Robert Stromberg (2014)
Although it’s been billed as a prequel to Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent deals relatively briefly with what happened before the birth of Princess Aurora – this isn’t much more than a prologue to a retelling of the familiar story. There are hints from an early stage that this retelling will be mildly subversive: the scene-setting voiceover introduces the audience to two countries, neighbours and enemies: one, a human realm, is ruled by a vain, unkind king; the other, a magical land called the Moors, doesn’t need a head of state, monarch or otherwise – everyone there just gets along. Once the rather long-winded narrator (voiced by Janet McTeer) has said her opening piece, we meet the protagonist Maleficent, a fairy child (Ella Purnell) with dark clothes and large, dark wings but whose eyes are bright and whose attitude towards the world around her is light-hearted and benign. A somewhat older Maleficent (Isabelle Molloy) takes a shine to a young peasant boy, Stefan (Michael Higgins), but he tells her that he dreams of living in the royal palace on the hill and his extraordinary careerism soon takes him away from her. When the dying king (Kenneth Cranham), who wants rid of Maleficent, announces that whoever kills her will become the next king, the ambitious Stefan renews his acquaintance with her. Having drugged Maleficent, Stefan can’t bring himself to kill her but, while she’s unconscious, he burns off her wings and presents them to the old king as proof of her death. Stefan duly accedes to the throne; his queen (Hannah New) gives birth to Aurora; the christening takes place and is gatecrashed by Maleficent. Years pass but it’s slow going from this point onwards as the Sleeping Beauty story is padded out and qualified by Robert Stromberg and the screenwriter Linda Woolverton. At the business end of the film, the kiss of true love to awaken Aurora from her sleep is administered not by a prince – although there is one, named Philip (Brenton Thwaites) – but by Maleficent, whom Aurora gets to know well before her fateful sixteenth birthday and whom she calls ‘fairy godmother’. King Stefan is killed, and Aurora and Philip live happily ever after – with Maleficent, in the kingless realm of the Moors where the latter was once happy and is now happy (and winged) again. The narrator eventually identifies herself as Aurora in later life. ‘So you see’, she concludes, ‘the story is not quite what you were told’. Maleficent was neither hero nor villain but a bit of both.
Her name is therefore baffling. Even if Maleficent is a catchier handle for a big-budget protagonist than Ambivalent, its plausibility cynically depends on the young target audience not understanding the meaning of the word. Reading about the picture after seeing it, I was reminded that the bad fairy in the Disney animated film of Sleeping Beauty (1959) was also called Maleficent: this live-action movie is a Disney production too and I assume that clinched the choice of name, in spite of the fact that the 1959 character was entirely malign. It’s something of an irony, though, that Carabosse, which this character has been called in several versions of the story, including the Tchaikowsky ballet, captures well the Manichaean personality that’s crucial to Maleficent (the ‘cara’ has lovely connotations, ‘bosse’ brings to mind the French for ‘hunchbacked’ and the equation in fairy stories of moral evil and physical deformity). According to Wikipedia, Linda Woolverton’s screenplay went through at least fifteen drafts but these weren’t enough: the moral scheme of the film is muddled. Why, when she’s a happy-go-lucky young fairy, does Maleficent dress in forbidding colours and boast menacing wings and the beginnings of devilish horns? Both wings and horns keep growing even before their owner is cruelly wronged by Stefan and, embittered, turns nasty. Her magical powers are extensive: why, when Stefan has burned off her wings, doesn’t she (as a woman behind me in the cinema whispered) magic up a replacement pair? The answer is evidently that her powers mustn’t get in the way of the film-makers doing things more traditionally when it suits, or staging big CGI battles.
Early on, the old king confronts Maleficent and bellows at the massed ranks of his infantry to kill her: she still has her wings at this point so the royal command seems daft but Maleficent likes a good fight so she gets involved in the scrap. Later on, she’s caught in a net by King Stefan’s men – she can’t metamorphose herself in order to escape from it yet she manages to transform her acolyte Driaval into a huge dragon to take out Stefan’s henchmen. (Driaval is originally a raven whose shape Maleficent changes into Sam Riley and sundry other things along the way.) Maleficent’s backstory describes how she was fucked-up-in-her-turn and the script momentarily psychologises King Stefan – the narrator suddenly, and jarringly, announces that he is becoming ‘more paranoid’ – but the film can’t work out how to reinterpret Stefan beyond this so he just reverts to the manic villain you’d expect in a fairy tale. Perhaps Stromberg and Woolverton are offering a more coherent political take on the original than I’m giving them credit for. Perhaps it’s part of a subtle and penetrating critique of monarchy that Stefan has a warped ambition to become king and Prince Philip is an ineffective kisser. But I doubt it somehow. (You can only conclude that, since he fails to wake Aurora, Philip doesn’t truly love her, so it’s rather anti-climactic that he gets the girl in the end.) I don’t know how bright children who know Sleeping Beauty well will take all this but their parents could be in for some difficult questions.
Angelina Jolie in the title role is much the best thing about Maleficent. She looks wonderful – her cheekbones are so great anyway they hardly need the exaggeration the make-up people have given them but the effect is to make her appearance amusingly alarming as well as beautiful. Her acting is impressive too, especially as she’s playing such a confused character. She’s particularly funny talking in a clipped, bitchy English accent, in the bits where Maleficent is a witty troublemaker-for-the-sake-of-it; but Jolie also brings off the moments where she’s meant to be feeling pain or depth of emotion – when Maleficent loses her wings or realises she cares for Aurora – without being a pain. Elle Fanning is probably too real an actress to play Aurora but she’s nuanced and likeable. (The baby Aurora is Vivienne Jolie-Pitt and Eleanor Worthington Cox plays her as a young girl before Fanning takes over.) As a trio of klutzy, bickering fairies – miniature digitised entities at first, then human size as the ‘aunts’ who raise Aurora in a woodland cottage (supposedly out of harm’s way) – Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville and, to a lesser extent, Juno Temple manage to be fairly amusing in spite of the dim comedy routines they’re put through. Apart from Kenneth Cranham, the male actors are boring: it probably sums things up to say that Sam Riley, although his casting is inexplicable, is the best of them.
22 June 2014
