Modern Cinderella Is Oprah-Lite But Dress Heavy

CINDERELLA

“Such a good dress for twirling!” marvelled my six-year-old cinema companion, when the newest incarnation of Cinderella finally got to go to the ball, and dance up a storm in a show-stopping frock. In Disney’s latest live-action-isation of one of its classic fairy-tale ‘properties’, Downton Abbey’s Lily James plays the princess-to-be, but the star of the show is that dress.

The electric, shimmering blue ball-gown is front-and-centre of the marketing, beaming out from browsers and filling whole billboards. It took star Lily James 45 minutes to get into, and required breathing-breaks where her corset needed loosening. It was made from over 200 metres of fabric, 4 miles of thread, and 10,000 tiny crystals. It took 20 tailors 500 hours to complete. Wardrobe designer Sandy Powell has been doing plenty of press for the movie, but, assumedly, only because the dress can’t speak for itself.

And Cinderella is, if nothing else, a story about a girl getting to wear that dress, about being the belle-of-the-ball, the centre of attention, the envy of everyone else in the room. Its dress is a sky-blue symbol of heavenly reward, every twirl making it shimmer like the firmament; its riches, its inherent goodness, the long-awaited reward for a central character who’s remained positive in the face of the pernicious. Going to the ball, wearing that dress, and winning the prince —the dramatic beats of any Cinderella story— is, in this retelling (written by one of the brothers who directed American Pie, no less), a form of karmic retribution, that dips a toe in Good-Christian piety, winsome new-age-ism, and the black/white morality of blockbuster storytelling.

Initially, Cinderella seems impossibly bland, like a mannequin to hang a Best Costume Design Oscar on. We begin in her most-magical of childhoods, a storybook fantasy-land big on daffy imagination, anthropomorphised pets, and a mother’s unconditional love. But when unconvincingly-blonde mum Hayley Atwell dies, leaving behind the deathbed command to “have courage and be kind”, the film introduces the ideal that will ripple throughout, both as idealised mantra and psychological conundrum.

When remarried dad Ben Chaplin dies, the audience know our heroine’s been turned from beloved-daughter to live-in-slave instantly. Director Kenneth Branagh depicts this, though, not as instant-nightmare, but slow slide into an abusive relationship. Cate Blanchett doesn’t arrive as Wicked Stepmother, but becomes one. She’s a twice-widowed, suddenly penniless society-lady slowly turning bitter, more desperate, scheming. She doesn’t lock her step-daughter in a dungeon, but tests the limits of her ‘kindness’, her patience, her compliance; out to see what lengths Cinderella will put others above herself.

Devoted to her mother’s dying words, James is, apparently, willing to suffer any abuse. It’s part Christian penance, part hippy-dippy it’s-all-good-ness (“Kindness is free! Love is free!”), part stiff-upper-lip Englishness, part Stockholm Syndrome. And, when she confronts getting-caught-in-the-rain with a joyful laugh, there’s even a touch of montage-ready Manic Pixie Dream Girl about her.

Eventually, sufferin’ Cinderz happens to meet Prince Charming in a wood, and proves plenty charming to him with her country-girl forthrightness and unvarnished optimism. So much so that the ball at the film’s centre is his plan to find that mystery-girl from the forest, making it the most elaborate Missed Connection in history.

Like an Austen heroine, our Prince (Richard Madden) is a modernist —“I hate myself in paintings, don’t you?” goes one of the more winking, revisionist jokes— less interested in sensible social nuptials than following his heart into a love-marriage. He also has a black best bro who has his back (Nonso Anozie), a smarmy schemer working behind it (Stellan Skarsgård), and a dying dad all his own (old Branagh standby Derek Jacobi). These gentlemen are all clad in power-suit jackets and tight tights sporting Nutcracker­-in-Top-Secret!­-sized crotch bulges, proving that it’s not just the frocks that make for eye-catching wardrobe.

Whilst there’s drama in the clothes, there’s little in the story. Like all good rom-coms, we’re on a one-way path to ending with a wedding. Adaptations of stories as well-known and oft-told as Cinderella mean their makers are left to work in the margins, to add individual flourish to a standard dish. Here our fated lovers are allowed to bond elsewhere than the dancefloor, to be as struck by ideas as beauty. Our heroine isn’t a victim needing rescuing, and she longs not for the prince, but for the man beyond the title. And Blanchett’s stepmother is no cruel caricature, but a character handed their own pathos, their own suffering; depicted as a kind of fading belle, a sad stage-mom whose luck is gone and whose beauty is fading.

The film is, eventually, about stepping out of the shadow of your parents, of becoming your own person, an individual. It takes the Oprah-esque lesson that the search for self —“to be seen as we truly are”— is its own form of enlightenment. This Cinderella is less about objectification, more about self-actualisation. Even if it is most memorable for a dress.

INFINITELY POLAR BEAR

Thank god for mental illness! With a strum of ukulele and a zany pep in its step, Infinitely Polar Bear climbs aboard the rollercoaster ride of manic-depression, screaming with delight as it hurtles and rattles around the tracks. It stars Mark Ruffalo as the chain-smoking, handyman-tinkering, never-sleeping, old-money eccentric who, in late ’70s Boston, bounces from full-blown breakdown to full-time Mr. Mom status, charged with taking care of his two daughters when wife Zoe Soldana goes off to business school in New York.

Ruffalo is the drawcard here, both in Oscar-nominated name and on screen, submitting a performance that is deliberately too-much: his mannered delivery and loud line-readings the opposite of the actor’s normal mumbly, underplayed approach. Ruffalo’s turn eschews naturalism for a bracing formalism intended to jolt the audience, to convey that something isn’t quite right. He smokes, he swears, he wanders off in the night, he imparts questionable life lessons, and sometimes sounds a little like Thurston Howell III’s wayward son. Where most films about mental illness overplay the crazy and delight in plunging into the darkness, Infinitely Polar Bear —with its sunkissed super-8 montages, its overalls and jumpsuits, and its indefatigably jaunty score— always reassures the audience that things’ll be alright.

That warmth, affection, and endless optimism comes direct from writer/director Maya Forbes, who’s penned the personal picture based on her own experiences growing up with a bipolar, primary-carer pops. Infinitely Polar Bear resides plenty close to home: its title taken from her own father’s punning; the film produced by her husband, Wally Wolodarsky; the fictionalised version of Forbes played by her own daughter, Imogene Wolodarsky.

Whilst Ruffalo is the drawcard, the film is just as defined by the performances of its young charges, Wolodarsky and Ashley Aufderheide, both screen debutants. Whilst the flick depicts manic-depression as an ongoing adventure, for the kids in the picture it’s more a burden. At first there’s some anxiety about being left in dad’s care, but soon there’s exasperation, then annoyance; the daughters perennially pissed that their childhood has to be so weird, so whimsical. When confronted with Infinitely Polar Bear’s incessantly upbeat music, audiences may feel that same sense of annoyance.

LEVIATHAN

Mounted with the intimidating air of an old master, and carrying the dramatic heft of a biblical parable, the latest film from Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Elena) is a caustic portrait of Modern Russia. Though staged with a stilled, stern air, it’s a howl-of-rage, railing at a country built on endemic corruption, in which Orthodox church and oligarchal state aren’t separated, but wed as one. (Of course, its parable isn’t singular: seaside Russia is just as easily frontier America.)

After an overture of crashing waves and orchestral bombast, we soon meet Aleksei Serebryakov’s drunken dad, whose family has been illegally evicted from their dilapidated waterside house by crooked local councillors in bed with cashed-up seaside developers. Serebryakov has asked Vladimir Vdovichenkov, an old army buddy turned big-city lawyer, to come and represent him at a court hearing, and Vdovichenkov has arrived with a folder full of incriminating evidence on the local mayor (Roman Madyanov). He’s going to “squeeze his balls”, to issue a threat that will, hopefully, save the house from imminent demolition.

At first, it seems as if Zvyagintsev could be mounting the unthinkable —a crowdpleasing tale of the little-guy sticking it to the powers-that-be— but, oh, how he’s not. Slowly, surely, ruthlessly, he snuffs out any and all notions hope. Our main characters —which include Serebryakov’s wife (Elena Lyadova) and son (Sergey Pokhodaev)— are soon due to descend into drunkenness, darkness, despair, and death; the pricks they’re kicking against not taking too kindly to those challenging their dominion. In these stretches, Leviathan plays like a mafia movie: the made men pulling up in black trucks, dragging Vdovichenkov off to get whacked; their power entrenched, the system bent for them.

Yet, as it takes the turn on past two hours, Leviathan goes beyond this dark, determined portrait of Russian corruption, and instead becomes a conversation on religion. By the time we reach its coldly satirical coda, all of the cast we first met —our virtuous objectors— are scattered, forgotten, jailed, dead. They are, on the capitalist scorecard, the losers. We end, then, with the winners: the small town’s powers-that-be attending a church service on a snowy morn, where the men talk real estate and the children are indoctrinated into their entitlement. The closing sermon preaches that Russian nationalism and imperialism has been ordained: that they are being rewarded by God, those less-fortunate punished. “The church will protect and guide us,” the priest pronounces, the look on his face undeniably smug. With the blackest of humour and grim horror, Zvyagintsev, finally, depicts conservative Russians as they see themselves: the victors, sharing the spoils.