'Maleficent': Shedding Light on a Dark Woman

by Brett Parker

 

You really gotta hand it to Disney: they’ve always been monumentally shrewd about making truckloads of money and they’ve figured out a brilliant new way to do so with Maleficent.  The big idea is to not only reconstruct a classically animated Disney gem in painstaking CGI hyperrealism, but to put an ironical modernist twist on the beloved tale.  So not only does it transform Sleeping Beauty into a living, breathing entity, but it recasts its gothic villainess as a sympathetic feminist heroine.  Could you imagine if Disney pulled this trick with its entire animated catalog?  What if The Little Mermaid’s Ursula was just a neglected diva who didn’t fit in with the rigid beauty standards of her world?  What if The Lion King’s Scar was just a self-reliant lion driven to alienation by his family’s self-absorption?  Maleficent may be too much frosting and not enough cake, but you have to admit that thinking up such a recipe in the first place is pretty ingenious.

Sleeping Beauty is one of those engrained children’s classics that just about everyone knows by heart: the young Princess Aurora (Elle Fanning) falls under a spell cast upon her by the evil sorceress Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) that sends her into a deadly deep sleep in which she can only be awaken by true love.  Maleficent re-imagines this story from the villainess’s point-of-view and discovers an astonishing amount of sympathy for her we may not have sensed before.  We first meet Maleficent as a proud and head-strong fairy living in The Moors, a mythical land which borders on a human kingdom.  She begins a fragile courtship with Prince Stefan (Sharlto Copley), a royal from the human world she falls hard for, but the feelings aren’t fully reciprocated.  Being with a non-human threatens his reign on the throne, and he is soon ordered by his kingdom to murder Maleficent as a sign of loyalty.  Instead, he drugs her one night and cuts off her fairy wings to make it look like he carried out the murderous deed without actually doing so.  

Mutilated and heartbroken, Maleficent casts herself off into the darker realms of her world and plots revenge.  On the day his royal baby is born, Stefan encounters Maleficent again when she appears in his court to place that fateful curse on his newborn that will send her into a deep sleep on her sixteenth birthday.  Fearing for his daughter’s life, Stefan hides her deep in the woods where she is raised by three bumbling fairies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple).  Maleficent watches the princess grow up from afar and starts to grow a considerable affection for her.  When the child turns fifteen, the dark fairy even comes out of the shadows to form a surprisingly caring relationship with her.  Regretting her supernatural scorn, Maleficent tries to reverse the curse but finds that her own spells may be more powerful than her emotions.

Maleficent marks the directorial debut of Robert Stromberg, the Academy Award winning Production Designer on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, so it must be said that the grand extent to which he meticulously recreates the original film’s fairy tale landscape as we remember it is quite dazzling.  While such productions are usually doomed to resemble live actors standing in front of shabby animation, the environment here has a sort of tangible texture to it which makes it feel more like an exquisite painting than a Saturday morning cartoon.  It’s just too bad that the overall tone is more on the side of children’s entertainment instead of hyper neo-realism.  For all its lush colors and sweeping visuals, Maleficent never really brings any depth past being a really beautiful coloring book.  Snow White and the Huntsman may have been far from perfect, but at least its atmosphere held a lived-in grittiness that brought about a peculiar kind of conviction these types of movies cry out for.  

 

It’s a testament to Angelina Jolie’s image that she could play a demonic-looking, horn-endowed queen of darkness effortlessly.  Jolie’s edgy demeanor and goddess glamour has become such a mega-wattage life force in Hollywood life that she’s usually at her most convincing in hyperbolic movie atmospheres (just ponder the surprising gravitas she brought to her bad-ass babe in the outrageous Wanted).  As the ultimate case study in scary-sexy and feminine authority, Jolie and Maleficent make the perfect marriage between star image and mythic grandeur.  No other actress in the role would dare have the same earth-scorching authority and superhuman magnetism.  As for the other mortals onscreen sheepishly sharing frames with Jolie, Elle Fanning was born to play purely innocent beauties while Sharlto Copley doesn’t have the regal sensuality to compliment the sinister madness he brings to Prince Stefan.  

Maleficent may ultimately just be cinematic candy--sweet and tasty, yet empty and not quite fulfilling--but the unearthed feminist musings the filmmakers bring to the forefront are certainly nothing to sneeze at.  In our post-modern, over-analytical times, the ideologies of classical Disney movies have been called out on occasion for their sexual and sociological implications, mainly in the ways white-bred beauty is celebrated and any kind of ambiguousness is ultimately cast as evil.  So it certainly took audacity and smarts to right all the feminine wrongs that inherently had to set Maleficent off.  For any smart woman knows that being burned by romance sets off reactionary scorn, the beauty standards that are often touted around could make any woman rage with vengeance, and absolutely no evil queen truly wanted to be an evil queen by choice.  It’s a sympathetic cleverness that certainly gives this shiny CGI display verve, and we’re rather thankful that Jolie is the one delivering it to us.  Like John Wayne playing cowboys and Robert DeNiro playing gangsters, we could go on watching Jolie play fairy tale baddies until the end of time.