Review of Cinderella (2013) by Eva S — 29 Aug 2015

The sets and costumes are absolutely gorgeous - they alone make the film almost worth watching. Almost. The script, however, is so incredibly bland and generic that even acting greats like Cate Blanchett couldn't save it.

With so many retellings of the tale already out on film, there needs to be some sort of justification for putting out yet another version. But this retelling offers little in the way of anything new - only, perhaps, that Cinderella and her prince get the chance to meet once before the ball, but even that was done better in the purposefully campy (and much more enjoyable) Rodgers & Hammerstein musical.

Cinderella (Lily James) has little personality outside of being very nice and patient, and most of the other characters are just as one-dimensional. Cinderella's step-family is nearly as cartoonishly evil and - in the step-sisters' cases - as outlandishly stupid as Disney's older animated musical, with little else to their characters outside of their eagerness to torture and laugh at Cinderella.

(They even kept the step-family's cat, unsubtly named Lucifer, in there from the animated version!) Sure, they add a tiny bit of backstory to the stepmother, making her marriage to Cinder's father her second one (she, too, was widowed), but she honestly doesn't seem much affected by being twice widowed - her only concern is for money.

I also found the prince's (Richard Madden) interactions with his father to be sickeningly sweet and unrealistically over-convenient - not to mention dripping with a sugar-coated promotion uber-modern values that, while not entirely bad to practice in real life, felt out of place in a film that worked so hard to place itself in a roughly 17th- to 18th-century era of all-powerful kings and queens.

But even then, it wasn't until Cinderella asked her step mother (Blanchett) why the woman hated her so much that I fully lost faith in the movie, giving up on the notion that it might get any less generic and sappy-sweet.

The moment had huge potential to give one of the film's characters some amount of depth. But instead of any sort of answer that a real person would give, Blanchett's step-mother simply tells the girl that she (Cinderella) is "too good" and then storms out, swearing to destroy Cinderella's goodness.

If I wanted that level of one-dimensional, over-the-top villainy, I would go watch some of Disney's older, animated films. Even then, I'd probably be able to find a few villains with more depth than this incarnation of Cinderella's stepmother.

Blanchett has a commanding presence in the role - if only the awful script hadn't ruined her performance for her. Even by "traditional retelling" standards, the film did a poor job, trying too hard to mesh beauty and realism with whimsicality, magic, and in-your-face modernized morality.