Movie Review: Why The Sudden Fascination With Snow White ...

The latest reimagining of the classic fairy tale, Snow White, to hit theaters this year (remember Mirror, Mirror? I know, I barely can too) is Snow White and the Huntsman, whose title is enough to give away what kind of approach director Rupert Sanders is going to take with the material. Gone is Julia Roberts? front-and-center hamming, and instead, enter the huntsman: a snorting, prickly, and sudsy Chris Hemsworth doing his best Colin Farrell. What the fairy tale becomes, then, is something like Willow set in a world not nearly as richly textured, yet similarly darkly-hued. The gothic fable pits Snow White (Kristen Stewart) against the Lady Macbeth-ish Ravenna (Charlize Theron), who stabs Snow White?s father, the king, on their wedding night, and sets about being generally nasty to everyone in the kingdom thereafter. White is locked in tower, until she escapes, hiding out in an enchanted wood under the protection of the huntsman, and eventually becoming something of a Joan of Arc, an armor-clad freedom fighter leading a duke?s army against her cruel stepmother.

With its update, the script tries to mine some social fodder from the Snow White tale, leaning on a kind of half-baked feminism that assigns to Theron?s Ravenna righteous ire towards the patriarchy, justifying her nastiness as gender revenge. ?Remember how we suffered when we were young?? Ravennasays to her brother (who looks like the eunich in The Da Vinci Code) at one point early on after we see the squabbling masses fighting over her runoff bath water that drips into the streets below the castle. ?They don?t suffer nearly as much as we did.? The problem is we don?t remember, and this new Snow White hardly spends any time building up its various characters? motives and backgrounds.

Detours into substance prove momentary. Instead, Snow White and The Huntsman is a film that drips in style, from its Terminator 2-style mirror (a golden bowl that takes the shape of a molten spirit) to the fetching Theron?s milk baths (a spa-like treatment for the magical old ladies). It is a movie more about its dazzling visuals than anything else. Theron?s performance, a raging, shrieking thing, is one of the only things to hold onto here, and her ability to win some?sympathy?from the audience for her wretched character is about as close as the film gets to the dramatically interesting. Stewart is decidedly less dynamic, though she is at home in the vampiric trappings and smushy romantic tension conjured between her and the huntsman.

The film?s real weakness, however, is its endless lackadaisical meandering, which mixes extended battle scenes with phantom deer, a side-long diversion into dwarf world and some incestuous tension betweenRavennaand her androgynous brother. No one is developed any deeper than the rough outlines the Grimms have already given them, and despite the repeated attempts to sweep us up with forest-based bow-and-sword clashes, the result is a wildly dull movie that never quite makes a full case for the sudden fascination over the battling beauties that keep creeping up on our movie screens.

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