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EARLY in
Enchanted, Disney’s good-natured attempt at some
satiric jujitsu, divorce lawyer Robert Phillip (Patrick
Dempsey) gives his six-year-old daughter a book about
female heroes. When they come to Marie Curie, he extols
her dedication to science and contributions to public
health until admitting, lamely, that she wound up dying
from radiation poisoning.
Such are
the invidious choices that Enchanted sets up and
eventually resolves for women, who in this clever and
mostly charming holiday comedy win by getting to be both
achievers and princesses. As that rare family movie that
really will appeal to the whole family, Enchanted
also finds the Disney empire celebrating the classic
princess genre it virtually invented while
simultaneously sending up its most saccharine clichés.
After enduring merciless skewering at the hands of
former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg in Shrek,
it’s a little late for preemption, but the studio
deserves points for some healthy self-parody.
Enchanted
opens
with a lovely animated sequence, reminiscent of such
vintage classics as Snow White and Cinderella, in which
a beautiful and kind peasant girl named Giselle pines
for her handsome prince while a menagerie of woodland
creatures looks on adoringly. When her prince finally
does come, the wedding is scheduled for the very next
day, that is until his evil stepmother plots to have
Giselle banished from her erstwhile kingdom. And what
better purgatory than a place where, as the stepmother
puts it, “there are no happily ever afters”? By which
she means, of course, modern-day
Manhattan, New York.
It’s at
this point that Enchanted switches from cartoon to live
action, with the altogether convincing Amy Adams taking
on the role of a bewildered would-be princess decked out
in an impossibly poufy wedding dress. Scenes of the
wide-eyed, innocent Giselle mistaking a businessman of
short stature for a dwarf (“Grumpy!” she cries
delightedly as he scowls back at her) while she
navigates the elbows-out crowd in Times Square set up an
amusing and original fish-out-of-water conceit, in which
the perennial princess craze among little girls is given
a road test in an all-too-real world.
The
narrative tension, if that isn’t too highfalutin a term
for such a lighthearted spoof, comes when Giselle meets
Robert, who, from personal and professional experience,
has become cynical in the ways of love. He’s about to
propose to his hard-charging fiancée (played by the
fabulous Idina Menzel in a thankless role), and
Giselle’s natterings about true love are only pulling
him dangerously off message. Meanwhile, Giselle’s own
brave but hopelessly dim prince (James Marsden) has come
to Manhattan to save her, with a computer-generated
chipmunk in tow to provide one of the film’s cutest set
pieces.
In some
ways, Enchanted is chock full of such
show-stopping scenes, especially some wonderful musical
numbers written by Disney house composers Alan Menken
and Stephen Schwartz. If the chirpily retro “Happy
Working Song,” which features a chorus of New York City
rats, pigeons and cockroaches, is too creepy-crawly for
some squeamish viewers, they will surely be transported
by the movie’s big production number, “That’s How You
Know,” a lavishly staged love song featuring a colorful
cast of 150 singers and dancers in Central Park. In a
nifty twist, some of the real-life voices behind
Disney’s animated heroines appear in supporting roles in
Enchanted, including Jodi Benson, a.k.a. The
Little Mermaid, as a law-firm receptionist.
All of
this is given surprisingly uneven direction at the hands
of Kevin Lima (102 Dalmatians, Tarzan), who has
taken product placement to new lows (Enchanted
might as well have a continuous ticker shouting “Use
Verizon! Drink Coca-Cola! Eat at Planet Hollywood!”),
and who, too, often seems to settle for
less-than-spectacular production values. Susan Sarandon
has grounds for a lawsuit for the unflattering camera
angles Lima uses to film her dramatic third-act
appearance as the wicked stepmother.
When
Sarandon appears, Enchanted briefly goes off the
rails, as the filmmakers pack in perhaps one-too-many
references to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and...King
Kong? No matter. This is an altogether winning piece of
escapism, in large part due to the stunning Adams, who
here gets the breakout role she’s long deserved. Best
known for her Oscar-nominated performance in the 2005
independent film Junebug, Adams flawlessly
embodies the part of a sincere-but-spunky princess (her
delivery of the simple line, “and EVER?” is just one
genuinely heartbreaking example). Don’t be fooled by the
delicate, doll-like looks: in Enchanted, she
delivers a subtle and even powerful performance, in this
case as a young woman in the throes of discovering her
true, heretofore repressed, emotional nature.
But
that’s just the subtext to a story that is dominated
less by sarcasm than by sweetness, light and love. At
first blush, Enchanted looks and feels like it
buys into princess culture with its frills and
furbelows, but its real, cake-and-eat-it idea of a happy
ending is to be a princess and a successful career
woman. Depending on your point of view, that’s either
progress or just another fairy tale to be debunked in
another movie, but for now: Marie Curie in pink tulle,
anyone? |
