I'm not sure when I first saw Disney's animated Sleeping Beauty, which was produced in 1959. It may well have been on television. By then, the exacting animation style of Bambi had given way to broader artistic strokes and goofier caricatures. This wasn't one of my favorite Disney animated outings, but I loved the goofiness of the three good fairies who were charged with caring for Aurora, even as I questioned whether this princess was indeed all that beautiful. Like Cinderella and Snow White, this was one of those fairy tales that cemented the anti-feminist myth that if you are beautiful by conventional standards, then One Day Your Prince Will Come and sweep you off your feet, magically transforming your life -- but I digress.
The nastiest shock of the entire picture is the evil witch Maleficent, who casts a vengeful spell on the princess to guarantee her death at 16. That was one scary-looking heffa (though the evil queen in Snow White is a close second).
And now comes the live-action picture Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie. I finally saw it this weekend, and it was better than I thought it would be -- since my expectations for it were not particularly high, especially after Snow White & the Huntsman, which was a showcase for Charlize Theron, but an overall mess otherwise. This picture takes the original story of Sleeping Beauty and twists it so that the motivations and psychology of the witch -- now a fairy gone rogue -- are laid bare (much as the revisionist tale Wicked explained the Wicked Witch of the West's reasons for her actions). In fact, the film struck a chord with me on a personal level. I'll explain shortly.
The picture begins with the titular anti-heroine's origin story, and that's where I have my first quibble. Too many things are left unexplained. For instance. we first see Maleficent as a girl, but she doesn't seem to have parents. She is described as a fairy, but she's a pretty gnarly looking one, because although she's got a pretty face she's got horns like a ram twirling out of her head and giant clawed wings as well. There don't seem to be any other fairies that look like her living in these Moors. She is regarded as the queen extant of this realm, but how did she get into that position?
And while she is initially depicted as a benevolent and good spirit, her very name suggests otherwise. Just as magnificent at its root means "characterized by largeness and grandeur," and beneficent means "doing or producing good," Maleficent means "doing or producing bad." It would have made more sense to me, if sense can be made out of these massive fictions, if the character was born with another name and became known as "Maleficent" later. Any good fiction writer (or maker of myth) knows how important the names of characters can be (J.K. Rowling was a wiz with bestowing appropriate names on her Harry Potter characters that encapsulated who they are) so this was a bit of a misstep.
This Maleficent is a story of redemption through love -- but not the love we've been taught to expect. It's about a woman deeply betrayed, a woman with a good heart whose chance at love and fulfillment was violently stolen from her by someone she trusted. After years of living in bitterness with elaborate plans of revenge, she is transformed through the love of a child. That it is a child she could never have had on her own is of no consequence. Love -- and family -- is what we make of it. Maleficent is ultimately restored to herself and who she was meant to be when she chooses good over evil and literally takes a human girl under her wing.
This story struck a chord with me. People who don't know me assume that being childless is a conscious choice or the consequence of letting my biological clock run out. Not so. In some ways I felt betrayed by my own body, and by the men in my life who didn't -- or wouldn't -- commit to co-parenting through assisted or adoptive means. Maleficent's story was one I related to on an organic level; her wailing upon discovering that she had been stripped of a precious part of her anatomy brought a rush of tears to my eyes, as it immediately reminded me of my own anguish when told that my only option to deliver me from pain was a hysterectomy. (Jolie herself underwent a double mastectomy to forestall breast cancer last year.)
Angelina Jolie is fantastic and entirely dominant as Maleficent. Her body swathed in voluminous black robes and her hair covered, with prosthetic cheekbones, black horns and elf ears, she does a lot with very little, letting her eyes communicate the entire spectrum from warmth to dismay, pity to thoughtfulness, wrath to resolve. The picture falters when she is not on screen.
As Princess Aurora, Elle Fanning -- not yet as riveting an actress as her big sister Dakota --is a cipher, forced by the script and the director to play the Sleeping Beauty role as Little Susie Sunshine -- often to the point of idiocy (in one scene, Maleficent uses magic to knock the Pollyanna princess into floating unconsciousness in the middle of a chirping sentence just to shut her up). We only care for Aurora vis a vis her relationship to Maleficent. And unlike in the original fairy tale, in which Sleeping Beauty slumbers for hundreds of years before being awakened, this little gal gets what appears to be a day's worth of shuteye before she is restored to wakefulness.
Another quibble: the three good fairies are once again played for laughs. But while their animated doppelgangers were good-natured but absent-minded aunties, this trio of winged "saviors" (played by Imelda Staunton, Leslie Manville, and Juno Temple) are just carping idiots. With a major part of the setting established with a war between humans and the non-human inhabitants of the Moors, it doesn't make sense that King Stefan would have allowed these three anywhere near his castle or his child.
The unusual creatures and landscapes created by CGI effects recall alternately the Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland reboot, OZ The Great And Powerful, Avatar, and the Ents of The Lord of the Rings (no wonder, the flick is directed by Robert Stromberg, the production designer on the first three films).
Overall, it's a dark movie and some may find the scene of Maleficent's betrayal extremely disturbing. The brightest single moment has to be when a very young Aurora heedlessly toddles over to the bad fairy and engulfs her in an unwanted hug. The sunny smile of Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, the last of Brad 'n' Angie's brood, is enough to melt the hardest heart at a thousand paces, and Jolie's maternal regard for her own makes the humanization of Maleficent very easy to believe.
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