From her film debut in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story to her bravura performance in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Rachel Zegler has the talent and screen presence to be a bona fide superstar. The young actress has range, spunk, and the vocal chops to deliver a classic Sondheim and Bernstein song splendidly. I have such respect for her that I find her underutilized in the overly busy live-action remake of Snow White. The movie is riddled with sentiments that have been played out in other films before and is overloaded with CGI that, at times, doesn’t look quite finished. For someone of Zegler’s talent, this feels beneath her—except when she sings one of the songs by Pasek and Paul.
All the narrative beats from the classic Disney cartoon are in this movie, but they have been expanded to include Snow White’s relationship with her parents and how she got her name in the first place. Her parents raised her to be a leader and to treat people with kindness, and it’s this upbringing that allows her stepmother to take over when Snow White’s father fails to return home after an investigation in the southern parts of their kingdom.
Snow White is then left to do chores, and she and the rest of the kingdom gradually forget she even exists (as expressed in one of the expository songs). The Evil Queen allows her to live as long as the magical mirror proclaims her to be the fairest of them all, but the moment Snow White awakens to the world’s harsh realities, the mirror finally declares her as the fairest. This prompts the Evil Queen to attempt to take her life.
One of the more clever additions here is the idea that Snow White isn’t considered beautiful until she has woken up to the realities of the world. It’s an interesting contemporary reimagining of the story: that beauty is a concept that goes deeper than the skin. It should play well with the film’s push for a more politically-charged retelling of the story but director Marc Webb and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson can’t make this kingdom feel bigger than the tiny little town in the film’s opening. This world feels so small and spends more time trying to capture nostalgia rather than to amplify its new themes. It takes the most shallow and contrived examples of corruption and shows them at such a small scale that the urgency the film tries to push doesn’t seem quite true or authentic.
What makes it even harder to sink into is the balance of the magical elements. There’s a mystical wood right beside Snow White’s castle with the seven dwarves who mine for gems that would make the Evil Queen turn feral, but never do we see her greedy schemes ever come near the dwarves or their bounty. So, when the dwarves agree to help Snow White, it feels unjustified.
Zegler, as Snow White, is fierce and a powerhouse. There’s a humanity in her that makes the character work, though she struggles when performing alongside a fully CGI-created cast. She fares much better when sharing scenes with other live actors—or even, for some reason, CGI-Dopey. Gal Gadot, as the Evil Queen, is giving it her all. What I find unfortunate is that she doesn’t bring anything interesting to the portrayal of the Queen. It’s such a literal performance that it feels uninspired. I’m surprised that she sings quite well. Andrew Burnap plays Jonathan, a bandit who fights in the name of the true king and is the new love interest for Snow White. It’s a fluffy character that’s written to be charming and to bring him (and by association Snow White) closer to the people, which would be fine if the film interrogated and explored the weakness of monarchial system. But it doesn’t. It still presents the fact that princesses and kings are okay despite all this talk about “being for the people.” There’s a disconnect to the socially charged themes and in the setting never questioning the viability of a system that passes down authority by bloodline or marriage. It’s not ideal. Look at what happened with the Evil Queen.
In an attempt to infuse the film with politically charged plots, the film ended up showing how superficial it was in its adoption of these new themes. And when you consider the reimagining of Snow White’s loss of her kingdom, the live-action remake of ‘Cinderella’ by Kenneth Branagh does it much better. It’s practically the same circumstances but done with more heart and a scale befitting the story. In ‘Snow White,’ everything is super-sized but it doesn’t take the time to match it in scale and so it feels hollow and empty.
With the shoddy CGI – those dwarves are not enjoyable to watch at all – and the plot not giving us anything new, Zegler is working overtime in making the film worth watching. She is singing every song and trying to make every scene mean something more and while she’s doing great, everything around her is just falling short. Zegler deserves a better movie than this and the original cartoon should have just been left alone.
My Rating:
Snow White is now showing in cinemas! Ready for the magic? Catch it on the big screen—check showtimes and get your tickets here!
