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Film: Mirror Mirror

Country: USA

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Tarsem Singh

Screenwriters: Marc Klein, Jason Keller

Starring: Julia Roberts, Lily Collins, Armie Hammer, Nathan Lane

♥

Anyone making a contemporary version of Snow White will have to compete with Walt Disney’s beautifully animated 1937 rendition of the Grimm Brother’s classic fairy tale. Disney understood the relationship between magic and terror (as opposed to mere horror) and while his Snow White and the Seven Dwarves overflows with beautifully drawn vitality and charm, it also reaches with full intensity into the depths of darkness. The wicked witch is not simply a bad person, she is evil incarnate, with the power of hell at her command.

In Mirror Mirror, one of three Snow White films coming out this year, Julia Roberts doesn’t exactly play the role of evil incarnate. If fact she isn’t even really given any real character to speak of, and her role, like that of everyone in the film, is markedly thinner than a children’s story book. The film operates in a kind of low-key burlesque that is neither funny nor intelligent – slapstick with neither slap nor stick, just the very occasional tickle. Retelling the Snow White story, the film takes narrative liberties but doesn’t update the plot or even play any post-modern games bar the occasional line of failed sarcasm.

There are many, many problems with the film, but at the front of the queue is the casting of Roberts as the wicked witch who is threatened by the youthful beauty of Snow White (Lily Collins), both emotionally and politically, for her kingdom technically belongs to the young princess. Like many viewers I’m quite fond of Roberts – it’s hard not to like her idiosyncratic blend of workmanlike charm and radiant beauty, and her presence can be very effective in the right film. But if Roberts has ever played a genuinely bad character, it’s been washed from my memory, so essentially nice, so humane, is the persona that she has built, performance after performance.

As a result of this, and also, I should acknowledge, because of her limited range, she’s simply not believable as a wicked witch. Glenn Close would have been great, Meryl Streep would have been perfect. Julia Roberts is just not that kind of actress. There’s a moment in the film that should probably have been cut, or perhaps simply wasn’t noticed in the editing suite, in which Roberts is romping on a bed with the young prince who she has bewitched (Armie Hammer) and falls completely out of character, for perhaps a full second. We see Julia Roberts laughing with delight at this young man who is molesting her like a puppy dog (the wicked witch gave him a puppy love potion by mistake). And when she does so, the distance she falls is as slight as the film itself. Given a decent script – although I’m tempted to say given a real script – Roberts might have been able to challenge herself, but there’s really nothing for her to work with. As it is, that single second in which reality breaks through is worth more than the rest of the film.

Mirror Mirror isn’t so much riddled with weakness as it is empty at the core. There really is very little here, and what there is is extremely poorly written and appallingly directed. For a movie so deeply located in fantasy, the film is barely art directed and there’s no sense of the visual lushness that this kind of production needs to work. It also feels strangely under-populated, more like a high school play than a high-end Hollywood product. If it were a local high-school play, I’m sure I would have felt a whole lot more charitable. As it is, I actually left the cinema a little angry. I’ve watched a fair bit of dross so far this year, and there’s a level at which even the blandest rubbish can be vaguely enjoyable if you allow yourself to sink into its mire. With Mirror Mirror, I actually wanted my 90 minutes back. I really did. I still do. It was that bad, that unsatisfying.