Kenneth Branagh (2015)

In 1976, The Slipper and the Rose, Bryan Forbes’s version of Cinderella, was advertised – amorphously and almost desperately – as an antidote to ‘dismal disaster and senseless violence’.  (These were the words of the film’s trailer.)  One of the interesting things about Walt Disney Studios’ Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is that it’s being promoted – and successfully promoted – as a straight, traditional version of the Cinderella story.  The hype is certainly more specific than it was for The Slipper and the Rose.  It’s founded on the relative straightness of Branagh’s Cinderella – compared with other, very recent fairytale-based pictures:  the two Snow White movies released in 2012; Maleficent, the 2014 take on Sleeping Beauty; and, in the realm of animation rather than live action, the phenomenally successful Frozen (2013).  Disney Studios naturally want to keep audiences warm for the sequel to their reworking of The Snow Queen:  a short, Frozen Fever, is so much a part of the new Cinderella that it follows rather than precedes the certificate for the feature.  But the title character in Branagh’s film, although not a wimp, is a less complex creature than Elsa in Frozen and isn’t part of the kickass heroine sisterhood of which Rapunzel in Tangled (2010) and Princess Merida in Brave (2013) are founder members.  (Brave is an original screenplay rather than based on a canonical fairy story but it’s still relevant to the ‘traditionalism’ of this Cinderella.)

Chris Weitz’s script is based on ‘Disney’s “Cinderella” properties and the fairy tale by Charles Perrault’.  In that order:  for example, most of the characters share their names with those in the animated Disney film of 1950.  The Branagh version is, however, longer and slower going than that precursor.  One reason for this is the amount of screen time devoted to parental deaths – Cinderella’s mother and father (he dies off-screen but we hear the news relayed to Cinderella and see her reaction) and the prince’s father.  Before she pegs out, the heroine’s mother urges her daughter to ‘have courage and be kind’ and Cinderella remembers this advice.  The mantra is repeated more than once and the concluding voiceover (the film is narrated by the Fairy Godmother) extends it:  the recipe for a good life includes courage, kindness and ‘occasionally, just a bit of magic’.  ‘Just a bit’ are the operative words:  there’s more mortality than magic in this Cinderella.  It’s as if the audience needs to be reminded that, in the real world, people get old and/or ill and die – the fantastic elements of fairy stories must be tempered with the hard facts of the real world.  This emphasis makes ‘Cinderella 2015’ far from traditional.  (In the Perrault tale, the only death is that of Cinderella’s mother, described in a very few, scene-setting words.  The heroine’s father dies in the animated Disney film but the king doesn’t.)   It’s striking that the film-makers feel compelled to give death its due in this way.  Compared with readers of the story in earlier periods or viewers of the animated film (a few years after the end of World War II), there will be many fewer children in today’s audience who have actually experienced the death of a parent (or even a grandparent).  More crucially, though, it seems pointless to minimise the magical element when the plot hasn’t been thoroughly re-imagined and still depends on supernatural achievements.

Although Cinderella is part of the classical opera and ballet repertoire, the story is stretched very thin as a feature film with no singing (the Disney animation and The Slipper and the Rose both had a full song score) and less dancing than you might expect or hope for.  The backstory is so protracted here that I was relieved when the evening of the royal ball arrived but, like nearly everything else in this Cinderella, the magic, when it happens, takes its time.  In Perrault, ‘instantly the pumpkin changed into a beautiful golden coach’.   In Branagh’s film, the special effects that transform the pumpkin, the mice into horses, the lizards into footmen etc are strenuously extended.  It says a lot that the reversion of the magical transport to its original components – at breakneck pace, through the chimes of midnight – is more entertaining than the first transformation.  (The coach is driven by a goose and the swiping into thin air of his coachman’s hat, the last vestige of the Fairy Godmother’s magic, is a nice, quick touch.)  I doubt that cinema is the best medium for these metamorphoses anyway.  A pantomime of Cinderella, at the Theatre Royal in York, is the first theatre visit that I remember as a child.  I’ve never forgotten, in particular, twelve o’clock striking and Cinderella, back in her working clothes, dashing across the stage – ‘a ragged young girl who looked more like a kitchen-maid than a fine lady’, in the words of Angela Carter’s translation of Perrault.  Film can create illusion so easily – too easily for this kind of transformation to be extraordinary or exciting.

Kenneth Branagh has some distinguished collaborators on his team – Dante Ferretti is the production designer and Sandy Powell the costumer – yet I found the spectacular elements of Cinderella repeatedly disappointing.  The golden coach is garish; the sumptuous ballroom is so overstated that the decor might have been chosen by Lady Tremaine, the socially pushy Wicked Stepmother.  I actually preferred Cinderella’s simple pink frock (even after Lady Tremaine had viciously ripped pieces from it) to the empyrean blue number magicked up by the Fairy Godmother.  The monstrously multi-faceted glass slipper is vulgar and looks big enough for a clodhopper.  Helena Bonham Carter, as the Fairy Godmother, is vocally witty throughout but she’s more comfortable – and a better camera subject – as the hag whom Cinderella first encounters than as her transformed version, in a complicated white meringue of an outfit.  Sandy Powell’s jealousy-green gowns for Lady Tremaine are witty but, with Cate Blanchett in the role, they only accentuate that she’s much classier than anyone else in the kingdom, royal or otherwise.  Blanchett has a fine hauteur and does amusing business (she flicks her fan so startlingly that it suggests a lethal weapon).  The (excellent) honking laugh that she’s devised is really needed, though, to cut Lady Tremaine down to size.  Without it, Blanchett is much too formidable to be ridiculous.

Cinderella is eventually told by her stepmother why the latter is a malignant bitch:  it turns out that Lady Tremaine is not wicked but embittered – by the death of the first husband whom she truly loved, by the disappointments that her two daughters (Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera) have turned out to be.  This echoes the moral of Maleficent (the narrator concludes that ‘the story is not quite what you were told’) but it makes no sense here.  At least Maleficent’s backstory fully explained her as neither purely good nor utterly bad:  there’s no follow-through to Lady Tremaine’s self-analysis – as if Branagh and Chris Weitz immediately realise they’ve made a mistake and that the character is worth attention only if her nastiness is unmodified.  The psychologising of the Wicked Stepmother has the same mechanical ‘human reality’ as the demise of Cinderella’s parents and the king.  That these deaths aren’t meant to be taken seriously is signalled by the certificate warning that Cinderella contains no more than ‘scenes of mild emotional upset’.  There’s a risk, however, that the deaths will cut more deeply with thoughtful young viewers – not least because the actors concerned – Hayley Atwell (Cinderella’s mother), Ben Chaplin (her father) and Derek Jacobi (the king) – create plausible, likeable characters during their brief time on screen.

The film’s tone veers curiously between straight and knowing:  Patrick Doyle’s conventional music sometimes seems to be used to counterbalance the more arch bits of dialogue.  The script’s attempts to accommodate political correctness in conte de fée hierarchy are awkward too.  Cinderella first meets Prince Charming, renamed Prince Kit, while he’s out hunting and her priority is to ensure that the deer being hunted escapes unscathed.  Kit pretends that he’s a humble apprentice, working at the palace; even when Cinderella discovers his true identity, he says that he’s learning how to be a king – so that his royalty is forgivable.  It’s something of an irony that Richard Madden (best known from Game of Thrones) is more believable as a common apprentice than a blue blood although he’s engaging.  Lily James (Downton Abbey), who occasionally calls to mind the young Kate Winslet, does well as Cinderella.  James’s cheerful resilience seems natural – and her appearance is immediately welcome after the overdone sunshine smiliness of Eloise Webb as the ten-year-old Ella (as she’s called before her stepsisters add the ‘Cinder-‘).   James and Madden make an appealing couple.  The large cast also includes Stellan Skarsgård (‘the Grand Duke’), Nonso Anozie (the court official who supervises the glass slipper-fitting) and Rob Brydon (unfunny as a royal portrait painter).  The CGI mice in Cinderella’s (spacious) garret are excellent – beautifully characterised and a reminder of where Disney Studios’ heart and talents really lie.

30 March 2015