Movie Review: 'Cinderella'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Disney's animated classic, Cinderella, released in 1950, was engaging and memorable.
Sixty-five years later, we get a live-action reimagining of that film that's not quite inspiring but that's impressively inspired by its predecessor.
Cinderella is a romantic fantasy based on the timeless, classic folk tale about the downtrodden title character.
Lily James, a stage actress best known to this point as Lady Rose from "Downton Abbey," assumes the title role and the spiteful nickname that combines her name, Ella, with her inadvertent makeup, cinder.
Cate Blanchett plays Lady Tremaine, the hateful antagonist usually and iconically referred to as the Wicked Stepmother.
And Helena Bonham Carter is Cinderella's fairy godmother, with plenty of helpful tricks up her sleeve.
We first see Ella as a ten-year-old who loses her mother, after which her merchant father (Ben Chaplin) raises her and, before too long, takes a new wife.
But almost immediately after welcoming the manipulative Lady Tremaine and her mean and insensitive two daughters, Drizella and Anastasia (Sophie McShera and Holliday Grainger) into his home, he dies, leaving orphaned, put-upon Ella at the mercy -– and there's precious little of it to go around -– of her three new relatives, who change her name and treat her like a lowly servant.
But because her beloved mother's dying words were to "have courage and be kind," Cinderella puts up with the cruelty and mean-spiritedness she is now surrounded by.
She meets a kindred spirit (Richard Madden) in the woods, but has no idea that he's Prince Charming, who announces a ball he is throwing at the palace -- in the hopes of running into her again -- that virtually everyone in the kingdom is looking forward to.
That includes Cinderella's "loved ones," who find the thought that Cinderella might also attend the ball preposterous and do what they can to make sure that doesn't happen.
And while visions of marrying off one of her daughters to the prince keeps Lady Tremaine hopeful, events conspire to get Cinderella to the ball –- at least (all together now!) until midnight.
The director, Kenneth Branagh (Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, As You Like It, Sleuth, Thor, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), works from a script by Chris Weitz that eschews surprise and avoids self-conscious contemporary irony.
Instead, the makers take a straightforward, faithful approach to the material, retaining its essential sweetness, allowing the silliness quotient to rise but not fly away, and letting the lavish sets, costumes, and special effects do the heavy lifting.
James and Madden fit Branagh's bill, and Blanchett is her usual force of nature, a fiercely bitter but more-than-one-dimensional villain who doesn't quite pull focus from the heroine but who sometimes makes you wish she did.
Another wish some detractors may have is that the title character, as kind and courageous as she is, had a bit more in the backbone department and were more proactive given the abuse being dished out at her expense.
But, hey, we know she's on her way to becoming a princess...
So we'll try to fit the glass slipper over 2½ stars out of 4 for the opulent and CG-enhanced romantic fantasy, Cinderella. You won't quite have a ball, but you'll appreciate the artistry on display for a new generation of young, wish-fulfillment-seeking youngsters.
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