Rating:

(TWO STARS) 

Disney executives, it is reasonable to assume, did not whistle while they worked on Snow White, the latest live-action remake of one of old Walt’s classic animations. 

They may have winced, wailed and whined, but I bet they didn’t whistle, because this production has been cursed from the start. Disney’s contorted attempts not to offend anyone have somehow managed to offend everyone.

Doubtless they hoped that the film itself would be good enough to distract from the brouhaha surrounding the casting of Latina actress Rachel Zegler in the title role, and the use of computer-generated imagery to create seven bulbous-nosed dwarfs. The CGI, they boasted, would avoid the peddling of dwarf ‘stereotypes’. 

Less happily, it has denied employment to real-life dwarf actors. Opportunities are already few and far between ‘for little people’, one lamented this week, grumpily adding ‘I was born to play Dopey.’

So can we overlook the rumpus? Does this picture elevate us to a higher realm, beyond the various controversies? 

Disney executives, it is reasonable to assume, did not whistle while they worked on Snow White, the latest live-action remake of one of old Walt's classic animations

Disney executives, it is reasonable to assume, did not whistle while they worked on Snow White, the latest live-action remake of one of old Walt’s classic animations

They may have winced, wailed and whined, but I bet they didn't whistle, because this production has been cursed from the start

They may have winced, wailed and whined, but I bet they didn’t whistle, because this production has been cursed from the start

Disney's contorted attempts not to offend anyone have somehow managed to offend everyone

Disney’s contorted attempts not to offend anyone have somehow managed to offend everyone

In a word, no. Snow White the movie has its charms, and dozens of cute CGI forest animals, but on the whole it is a painfully muddle-headed affair.

It is a pallid reimagining of the 1937 original, a transcendent work of genius which Zegler herself seems to think was a study in misogyny.

Everywhere you look there are attempts to correct the perceived ‘crimes’ of the original film. Zegler reckons the original Prince Charming was basically a stalker and maybe Disney executives agree, because Snow White’s love interest here, played rather blandly by Andrew Burnap, is called, simply, Jonathan.

Perhaps they decided that it’s more enlightened for a princess to fall in love with a commoner rather than a boring old lantern-jawed prince. Whatever, the whiff of Hollywood’s liberal angst is ever-present.

‘Just because he’s called Dopey doesn’t mean he’s actually a dope,’ explains one of the other dwarfs. I think it’s Happy, but it could just as easily be a new one called Wokey. It almost comes as a surprise that nobody asks Sneezy to take a Covid test.

Anyway, apart from dwarfs not allowed to be dwarfs and dopes not allowed to be dopes, Snow White broadly follows the trajectory of the 1937 film, itself adapted from the 19th century fairy-tale by the Brothers Grimm. 

Snow White is born to the loving monarchs of a contented kingdom, but after her mother dies, her father has his head turned by ‘an enchanting woman from a far-off land’. 

Those on-the-rebound nuptials never work in fiction and so it is here. He goes and marries her. And that, of course, is when the trouble starts.

Doubtless they hoped that the film itself would be good enough to distract from the brouhaha surrounding the casting of Latina actress Rachel Zegler in the title role, and the use of computer-generated imagery to create seven bulbous-nosed dwarfs

Doubtless they hoped that the film itself would be good enough to distract from the brouhaha surrounding the casting of Latina actress Rachel Zegler in the title role, and the use of computer-generated imagery to create seven bulbous-nosed dwarfs

It is a pallid reimagining of the 1937 original, a transcendent work of genius which Zegler herself seems to think was a study in misogyny

It is a pallid reimagining of the 1937 original, a transcendent work of genius which Zegler herself seems to think was a study in misogyny

Everywhere you look there are attempts to correct the perceived 'crimes' of the original film

Everywhere you look there are attempts to correct the perceived ‘crimes’ of the original film

We all know the famous old story, but the tweaks start right at the beginning, with Snow White so named not because of the fairness of her skin, but on account of a snowstorm on the night of her birth.

That seems fair enough. There are times when so-called colour-blind casting makes sense in a modern world (as well as times when it doesn’t). 

Besides, Zegler, who owes her burgeoning fame to another remake, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021), plainly has oodles of talent.

Yet Marc Webb’s film only intermittently allows her to sparkle. Four of the 1937 songs feature, including the enduringly catchy Heigh-Ho, but mostly the new ones are forgettable Disney dirges. 

There is also the small matter of Zegler’s Snow White scarcely being a match, in the beauty stakes, for Gal Gadot’s Wicked Queen. 

It must be a decidedly myopic mirror on the wall that informs the Queen she is no longer the most beauteous of all.

Gadot at least adds a bit of glamour to the proceedings, although there’s a sexy twinkle in her eye that doesn’t seem entirely consistent with unadulterated evil.

Just as disconcertingly, writer Erin Cressida Wilson (whose credits include 2016’s The Girl on the Train) appears not to have complete faith in the Snow White story, so chucks in a few medieval references seemingly to pep things up.

Zegler reckons the original Prince Charming was basically a stalker and maybe Disney executives agree, because Snow White's love interest here, played rather blandly by Andrew Burnap, is called, simply, Jonathan

Zegler reckons the original Prince Charming was basically a stalker and maybe Disney executives agree, because Snow White’s love interest here, played rather blandly by Andrew Burnap, is called, simply, Jonathan

Thus, Jonathan is presented as a kind of Robin Hood figure, lurking in the woods with his rebels where they fight the Queen’s troops on behalf of the absent King. 

And after Snow White recovers from that dreadful poisoned apple episode, she turns up at the palace gates at the head of a peasant rabble, just like Joan of Arc.

Well, I say ‘she’. But maybe I’m making assumptions about her pronouns. With this Snow White you simply never know.

Snow White opens across the UK tomorrow

***
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