Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

One thing that has caught Hollywood’s imagination in recent years is the idea that European fairytales were originally much more ominous and frightening before they were diluted by Walt Disney in the middle of last century. Consequently, revisionist versions of stories such as Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are currently all the rage.

Snow White and the Huntsman follows this trend, purporting to be a kind of dark restoration of the original Brothers Grimm tale with a bit of pop-feminism thrown in for good measure.

The most striking thing about the film is its visual style. Costume, colour, light –for the most part it is designed very well and knits the story’s world together in a convincing way. However, what becomes a nagging problem is that it never quite envelops the audience in the way it should. I didn’t know for sure until 5 minutes ago that director Rupert Sanders is a prolific maker of TV adverts but I was quietly confident. Dissolving fruit, porcelain skin, trees with consciously creeping branches, sped up flower-blooming, parted lips, hand bras – sitting there in the cinema, I got the urge to buy perfume about 7 times and didn’t know why.

Despite the distracting ‘buy me’ imagery, there is plenty more that undermines the escapism that a fantasy film like this is designed to provide. Foremost is the acting of Kristen Stewart , who isn’t all that convincing as a warrior princess. Firmly established in the Twilight saga as our age’s passive sap of a female character, Stewart carries her baffled face from those films to this one. Those awkward expressions work for Bella (flawed as that character may be) but not for Snow White.

Having said that, she is not as much to blame as the script, which is full of dodgy “Olde English” and clanging clichés. There’s nothing wrong with clichés – well there is, but the odd short stinging phrase muttered by an action hero on a close-up can work wonders. Here though, the characters are constantly coming out with relentlessly convoluted waffle. It might be funny if delivered ironically, but that isn’t the tone that the film is going for. Great work by Charlize Theron however, who does the best she possibly can with the lines she is given and lends the evil queen Ravenna a good deal of believable scariness with her histrionic delivery i.e. “You will DO THIS for me Huntsman!”

Although the first act is enough to almost give up on the film, it is rescued somewhat by the dwarves who enter the fray at around the 45-minute mark. Actors such as Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins and Eddie Marsden immediately improve the verisimilitude of the story and highlight the lacklustre performances of their taller co-stars. Just the small smirk or grimace or well-timed pause here and there give a much-needed depth and pathos. Their dialogue must be part improvised because it bears no resemblance to that of the other characters. The small talk they provide is often puerile and inconsequential but it at least offers the sense of something real. The trailers avoid the dwarves like their little jokes might undermine the dead seriousness of the piece (and out of context, they might) but in truth, no character does more to ground the film than they do.

Their presence even seems to have a positive effect on the edit and direction, which also dramatically improves about 45 minutes in. Especially effective is a scene where the dwarves sing a lament for one of their number who has died (that’s not a major spoiler). The pacing, which has up to this point been a bit all over the place, settles and a weight is added. It’s like suddenly getting some good earthy nutrition after having your face stuffed with style for an hour. The shot where the camera pans slowly from their campfire high up into the trees and then above to the firefly-specked sky is the single stand-out remarkable moment of the film.

Onto the “empowerment of Snow White’s character” thing which the trailers lean on so heavily. I don’t think it quite works. Besides Stewart’s acting, the big detraction from this thread is the way in which her status as a Princess is reiterated over and over again. Because she is the true heir to the throne, born into royalty, her character has no room to become heroic. She does after all get a troll to go away by just looking at it, get helped out of a deadly forest just because of her value as a royal commodity and is able to break the spell of Ravenna’s power because of her blue blood beauty. None of this she works for, all of it comes part and parcel of being the rightful Queen by God’s divine appointment. If it is her destiny to be the ruler of a Kingdom, there is no option other than fulfilling it. What she learns in the way of fighting skill is taught to her by a man and, once poisoned, she is helplessly paralysed until saved once again by the same man. The traditional Snow White tricolon goes like this “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony.” You can’t just add “…oh, also the same spirit and defiance as a rose in winter” and automatically make it work as a fable of female empowerment. For one thing it ruins the rule of three. Which isn’t on.

Music. Who am I to criticise the score of 8-time Oscar-nominated James Newton Howard? Well, it is surprising to find that the man responsible is so experienced and highly rated, but I just heard it as simple pastiche. It is less memorable that the scores of other fantasy films and yet somehow more intrusive. It softens the threat by being there too much (but that could just as well be down to the director’s input) and is at best functional.

Maybe all of that sounds too critical because I actually had a good time watching Snow White and the Huntsman. Sure it fails to deliver certain things and plays like a polished commercial but it’s a fairly entertaining way of spending a bank holiday afternoon nevertheless. I mean hey, what else is there to do, watch the Queen slow-waving her way down the Thames on a glorified barge in the rain for 5 hours? Don’t be silly.