REVIEW: Disenchanted

Once Upon a Time, Disney's Enchanted reminded us that deep down inside, even the most cynical of us was pining for a fairy-tale. In those days, a musical rom-com featuring hand-drawn animation and overtly referencing films of the Disney animated catalog actually felt novel, even daring.

But today is a different climate. Disney fairy-tales are unambiguously a popular presence in modern pop culture. They are regularly referenced, discussed, and abused both by their parent company and the public at large. Any sequel to such a film wouldn't have the same opportunity to feel revelatory or groundbreaking.

But this proves to be an inadequate defense for this movie's shortcomings. Turns out, you can sing about fairy-tales for two hours without earnestly exploring what makes them so special to begin with.

I say shortcomings deliberately because there's not a lot that's actively wrong with this movie. Almost everything about this movie could have worked if it had been properly finessed, but the film consistently stops short of saying something anything truly insightful, in daring to probe what might actually compel a fairy-tale princess to morph into a wicked stepmother. The conflicts and questions are all surface level. This lack of curiosity betrays the film's intended thesis about magic, true love, and wishes being perfectly at home for the adult, thinking mind.

As one example, the choice to center the film's conflict on Giselle's relationship with her teenage stepdaughter, Morgan, should open some doors for some ripe emotional ground, but the film's excuse for why Morgan should suddenly act so antagonistic toward her stepmother is nothing more than "adolescence," plain and simple. The movie takes it as a given that there are no teenagers in fairy-tale land, which I guess de-canonizes The Little Mermaid.

Amy Adams was undoubtedly the secret ingredient to that first movie's success. Adams reminded us that even a cartoon princess could possess emotional texture and complexity that adult viewers had forgotten about. Here, Adams just uses sweetness like a band-aid. I suppose there's something novel about a 40 something year-old woman expressing herself with all the spriteliness regularly afforded to much younger female characters. At the same time, Adams never gets to reach the depths of emotional truth that revealed themselves naturally in that first film. Even as Giselle descends into wicked stepmother-ness, the film only ever lets her play it as a parody, as though we all wouldn't be here for a genuinely evil Disney Princess.

Meanwhile, the music behaves less like a family of individual numbers supporting a central theme or story, each with their own function and character, and more like a single channel frequency that the characters sometimes accidentally synch up with. Credit where it's due: Amy Adams is still an unappreciated musical goddess, but I had difficulty keeping track of which numbers were meant to be reprises of earlier songs and which just sounded like faded copies. There are something like a dozen musical moments in the film, and not one of them carries a memorable lyric (though I think at some point Giselle calls Maya Rudolph's character a bladder. I couldn't have imagined that ...) The closest we get to a truly iconic song is Nancy's ballad, "Love Power," which might enrapture the audience with its lush visuals for a moment. That is, if they can get past its unmistakable resemblance to another recent Disney powerhouse song performed by Idina Menzel.

I'll clarify, this sequel doesn't fall prey to the same diseases that afflict so many of their live-action fairy-tales these days (e.g. 2017's Beauty and the Beast). Despite the film's title, Disenchanted never feels cynical or overtly antagonistic toward the fairy tales it's referencing. The film is occasionally patronizing, but never insincere. For all its problems, Disenchanted does seem to believe in what it's doing, even if it doesn't understand it. And I can't honestly decide if that's better or worse.

--The Professor

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