Sparkly, sumptuous and heartfelt adaptation: Cinderella review and trailer
A STORY which has fuelled a myriad Hollywood romances and private fantasies unfolds with a beguiling freshness and generosity of spirit
Cinderella
(U, 105mins)
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Stars: Lily James, Richard Madden, Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter
How do you reinvent a classic fairytale? The answer is you don’t. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Cinderella is a sparkly, sumptuous and heartfelt adaptation of the ultimate romantic fairytale told with conviction and confidence, as if no previous version had come before it.
So we get all the traditional ingredients - the handsome Prince, the evil step-mother, the magnificent ball - delivered without a hint of irony, sarcasm or nudge, nudge, wink, wink self-awareness.
How can this be in today’s post-modern world when even the knowing gags of Shrek look old hat? The impressive thing is just how successfully Branagh and writer Chris Weisz pull it off.
Yes the picture takes no significant creative risk - although arguably the traditional interpretation is an enormous risk in itself - but it is executed with such brio, wit and above all sincerity that you are swept along like the train of Cinderella’s silk ball gown.
Cinderella – New UK Trailer - Official Disney - HD
From the opening scenes of ten-year-old Ella’s idyllic home life with her parents the picture goes the full fairytale (the setting is a 19th century-style enchanted kingdom) while successfully navigating the cheese and mining some surprising emotion.
Ella’s closeness to her parents is touching and the death of her beloved mother (Hayley Atwell) strongly felt. “Have courage and be kind,” are her mother’s dying words which echo throughout the story.
This is a picture which believes in the power of goodness and human kindness as embodied in our sunny heroine played winningly by Lily James, a sweet-natured optimist who rarely stays blue for long.
She may have more than her share of life’s vicissitudes - bereavement, ugly sisters, sleeping by the hearth - but she responds with good humour, never succumbing to cynicism unlike her malevolent stepmother, Lady Tremaine, played with cold-hearted glee by Blanchett.
“She too had known grief,” narrates the Fairy Godmother (Helena Bonham Carter) “but she wore it wonderfully well.” In some ways she recalls Blanchett’s unravelling socialite in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine - beneath the imperiousness lies a terror at losing her position in life.
To elevate herself and her ugly daughters - who she belittles to good comic effect, dismayed by their inadequacies - she has to subjugate Ella who is gradually reduced from sibling to servant girl.
Will Prince Charming set her free? In a departure from the traditional tale the pair meet before the ball but it’s not the prince who rescues Ella so much as the other way around.
Whereas Ella is a free-spirit, the prince (Richard Madden) is a prisoner of convention and expectation (he must marry a princess) and when the pair meet in a woodland, the prince out hunting, Ella’s charm and goodness start to work on him straightaway.
“What’s the stag ever done to you?” she questions and he calls off the hunt.
Thus the prince starts to think for himself. In a nice touch that establishes their relationship on an even footing he conceals his royal status from Ella.
There are few surprises in the storytelling but it’s told with a charm, lightness and humour that wrap you up in this make-believe world and succumb to the likeable lead characters.
Madden pulls off the challenge of playing a handsome prince who isn’t a caricature while the perfectly cast Lily James is an unaffected delight, radiating good-heartedness offset with a degree of goofiness and eccentricity (she talks to a posse of mice).
It also looks wonderful, from Sandy Powell’s extravagant costumes to the grand production design and some well rendered special effects in the Fairy Godmother department; the transformation from pumpkin to carriage is a hoot, complete with a goose turned coachman.
The result is that a story which has fuelled a myriad Hollywood romances and private fantasies unfolds with a beguiling freshness and generosity of spirit.
