The Brothers Grimm didn’t write “Snow White.” They compiled it from countless bedtime stories across the European continent. The runaway princess befriended not seven dwarfs but 13 giants, 17 thieves or 40 dragons when she sought refuge in Spain, Belgium or Algeria. Walt Disney took his own liberties, experimentally drafting the raven-haired beauty as both a redhead and a blond, and individualizing the dwarfs. At one point, he considered the names Flabby, Dirty, Deafy, Thrifty, Shifty, Soulful and Awful.
Not my Snow White? Fine. But they’re all a Snow White. And so is director Marc Webb’s “Snow White,” even as it tiptoes into theaters like they’re full of mean and scary trees. Ten years ago when Disney started releasing live-action adaptations of its animated classics, its executives must have thought remakes were a no-brainer way to print money and please fans. This one has been assailed at every turn. So much for a happily-ever-after.
As it turns out, today’s “Snow White” isn’t even that galvanizing. The new songs are forgettable and the animation is cluttered with every pixel competing to show off. There are too many leaves, too many petals and too many pores on the fully animated dwarfs, who bound into the movie with noses the size of pears. As soon as “Snow White” was announced, it was criticized for trafficking in little-person stereotypes and, as a response, replaced the dwarfs with fantastical CG creatures. Now it’s been pilloried for taking jobs from short actors.
Which makes “Snow White” a fascinating case study in today’s impossible contradictions — a magic mirror reflecting the tensions of the current times. Webb and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson had two options: Mimic the 1937 cartoon shot for shot and be slammed for the craven inessentiality of such an exercise, or change anything and face fans’ wrath. They’ve split the difference. Yes, Snow White still runs off with a guy who smooches her corpse. But now she gets to know him before she passes out — and once conscious, she assertively kisses him again.
Of all the Snow Whites I’ve seen, and I’ve seen her do everything from sword fight to Bollywood dance, this version, played with chin-up moxie by Rachel Zegler, raises a question I’ve never considered: Would the princess make a good monarch? Here, her royal parents (Hadley Fraser and Lorena Andrea) raise young Snow White (Emilia Faucher) to understand the kingdom’s economy, schooling her in its resources from fruit to mineral ores. The castle’s subjects swirl about the grounds clutching deep-dish apple pies. “Happy peasants,” I scrawled in the dark. That old-school tone felt wrong. Guiltily, I crossed it out and wrote, “Happy workers.”
This film’s vocabulary is pointed. “Fair” — as in “the fairest of them all” — has been emphatically underlined to mean both beauty and justice. “All is fair where you wear the crown,” snipes Gal Gadot’s evil queen, who wears slinky ballgowns made of obsidian shards that clatter and clank with every step. She’s given only one note to play, an armor-plated diva who lacks the vulnerability to seem insecure about her looks. But Gadot gets the best number in a tepid batch, a villain’s anthem that welds together a half-dozen sneering, cooing, minor-key tempo shifts. Anyone who mocked her viral rendition of “Imagine” at the start of the pandemic will have to grudgingly concede that she at least keeps up.
Gadot’s queen hoards wealth; Snow White can’t fathom why a ruler would let people starve. “I’m sure if she knew how desperate things have gotten, she’d be eager to share,” the princess beams with the innocence of, say, a Disney publicist hoping to promote a fairy tale without getting protested by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When this queen sends her rival off to get murdered by a huntsman, the stakes feel bigger than a cat fight — it’s closer to a political assassination.
This Snow White is pragmatic. Asked what she sees in a magic wishing well, she replies, “Water.” Later, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul replace the cartoon’s sweet but drippy plea “for the one I love to find me” with a more impatient number, “Waiting on a Wish,” that gains steam with each verse as Zegler’s Snow White wonders how much longer she’ll drag her feet before seizing her own self-empowerment. The princess’s rather bland love interest, a bandit named Jonathan (Tony winner Andrew Burnap), advises her to “stop thinking and start doing.”
Zegler has all the qualities of a great star. She sings with her jaw jutting out like she’s daring someone to throw a punch, and she has the ability to turn on an extra light behind her eyes when Snow White is desperate for a favor. In Walt Disney’s day, a studio would have built a whole machine around her, building up Zegler’s persona and potential film by film until she could bear the weight of it. In our day, she’s mostly being hurled into larger machines — “West Side Story,” “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” — by studios hoping this talented girl can shoulder their blockbusters.
The young actor has taken heat for suggesting that the animated Snow White was a bit of a simp. Folks also whined that Zegler, whose mother is of Colombian descent, is — horrors! — too tan. The script spits out a defensive explanation: This Snow White got her name because she was born in a blizzard. Whatever. But its other small adjustments aren’t going to ruin anyone’s childhood. Now, after breaking and entering the dwarfs’ home, Zegler doesn’t spend this iteration of “Whistle While You Work” tidying up with birds, squirrels and bunnies — she makes the men scrub their own damned floors.
The cabin’s interiors are dim and brown, an ill-advised commitment to naturalistic lighting that’s all the more nonsensical given that other stretches of the film are vividly expressionistic with fireflies that zip into view whenever a night scene needs extra twinkle. Meanwhile, Snow White’s signature costume is so brightly saturated that it’s blinding; it appears especially bizarre when she tromps around the woods with a hoodie-clad Jonathan and his troupe of merry Brooklyn bicycle messengers.
“Things are looking bleak,” Jonathan belts in a duet that pits his selfishness against her do-gooderism over a militaristic drumbeat. That number dances right on the line of how much inequality talk this tonally insecure remake can take — especially when its modern money concerns clash with its callbacks to Walt’s beloved whimsy. By the time Snow White mulls an uprising to redistribute the kingdom’s wealth, I found myself dwelling on an earlier scene in which the dwarfs splash around in a jewel cave like a glittering ball pit. Wouldn’t a few diamonds in Dopey’s pockets solve everything?
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