neighbors. Bitterly divided due to the humans’ intolerance, Maleficent becomes our tortured heroine, a victim of said intolerance, once the king sets out to destroy the fairy land. Envious and fearful of her tremendous power, the king offers a price for her demise. Her childhood friend whom she spared years before when the magical creatures found him invading the moors to steal precious stones from their pools, eventually accepts the king’s offer to destroy her in exchange for ascension to the throne. So he cuts off her wings while she sleeps, and abandons her. It is this act that eventually gives rise to her placing a curse on his newborn child after he has become king.
"The look of the film at times seems redolent of Disney's straight-to-DVD Tinkerbell films"
As an origin story, there is some interest in seeing how Maleficant acquires the classic elements of her character. She makes her famous staff from a branch to help her walk, gingerly, as she recovers from the painful severing of her wings. The crow, she saves from an attack (transforming him back and forth from a man to any other creature including a dragon). Once those elements are established, and why she wants to curse Aurora, the film takes off into pedestrian territory. Maleficent is forced into a position of nurturing parent to the child she has cursed, filling a void left by the neglect of her ham-fisted fairy godmothers, who literally vanish from the film’s timeline for several years while they are presumed to be caring for the her. Aurora regards Maleficent as her fairy godmother instead, since she seems to give her the attention she needs. Maleficent eventually welcomes this role, but finds that she is incapable of reversing her spell, causing her to want to protect the child too.
Supposedly, this is Disney’s feminist update of the Sleeping Beauty fable. I guess anything is a step up from Basile’s original written tale: the prince actually discovers her asleep and rapes her inanimate body, whereupon she gives birth to babies who suckle the spindle from her fingertip. Though I’m glad Disney and co. didn’t go back to that origin, it was a huge disappointment to find a simplistic Wicked-style variation. Some of the changes are refreshing and effective, but put in the service of another gendered fairy tale. It’s a nice touch that the color palettes of the moors environment reflect Maleficent’s moods; dark and brooding during her depressive states, and light and sunny with Aurora. Converseley, the look of the film at times seems redolent of Disney’s straight-to-DVD Tinkerbell films (all swirling colors and sparkles) crossed with the saccharine blandness of Thomas Kincade paintings. The battle scenes look great in 3-D and very effectively highlight the smallness of the men in relation to Maleficent and her control of the natural world. But the rest of the film shows no attempt to employ the technology for any narrative or artistic purpose. I am all for watching movies on the biggest screen possible, and watching in IMAX is preferable for many reasons. But the CGI work looks more like animation than live-action, in a bad way. It’s when Maleficent revels in her darkness that the film is most convincing and impressive. Her slinky shadow preceding the reveal of her full get-up when she arrives to bestow her curse in a plume of green smoke, in all her delightful iniquity, is nearly as awesome as Frank Perry’s reveal of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. Back in the moors she twists the branches of dead trees into a throne shaped like a human skeleton, as she sits perched elegantly in symmetry with the spine and rib cage. This is the Maleficent I was looking for.
Once she starts complaining about the other fairies’ lackluster parenting skills upon hearing Aurora’s cries of hunger, she may as well have started swaddling and breastfeeding the infant. That’s the sign that this will be another movie about an embittered person, beaten down into cynicism and regret by a cruel life, vowing never to let anyone in again, until the joie de vivre of a young child melts their heart like butter over a hot stove, and they learn it’s better to love, et cetera et cetera. Would that I could have tossed the rest of the script into that burning stove and forced the writers to start over. They instead proved that Disney cannot conceive of female lead characters who aren’t feminine stereotypes. I get that it’s supposed to be empowering that the men in the story that once were so central to saving the day are now uninteresting as villains (the selfish new king who violates Maleficent’s winged beauty) and useless as heroes (the young prince who sweeps Aurora off her feet). I get that it’s a beautiful message that motherhood is a more powerful magic than any other (which J.K. Rowling expressed in far more convincing and complex fashion in the Harry Potter series). But once again, the roles of women are limited to mother and daughter, queen and princess, witch or fairy. I will give credit where credit is due, and Angelina Jolie did get the fabulosity of Maleficent right when the script allowed her. Maleficent’s newly minted backstory, the inspiration for her descent into darkness and revenge, does dovetail seamlessly into this context and sets up an interesting film. The devolution into antiquated cultural definitions of femininity derail its potential.