Snow White
It’s inevitable that some of Disney’s most iconic animated films would not lend themselves well to a close live-action adaptation. The question as to whether they should be adapting them to live-action is a separate issue- especially as most of the live-action films have been inferior to their animated predecessors- but, if Disney is committed to doing this, there are things they should consider as perils of adaptation. In adapting the studio’s first feature-length animated film, I think it offers some of the biggest challenges, and it doesn’t really do a good job is leaping over them.
A big part of this film’s failures to adapt its source successfully are as a result of the many other ways people have adapted the original Brothers Grimm story before- remember when we got “Mirror Mirror” and “Snow White and the Huntsman” back in 2012? A big part is how, for all its animated beauty, the 1937 film is about as straightforward a film narrative as you can get. That means that writer Erin Cressida Wilson had to add a lot to give stars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot something to play with some meat on the bones. She succeeded, but it also made the choices that show this film as very much a straight adaptation of the original feel out of place; namely, the film really seems to twist itself in knots to get to a heroic finale without delving into an action set piece. It’s a tough road.
We get a lot of moments with Snow White and her parents before the Evil Queen even comes into the equation, giving us a sense of Snow White as the daughter of a kind king and queen who ruled through giving people hope; when the Queen comes and marries her father, the world changes, and when her father dies, it’s just her and the Queen. She turns Snow White into a maid, and asks her magic mirror every day who the fairest one of all is. When a young thief (Andrew Burnap) is caught stealing potatoes from the castle, Snow White starts to remember who her parents wanted her to be, and the mirror changes its answer. From there, Snow White is called to be killed by the Queen, she ends up in the forest, and the home of seven dwarves, who are hard at work in the mines, at the time.
Even before the CG dwarves enter the equation, something feels off about Marc Webb’s film. While several other films in the Disney live-action remake factory have cosplay fantasy vibes, “Snow White” feels truly artificial in that respect. When Zegler puts on that iconic dress of Snow White’s, with the hair, it looks like an actor at Disney walking around, not an actress in a multi-millon dollar production. That isn’t helped by the fact that the production design in this film feels genuinely fake, as if the film was largely shot in front of green screen. There’s little that is authentic in this film, and that is it’s biggest weakness. And when the CG dwarves come in, it completes the false sense of reality. From a production standpoint, very little works; the only moments in the film that really land the fantasy reality of the film are the opening scenes before the Evil Queen comes in, and Zegler’s big song in the role, “Waiting on a Wish,” but that is because of her natural charisma coming through. She is the best thing about this movie. (And Gadot as the Evil Queen isn’t bad, but she just doesn’t have the same energy her co-star brings to the film.)
