In his time Kenneth Branagh has acted as D H Lawrence
and Henry Vth, Jimmy Porter and Iago,
Reinhard Heydrich, Shackleton and Larry
Olivier. You cannot say that he is a
one trick pony.
He has also has directed seventeen movies
in a variety of genres, including a CIA thriller, Jack Ryan; Shadow Recruit, a
Marvel adventure, Thor, a thriller/comedy, Sleuth, the opera The Magic
Flute, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Peter’s Friends
and seven of Shakespeare plays. He even tried a Hitchcock lookalike, Dead Again. And now he has directed Cinderella? For Disney?
With glass slippers and blue birds?
No subversion, not even irony? With
neither parody nor deconstruction? Well yes, he has, and he has made a rather
fine job of it too.
Cinders is played by Lily James, with Cate Blanchett as her
step-mother and Richard Madden as the Prince,
along with Helena Bonham-Carter,
Stellan Skarsgard, Derek Jacobi, Nonso
Anozie, Ben Chaplin. Many of the secondary
cast seem to have come from Downton Abbey
and/or Game of Thrones, so for some
of us at least they are unfamiliar faces. They
are also, apart from Ms Blanchett, British.
That saves us from clashing accents, giving a consistence to the dialogue, a
consistency that carries into the other areas of the movie, its tone, music,
design and mise-en-scene. That last quality is hard to define, and
even to spot, but you do notice it when it is not right. Not consciously, perhaps, but with a sense
of unease. Of things not quite hanging
together.
The script is by Chris Weitz, who previously adapted Philip
Pullman’s magnificent trilogy His Dark
Materials. Sadly only the first
part, The Golden Compass, made it to
the screen owing to powerful American ‘Christian’ opposition. That was no easy task, but he delivers the
same clear narrative lines and character development here as there. Even
Cate has a chance to play for our (limited) sympathy. Helena Bonham-Carter is the Fairy
godmother, and relishes it. I like to
see HB-C relishing. Personal aside; I attended the play Don Carlos in London a
few years ago and during the interval had to push my way between HB-C and Tim
Burton. Really, I had to. You can guess which way I faced, and when for
a second I looked down – looked a long way down, she really is quite tiny – into her eyes, that second lasted for a hundred years. Just
thought I’d share that.
The original Disney film of Cinderella was the animation of
1950. In 1998 Andy Tennant co-scripted
and directed Ever After, a Cinderella
Story, ‘the true story’, with
Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott as the lovers and Anjelica Huston as
‘Mother’. This gave it a historical setting – 16th
century France – and was, it seems, well
made. It came out hard on the heels of
another adaptation of a tale, Snow White;
A Tale of Terror, with Sigourney
Weaver as the stepmother set in the time of the Crusades and much grimmer - pun intended. It seems the original tales were for adults,
not children, and were truly dark. A new edition of these has just been
published.
The new Disney film tells it straight. It cost an estimated $95
million to make but the mone is, as they say, all up there on the screen, with a
magnificent palace, sumptuous costumes
and charming special effects. The
music is by Branagh’s long time
collaborator Patrick Doyle and
is suitably period and lush. So is the
cinematography by another past collaborator, Haris Zambarloukos. The Production Designer was Dante Ferretti,
who has worked with Martin Scorsese a number of times. So has Sandy Powell, the British costume
designer. They work well together.
So what do we have here? A perfectly straight forward, beautifully made, well acted account of a charming fairy story that has not
been seen (straight) on our screens for 65 years.
I really cannot remember the Disney cartoon
clearly enough to compare it with this, but if this is what we have for the
next 65 years it is good enough for me. I do hope Disney will release the DVD
soon, and drop their annoying habit of hanging onto them to make scarcity add
the their value.
PS. Talking of DVDs I hope the we will soon see the release of Branagh's wonderful MacBeth, staged during last year's Manchester Festival. Theatre friends of mine who have attended many productions of the play - and taught it - say it is the best they have ever seen. It was certainly the best I have ever seen, as stated elsewhere in my blog.
