.
Zegler and Burnap are cute together. They do not have much chemistry in themselves, but they have superficial scenes where they playfully jokes and stare at each other in slow movement, and these artists make it work. He has enough scene presence to get the most out of a cartoon, which is more than you can say for Gal Gadot.
Gal Gadot looks like the evil queen, as an animated cel suddenly comes to life. Her performance is Arch, which can be expected, but not in a fun way. It is really hard to imagine a filmmaker who says: “cut, press it” after most of her lines. It is the type of performance that usually finds its way to films where an average, convincing actor is replaced by a better one of the plot reasons.
And when the evil queen has her new scrubbing song, Yikes. The number is camp and absurd, which suggests that maybe someone should have told Gadot that she would have fun all the time. Instead, it is like watching a dinner theater version of “Richard III” is randomly interrupted by a clip from “Rupaul’s Drag Race”, then ploding with again that nothing happened. Sidney Lumet claimed that one of the most important things a filmmaker can do is make sure everyone on set makes the same movie, but Gal Gadot doesn’t even make the same movie as Gal Gadot.
“Snow White” comes icy on the heels on two other major live adjustments of the classic story. It has been 13 years since “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Mirror Mirror” drank this film’s milkshake. None of these other films are good but they both have a texture of tone, a memorable villain and creative choices that are worth celebrating. Disney’s new “Snow White” has none of these properties. All that has is Zegler and a bunch of actors who, with uneven success, try to keep up with her.
The title character in “Snow White” has always claimed that the trick to get a tricky job done is to whistle while you work. Continue whistling, Disney. Continue whistling.
