Angelina Jolie; the interior designer.

Angelina Jolie is magnificent as Maleficent, and her work redeems an otherwise middling movie.

This film is built round the back-story of the fairy queen Maleficent, done wrong by an all too human and insufficiently humane man.   We see  how she was not only betrayed but also mutilated by the ‘man who would be king’,  the one who had given her what he said was the ‘kiss of true love’ on her sixteenth birthday.  It was not only her physical form that was misshapen (by fairy standards) by him, but also her heart.    She later curses his child, the newborn princess,  to become a sleeping beauty at the age of sixteen, only allowed thereafter to be freed by a ‘kiss of true love’.

The original story comes from Perrault’s collection of fairy tales, and shares in the cruelty of these classics; a very unDisney attitude that many psychiatrists, led by Bruno Bettleheim,  saw as therapeutic and helpful for young children.   The depiction of wicked step-mothers can be seen as allowing the child – and parent – to implicitly admit to each other that no parents are perfect, and that they will not always be kind and good and harmless.    Maleficent, who adopts a kind of parental role here, is certainly not kind,  good or harmless.   She is damaged, and damaged people damage people.    But she also  becomes a kind of surrogate mother, and this unexpected relationship….well, you may not have seen the film, so no spoiler here.

I was disappointed by the script, originally by Linda Woolveton  which, even after many (reported) rewrites, is still banal, and by the second rate direction.   This latter may be forgivable as it is Robert Stromberg’s first stab at directing after a long and successful career as an artist and production designer in films including Frankenstein Unbound (1990), The Age of Innocence (1993), Cast Away (2000), Solaris (2002), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004, which also starred Angelina), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), There will Be Blood and The Golden Compass (2007), The Road (2009) and The Life of Pi (2012) – and that really is an impressive portfolio – though I would have liked to see more influence from Pan’s Labyrinth.  The direction is not as imaginative as the design – save again for that of Maleficent herself.

So the film stands and falls with Angelina.  She is supported by Sharlo Copley (Area 9) as the betraying villain, Elle Fanning  as the princess, Sam Riley (Brighton Rock)  as Maleficent’s ‘familiar’,  and a largely British cast in secondary roles.   They all do ok.   But the poster tells it all.   This film is all about Angelina Jolie, and for me her performance is more than sufficient.

Maleficent  takes a 1950’s Disney classic and makes it a 21^st century feminist statement.     It speaks to the female condition in a male dominated world, (male-ificent?).   It adapts an ancient tale and gives it modern relevance, reminding us of things we know about today’s world that we may wish we did not know; about the way men can mistreat women, and some mothers mutilate their daughters.  Angelina’s personal crusades against sexual violence and rape as  a weapon of war lend this film credence – and have now made her an Honorary Dame. 

She holds the screen with a nuanced performance that seems almost inappropriate in a fairy tale, a genre that has never needed to be strong on characterisation.  Fairy tales are not Shakespearian, their psychology has never been about the exploration of individual characters, but of representative figures.   This film is truthful about the human condition  almost entirely becauses Angelina makes it so.  

 Maleficent’s transformation from good fairy to bad fairy is utterly believable – and even forgivable - because Angelina makes it so.  Despite its many failings the film is relevant, moving and truly disturbing, because Angelina makes it so.

I can absolutely see why Angelina was so keen to play this part, and I am glad she did.   The exterior design of her character is more than matched by the interior design of the person, and Angelina is the interior designer.  

One other thing we learn from Maleficent is that all CGI can do to her beauty is mar it.    In Beowulf CGI turned Ray Winstone into a buffed up Sean Bean, but nothing could make Angelina more wonderous  as she emerged from her underground lake to seduce Beowulf, not in Grendel’s mother’s natural form as a dragon,  but in the form of a golden woman, the essence of glamour - a word that is intimately connected with gold.   As Maleficent her cheekbones are as sharp as her cut glass English accent.   It is a terrible beauty, but it is not more beautiful than that of the original actress.