Rachel Zegler stars in the live-action remake of the Disney classic Snow White.Disney/Disney Studios
Snow White
Directed by Marc Webb
Written by Erin Cressida Wilson
Starring Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot and Andrew Burnap
Classification G; 109 minutes
Opens in theatres March 21
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, just a few more remakes to go … right?
As Disney executives continue to plunder the studio’s vault for more animated classics to reimagine in sorta-live-action form, Snow White surely marks one of the last major Mouse House properties left to strip-mine. In fact, Disney has already reworked the classic to rather zippy effect in the 2007 Amy Adams comedy Enchanted, which updated all the familiar Snow White trappings in ways both respectful and semi-subversive.
But it’s been a long few quarterly reports since Enchanted – although not as long since its mostly forgotten 2022 sequel, Disenchanted – and moviegoers (or more accurately stockholders) are apparently now demanding that the real Ms. White please stand up. Which is how we got director Marc Webb’s new-old musical, which adds a lot (new characters, new songs, new political themes) without ultimately adding all that much.
The fairy-tale basics are largely the same: the kind princess Snow White (Rachel Zegler) lives a perfectly kind life in a perfectly kind kingdom until her mother dies from illness. Once her father is put under the bewitching spell of the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot), who would go on to give stepmothers a bad name for generations to come, everything falls apart for our young heroine. Madly jealous and as her name implies, quite evil, the Queen forces Snow White to run for her life, with the princess finding refuge with a band of hard-working dwarfs of varying physical and emotional afflictions.
Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson – who is welcomed inside Disney’s Magic Castle despite an extremely curious filmography that includes the kink-cinema milestone Secretary and the equally eccentric Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus – mixes in a few new elements to the tale. Most prominently, this includes a backstory for Snow White’s one true love, here reconfigured as a rogue actor-slash-thief named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap, sporting a very mid-’90s Jonathan Taylor Thomas look).
The Queen’s brutal reign is also recontextualized to gently flick at the rotted heart of authoritarianism, and what happens when a hardworking community lets an unwilling-to-depart ruler run roughshod over their collective efforts, draining their kingdom of magic. Any notion that this theme might parallel the long-running power of, say, a movie studio chief such as Bob Iger is surely and entirely unintentional.
Gal Gadot appears as the Evil Queen in Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White. Gadot’s performance it not as strong as other cast members, but she’s has the bone-chilling look locked in.Giles Keyte/Disney Studios
Compared to other such recent big-budget fairy-tale musicals as Wicked, Webb’s film is something of a revelation by default – the camera actually captures the full frame of a dance number, the choreography slickly designed and easy on the eyes. And Webb, best known for the worst batch of Spider-Man films, isn’t afraid of bright, popping colour, either.
Yet for every impressive aesthetic choice, Webb makes a disastrous one, such as the decision to render all seven dwarfs as fully digital creations: Grumpy, Doc, Sleepy, Dopey – they’re all highly unnerving spoonfuls of nightmare fuel, their dead-eyed compositions resting somewhere deep inside the uncanny valley of CGI artifice. (In an odd bit of capitulation, Webb casts a real-life little person as one of Jonathan’s fellow thieves, as if to remind audiences that the real world still exists.) There are several other scenes set in and around Snow White’s castle that are poorly lit and flatly shot, giving the film the air of a Disney+ series.
Almost since the moment that development of a new Snow White was announced, the production has been mired in largely empty controversies, ranging from Zegler’s casting (a diverse actress playing the whitest character in the Disney canon, gasp!) to theoretical political feuds between her and Gadot. Onscreen, though, all the chatter tends to melt away – especially any time that Zegler is the focus, with the West Side Story ingénue delivering a thoroughly charming performance that carefully manufactures innocence and naiveté. Gadot is not nearly as strong – at times, it seems as if the erstwhile Wonder Woman is going for high camp, only for her to retreat to straight-faced solemnity – but she’s at least got the bone-chilling look locked in.
Like Disney’s exhaustive Marvel machine, it feels as if audiences are entering an era of remake fatigue – a malaise that Webb’s film won’t come close to curing. But this new Snow White is neither a chore à la 2023′s The Little Mermaid nor an abomination on the scale of Robert Zemeckis’s ghoulish Pinocchio redo. Whistle hard enough, and it almost sort of works.
