SNOW WHITE Review: Disney's Latest Live-Action Remake Delivers Frustratingly Uneven Results

Disney’s latest exercise in brand management and IP (intellectual property) extension, Snow White, arrives in theaters clouded by unwanted controversy.

 

A combination of factors ignited the controversy, initiated by relentless reactionary, regressive "fans" regarding Rachel Zegler's (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, West Side Story) casting, the handling of the dwarfs as part of the main cast, and Zegler’s vocal pro-Palestinian views versus co-star Gal Gadot’s (Death on the Nile, Wonder Woman, The Fast & The Furious series) pro-Israel views over the last year and a half.

 

Setting aside those concerns and judging Snow White on its own merits, while difficult, isn’t entirely impossible, requiring if not an unbiased approach (that, in itself, wouldn’t be possible), but an awareness of those biases and their influence on what and how we see various filmmaking components (e.g., story, characters, performances, etc.), how they connect to and interact with each other, and ultimately, how they cohere into the film we see onscreen.

 

Directed by Marc Webb (Gifted, The Amazing Spider-Man I and II, 500 Days of Summer) from a script written by Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train; Men, Women & Children, Secretary), Snow White (officially "Disney’s Snow White") opens with a rushed prologue. The prologue begins with Snow White’s birth during a snowstorm (thus the rationalte behind her name apart from the supposed hue of her skin), before jumping forward more than a decade to the end of a preteen Snow White’s (Emilia Faucher) idyllic childhood. Guided by her parents, the benevolent, progressive King (Hadley Fraser) and his equally benevolent, progressive Queen (Lorena Andrea) of an unnamed fairy-tale kingdom, Snow White gently learns the ins and out of her future birthright.

 

Believers in a Marxian-socialistic "share and share alike" philosophy, the king and queen ensure their subjects are well-fed, brightly clothed, and their material needs addressed. Happiness reigns and poverty exists – if it exists at all – exists somewhere offscreen.

 

Unfortunately, monarchs, however benevolent and forward-thinking they might be in the "reel" world, regularly pass the crown to regressive, reactionary ones, a problem typical of hereditary monarchies. It's baked into Snow White's narrative: Both the title character's mother (illness) and later her father (war) pass from this mortal plane onto the next in rapid succession, leaving Snow White in the callous care of her new stepmother, the Evil Queen (Gadot).

 

As days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, Snow White grows into a independent-minded, if naive, young woman (Zegler). Deliberately isolated by her stepmother, Snow White's relegated to servant status, dreaming of restoring the monarchy to its prior, community-oriented state. Only a chance encounter with a potato-stealing bandit, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), awakens Snow White to the revolutionary possibility of actively resisting her stepmother’s cruel, arbitrary, and capricious rule. Before long, of course, the Evil Queen sees Snow White as a threat to her rule. And that's on top of the magically powered mirror that informs the ultra-vain, beauty-obsessed queen she’s “no longer the fairest one of all.”

 

From there, Snow White rurns into a frenetic speedrun through plot elements lifted wholesale from the 1937 Disney original, up to and including a lengthy, superfluous encounter with the Seven Dwarfs, here animated via unfortunate CGI to resemble their decades-old, two-dimensional counterparts, ensuring Disney’s copyright control and thus, over their depiction in visual media. More uncanny than canny (valley), the dwarfs heigh and ho, whistle while they work, and otherwise do their rambling thing, arguing and fighting, refusing to clean up after themselves, and while at work in the nearby mines, collecting colorful gems that, alas, have zero role to play in the scenes that follow.

 

Soon after fleeing the Evil Queen and her soldiers, Snow White meets the dwarfs Goldilocks-style, asleep on their beds, creating a ruckus when she awakes, but almost immediately bonding with the diminutive gem miners, especially Dopey (voiced by Andrew Barth Feldman), a painfully shy, put-upon dwarf treated badly by his mates. Due to his unwillingness to talk, his mates also wrongly assume he’s an intellectual imbecile. Far from it, apparently. He’s a great whistler, though, and despite ill-fitting clothes, can move with the best dwarf dancers of his generation.

 

Peppered throughout with songs old and new, the former lifted from the 1937 original with slightly re-tweaked lyrics to bring them up to 21st-century standards, the latter courtesy of songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land, Aladdin, Trolls). Unsurprisingly, the originals still pop and hum while the newer efforts, “Good Things Grow,” “Waiting on a Wish,” and “All Is Fair,” Princess Problems” (among others), also just as unsurprisingly, miss the musical mark more often than they hit it. It’s not an atypical result for Disney’s live-action efforts, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing.

 

Luckily for Disney, and any audience willing to set aside any preconceptions, they found a perfect incarnation for a contemporary Snow White in Zegler. A talented performer capable of delivering whatever an assignment requires, from drama to comedy and back again, and gifted with a fine, melodic singing voice, Zegler all but makes Disney’s Snow White a must-see.

 

Alas, Gal Gadot’s uneven performance fails to match Zegler’s, though it’s not for lack of effort. Whatever her limitations as a performer or singer, Gadot’s onscreen presence, buoyed by Sandy Powell’s magnificent costuming, almost makes her Evil Queen a worthy adversary for Zegler’s pop-revolutionary, songstress-princess.