Review: Snow White and the Huntsman - Rupert Sanders

Having read the original screenplay two years ago I have not bothered to see SWATH. yet understanding why Kristen Stewart chose Snow White to play an active, physical role was a good choice for her. I was not inclined to see it for that or for what I knew would be a fabulous Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen. Lately I don't go to a movie just to see one outstanding performance. I want to see excellence in all of its details. 

So I almost missed it on the big screen. Another example of a quick judgement based on little evidence almost ruined an astonishing experience for me. Why I went was to observe what influence Rupert Sanders as a director had on Kristen Stewart and I went to read that interaction. My disclosure. 

It is an absolutely beautiful and breathtaking film. Yes, I have read the bits of literal observations that reviewers have noticed and commented about. Me, I drop my brains in the chair next to me for a fantasy of this type.  I say YES  and I don't care if accents are off, if a sword appears in the wrong hand, or anything else as long as I stay inside the film. Mirror, Mirror had me packing up and leaving before  30 minutes had passed with its funny ironic cynicism and asides that were so boring to me, but required you to pay attention to to get it. 

I didn't expect much from Snow white and the Huntsman but after this furor I did want to see the dynamics of what a smitten director might draw forth from Stewart. Awesome. Snow White's script does not give her too much range, but more than usual in some past films. And it was by far so well directed, seen, and opulently lush that it pulled me in. The discount audience around me was hushed for the entire film, quite unusual in a fringe town growing to be a city on the fringe of the Ozarks.

Unbelievable!

There isn't a woman, child, man or any other actor that won't want to work with Sanders. He knows exactly how he wants a scene framed, how he wants an actor framed. Charlize has never, never been more lovely or more subtly evil. Stewart is absolutely beautiful in some frames, and utterly fierce in others while maintaining her beauty. She now knows how to be in a rage and be beautiful at the same moment. Not easy as we all well know how distorted our faces can get in rage. Of course Charlize knows how in her sleep. Chris Hemsworth is ruggedly handsome, and is not used as a prop. Sam Claflin's Prince has something off about him in his first adult scene. I felt as if he were ill cast, but not so. He just slightly smacks of some insincerity that is in his performance, not an acting discrepancy.

And that reminds me that this director is a genius in casting. Not an off one in the bunch and there are a lot of them. Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones for two.

Beautiful and Smart

Stewart has another film for  
a Love Letter in addition to Remember Me. Only it is a much bigger one, a lusher one, but perhaps not quite as subtle as Pattinson's fingerprints all over his film in the script. This love letter is all visual and musical. the music does not intrude and yet it enhances. 

It is a beautiful film that children will love and that adults will quite likely re-enter in a timeless zone of fantasy. Is it a great artistic film such as The Cronenberg is touted to make and doesn't deliver with Cosmopolis? No it isn't, but it's not meant to be, yet it still feels like art in a nostalgic way of recently earlier times. It is lovely.

At the end looking forward to a future film in the series, Kristen is crowned queen and her face is no longer innocent. She knows now that there are enemies in her court, and some very close to her who would kill her. Much as the young Elizabeth I knew when she was crowned queen. And who knows about the young Elizabeth II.

Fierce and lovely all at once

The Prince in Armor

 

The "feminist" Snow White has been accused of having to get men to fight her battle for her. What a stupid comment. She resonates with Jeanne d'Arc, who led the army of the Dauphin. ALL MEN! Doesn't anyone know anything anymore!

Sam Claflin - The Prince Who Betrays Her Hmmmmm.

The Test and The Affirmation

The Troll 

Just before Snow White faces the Troll the Huntsman has showed her how to use her dagger. He tells her that before she kills she must look into their eyes to see their Soul. 

This is what she is doing with the Troll, looking into his eyes and seeing his Soul. She sees a monster who is frightened. Missed by all reviewers I have read. A nice touch too. I expect - hope? - that children will get it.

Snow White Fairy Tale - Deconstructed

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales - Bruno Bettelheim

Snow White is usually considered a fairly harmless fairy tale to be read to children or by them. Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales  goes deep into the unconscious psychoanalytic messages lying submerged in these tales.


Women Who Run With The Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Pinkola Estes in her Women Who Run With the Wolves, a Jungian analyst, digs for the TRIAL secretly lying in the story for the reader or teller to be communicated unconsciously to the girl child.

The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society)
Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss blasted open the structure that is present in anthropological rituals, folk tales, kinship systems, practices, myths and legends. A structuralist analysis became the method of choice in researching and writing about all of the above for a few decades. Until Foucault whose method of genealogy modified this way of seeing, not replacing it, as it is still a valuable frame, just adding an alternative way.

The Oedipus Trilogy - Sophocles



For example, to take a familiar myth: the Oedipus myth, so central to Freudian theory. The Oedipal Phase occurs when the boy fixates his libido on his mother. He wishes to have his mother, to marry her, to replace the father, to do away with the father with wishes to kill the father. These "incestual" desires for the mother and the wish to kill the father require the boy to identify with the father and give up the mother. This is a brief summary most people already know.

When Levi-Strauss applied structural analysis to this myth he turned to the observed object of aggression. The boy wishes to do away with his father to leave him a clear field with his mother. 


Levi-Strauss however, observed that the first act of aggression was that of the father! The father directs the shepherd to take the baby boy and set him on a mountain top to be exposed to the weather and wild animals. It has been prophesied that the boy will kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid this the boy has to die, and the father directs his death.

Things change now, don't they. The first act of attempted murder is that of the father against the son. Freud was not a careless thinker, but since he was not thinking within the frame of structuralism he did not "see" it; he certainly did not include it in his theory, and so it went unnoticed until the 1940's or so when Levi -Strauss began working on it in his field studies with primitive peoples.

Snow White contains a dirty little secret. The aging beauty of the mother, who has been made into the stepmother to disguise and mask the tale for real mothers, makes clear that the beautiful woman ages, becomes less and less desirable, and is replaced by her daughter - younger women. This is in the inevitable ongoing history of human life. But the queen is evil, she is the evil queen because she wishes to "kill" her daughter, the younger women, from jealousy, from a narcissism unable to accept that life changes, that she ages. One of my speculations is that the evil is projected on the queen, when perhaps the evil is in a culture that only values youthful beauty.

In fact the real secret is that Snow White is about Death, disguised of course, since Death is never acceptable, especially in children's stories. Children are very concerned with death, but death is a subject to be avoided at all costs with children. Another fantasy of immortality we burden them with. But they know, and also know it is not to be discussed.


Which is where the Fairy Tale enters because it tells them about aging, Death, the loss of beauty and love, all concerns children are very concerned with on an unconscious level. They dream about it. They know in their hearts.

In Asia white is the color of Death and Mourning

Do not be fooled that this tale is not intuited by the adults making this movie. They are making a movie about Death, and Death is denied in western culture. It is there anyway. Sanders feels it, Kristen feels it, Liberty Ross feels it. Liberty is aging, her beauty is aging, Kristen is the young beauty. No amount of feminist inversion of Snow White changes any of this. It merely acts as a mask to obscure Death even more. The poisoned apple the queen gives to Snow White to put her in an endless sleep is Death faked as in Breaking Dawn. The reference to The Sleeping Beauty is ignored. The "sleeping" is the unconscious state the young girl enters during latency until awakening in sexual adolescence. The "sleeping" is also a simulation of Death. Snow White needs to wake up! She also needs to free herself from the influence of the Mother. This is not lost on Kristen. It lies deep in the western mind. It is not lost on the director/ the father who guards his daughter, who is also aware of her beauty, but not his own incestual wishes, and the fact that he will have to give her up to a young man, when he himself feels her attraction. It is not lost on the mother who does not want this awakening which means her time of love and beauty is soon to be over. Liberty Ross knows this. So all these feelings are churning on this movie set, all underneath the surface everyday working environment.

So we got an irruption. Why is it a surprise?

Snow White and The Huntsman Premiere Image

Which One Captures Your Eyes?

Liberty Ross is elegantly seductive

Seductively elegant

Shimmering, glittering vibrant and glowing

Gowned in a skin like a bird in tiny prickling brilliant feathers

A skin to be peeled off

And Charlize and Kristen 

are NOT wearing gowns

This Is Not A Dress

These Are Not Dresses

These are signs, "floating signs"

Designed just for the Red Carpet

To be worn as masks

asserting? denying? disassembling? contradicting?

They are beautiful, witty, and very funny

Not at all like second skins

This Is Not A Pipe - Michel Foucault

Mirror mirror on the wall
Who is fairest of them all?