But I've seen it now, and naturally I have thoughts.
As it happens, I adore Disney's 1959 film. The story boils down to three awesome old ladies versus one magnificent villain fighting over the fate of two young lovers while a couple of kings stand around on the side-lines. Their most important contribution is to sing a little ditty together and get drunk.
By virtue of good and evil being embodied by female characters, the film is feminist almost by default, despite the undisputable fact that Aurora is the most passive and uninteresting heroine in the Disney Princess line-up. Her role in the story is to a) fall in love, b) fall asleep. That's it. Even Snow White came up with the idea to clean house in the hopes the dwarfs would let her stay, and Cinderella has more personality and spunk than many modern viewers give her credit for.
Her male counterpart Philip fares a little better than the princes in Snow White and Cinderella (not only does he get a name, but also something of a personality!) yet he too proves virtually powerless in the face of Maleficent's evil, and doesn’t stand a chance against her until he's equipped, protected and guided by Flora, Fauna and Merryweather.
Make no mistake, this movie belongs to the trio of fairies and "the mistress of all evil" (her words). I watched the film for the umpteenth time before writing this, and the line in which Flora cries: "Thou sword of truth, fly swift and sure, that evil die and good endure!" still sends chills down my spine.
So yeah. Big fan of the original Sleeping Beauty.
And now we come to Maleficent. Contrary to the film's promotional material, it is not a live-action retelling of the animated version, and neither is it a prequel that explores Maleficent's Start of Darkness (not technically; I'll articulate further on this in a bit). Instead it's a revisionist adaptation of the Disney film, one which turns the villain into a heroine, and a sympathetic supporting character into her enemy. And it is specifically Disney's take on the fairy tale that's being adapted here, what with the use of Maleficent's iconic look, the idea of three good fairies fostering Princess Aurora in the forest, and Lana del Rey singing "Once Upon a Dream" over the end credits.
Before my critique starts, let's make something clear. There were things about this film I really loved. I loved that its focus was on the relationship between Maleficent and Aurora. I loved that it passed the inverse-Bechdel test (no two males ever speak to each other about anything that isn't a woman). I loved that True Love's Kiss was not between Aurora and the Prince she literally met five minutes ago, but bestowed upon her by Maleficent herself. I think it's worth celebrating that this woman-centric film was a financial success, and that it was almost hilariously uninterested in its male characters.
But though bits of stained glass look good on their own; it counts for nothing if the design is a mess.
In the lead-up to writing this review, I challenged myself with the question of whether I was disappointed in Maleficent because of what it was, or because it wasn't what I wanted it to be. It's a tough one to answer, and I suspect that it's the latter reason that's made my reception to the film so lukewarm. To me, the biggest problem is how it handles the dichotomy of good and evil.
In the animated film it's a straightforward divide. Evil is represented by Maleficent, who embodies petty vengeance, cruelty for its own sake, and "all the powers of hell" (again, her words). Goodness is personified by the three fairies, who embody nurture, protection and goodwill.
Good versus evil seems a fairly basic conflict, but then – that's the way of fairy tales. They're not big on logic or character development, but they're not supposed to be. They're all about psychological realism, about moralistic guidance, about dense symbolism and insight into the human subconscious. I've always been rather opposed to the derision aimed at Disney films for "disneyfiying" fairy tales, for not only was this "softening" of original folktales utilized as far back as the Brothers Grimm, but there is always plenty of horror and darkness to be found in any given Disney film.
All this is a debate for another essay, but my point is that I don't find the Disney movie to be simplistic. Maleficent and the three fairies might be clear-cut embodiments of good and evil, but they're certainly not boring.
So if a film purports to explore the meanings and themes of our oldest tales, or to return a fairy tale to its "darker roots", or to take an iconic villain and explore her psychological underpinnings, then the screenwriter should probably have rudimentary knowledge of what fairy tales actually mean (compare Red Riding Hood to The Company of Wolves, or Snow White and the Huntsman to Snow White: A Tale of Terror). Instead it seems that whenever Hollywood gets its hands on a bankable fairy tale, it invariably does two things: a) fill with them action sequences, love triangles and girl power, and b) turn their villains into misunderstood anti-heroes with tough childhoods and label it "moral complexity".
Not necessarily bad in theory but – well, this is Hollywood we're talking about.
Maleficent essentially poses the question: why was Maleficent the way she was? It promises a complex character study into the genesis of pure evil. It purports to delve into her backstory and reveal why a fairy would curse an innocent child to a premature death. In the Disney version, they pay lip-service to the fact that Maleficent's motivation is that she's insulted for not having received an invitation to Princess Aurora's Christening, but it's made pretty clear by her attitude that she doesn't really care. This is just her excuse to stir up some shit.
She's unabashedly, delightedly, unrepentantly evil. She's the poster child for Evil Feels Good. There's zero motivation, just dark intent.
Here's how things go in Maleficent. The titular character is a young fairy that lives in the Moors, a utopian paradise of magical creatures that is under threat by the patriarchal kingdom next door. King Henry hates and fears the Moors and promises the male members of his court that whoever destroys Maleficent will inherit the throne. One of his servants, Stefan, befriended Maleficent when they were both children, and now sneaks out to the Moors to find her.
Feigning concern for her wellbeing, he slips her a drugged beverage and cuts off her wings while she sleeps, returning them to King Henry as proof of her demise. He duly inherits the kingdom by marrying the King's daughter, but when Maleficent discovers the reason why he betrayed her she crashes the Christening of his newborn daughter and – well, you know the rest.
Basically, the story's conflict has shifted from heavenly good (the three fairies) versus demonic evil (Maleficent), to the greedy patriarchy (Stefan) versus rightfully vengeful woman (Maleficent). Even though the film keeps some of the fairy tale's basic set-pieces and plot-points, the moral inversion creates a massive shift in the characterization, themes, tone and portrayal of good and evil.
For the record, I'm not exactly hand-wringing over the fact that there are no decent male characters in this film (it's not like there's a shortage of them elsewhere), and as I'm sure this struck a deep chord with many female viewers, I have no desire to take their appreciation of this film away from them. There's a trope called Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped, and unfortunately we live in a world where the obvious subtext of what happens to Maleficent is not as uncommon as it should be.
But something still bugged me about the change in paradigm of good and evil. There's nothing wrong with a film that paints the patriarchy in a grim light – I'm just not entirely sure why it needed to be grafted onto the story of Sleeping Beauty. Especially Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which already had strong feminist underpinnings and a strong lack of emphasis on its male characters (as I said earlier, Prince Philip is utterly helpless without the three fairies).
But by turning Stefan into the new villain, the three fairies (here called Knotgrass, Thistletwit and Flittle) are not only side-lined, but rendered completely ineffectual. The third fairy is not given the chance to add an escape clause to Maleficent's curse – instead it is Maleficent herself who adds the part about "a death-like slumber" and "true love's kiss." It is Stefan's idea (not the fairies) to have Aurora raised by three peasant women in the forest, and the trio are so utterly inept at the task of child-rearing that it's up to Maleficent (who finds their hiding place instantly) to secretly protect Aurora from everything from starvation to tumbles off cliffs. The original animated trio might not have known how to bake a cake, but at least they raised Aurora to adulthood in one piece.
Finally, when Aurora falls into her spinning-wheel induced coma, the fairies manage to usher Prince Philip into the room (it's Maleficent who finds him and brings him to the castle) and order him to administer True Love's Kiss. It doesn't work, and it's a far cry from the teamwork that's demonstrated in the animated version when Philip storms the castle with the help of Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, in which the three fairies not only arm him with a sword and shield, not only shout instructions to him on how to fight the dragon, but also protect him from arrows and falling rocks by turning them into bubbles and flowers.
Personally I found their ineptitude heart-breaking, for the animated trio is perhaps the greatest example of Badass Grannies ever. And the best thing about them was that despite their fragile appearance and doddery mannerisms, they were a match for Maleficent. They cannot undo Maleficent's curse, but they can weaken it. They cannot fight Maleficent directly, but they can outwit her for sixteen years. And in the final battle, they are the driving force behind Philip's success.
But by replacing the three fairies with Maleficent as the heroine, and replacing the evil Maleficent with Stefan as the villain, you're left with a conflict that – to me at least – wasn't even half as potent, simply because Stefan makes such a limp antagonist. He's not evil, just weak and greedy. He's certainly not interesting or intimidating. Heck, in order to make him even remotely threatening for the climactic finish, they have to give Maleficent her own brand of kryptonite (it's iron, which at least is a decent nod to faerie lore, but still doesn’t make Stefan even remotely compelling).
I said at the beginning of this review that Maleficent purported to answer the question of what made her so evil. The truth is, it does no such thing. It can't explore Maleficent's evil, because she was never evil to begin with – just wounded and betrayed and vengeful and broken-hearted after Stefan robs her of her wings in order to claim the kingdom for his own.
Is she right to be furious? Of course! Is it fun seeing Stefan's downward spiral of paranoia and guilt? Sure. Is the blossoming relationship between Maleficent and the object of her curse who has no idea what's going to happen to her when she turns sixteen heart-rending and fascinating and more than a little Sapphic? Absolutely.
But that's not what I was promised – or at least not what I was hoping for.
The problem with a moral landscape that is as simplistic as men = bad, women = good is not that male characters are short-changed or undermined, but that when a male character is characterized by his misogyny, it usually tends to be his only personality trait, and becomes synonymous with mere stupidity. And that only undermines the female characters that are pitted against them.
The reason I could never get through The Mists of Avalon (well before the truth about Marion Zimmer Bradley came out) was because all the intelligent and interesting female characters were at odds with a male cast that was invariably idiotic, boorish and pig-headed. From a literary point-of-view it inadvertently serves to undermine the effectiveness of the women, for when a strong, brave and clever female character has a range of one-dimensional thugs as her adversaries, it only makes her seem heroic and admirable by default. She's only brave and strong because they're a bunch of idiotic dipsticks. They're not worthy of her attention, much less her animosity.
And what makes this so frustrating is that the answer to the question at the core of this film – what made Maleficent "evil"? – is simply: a man. Not just any man, but this man: a lying, cheating, greedy, horse-faced loser.
I mean, seriously? Maleficent, that magnificent villain, that glorious, oozing spectre of pure evil, that unrepentant monster and shape-shifter and sorceress; she's the way she is because she had her heart broken by this guy? Are you kidding me??
I suppose I better mention at this stage that Stefan mutilating Maleficent's wings is an unmistakable date-rape metaphor, as confirmed by Angelina Jolie herself. Because why not throw in a symbolic rape while we're at it? What other possible reason could a woman possibly have for becoming evil?
As a point of comparison, consider this. There are plenty of stories that chronicle a male character's fall into darkness. Walter White. Magneto. Rumplestiltskin. Anakin Skywalker. Benjamin Linus Macbeth. Hannibal Lector. Lex Luthor. Ludo from Toy Story 3 (don't laugh, that shit was devastating). All their stories are of differing degrees of quality, but their range of motivation and backstory is vast, from personal foibles to external tragedies, everything from the Holocaust to abandonment issues to personal greed and ambition and desperation, or some mixture of all these components. They are forced into making difficult moral decisions, overcome by misery or fear, or end up succumbing to their own lust or pride or avarice.
But when the chance is given for us to delve into the motivations and circumstances of a woman's impending fall into darkness? And not just any woman, but one of the most frightening climatic villainesses of all time? It's still somehow all about a dude.
And of course, what muddies the waters further is that the film ultimately can't answer the question: "why is Maleficent evil?" because she never BECOMES evil. She is victimized, lashes out at the wrong person, immediately regrets it, and is back to normal by story's end. Her portrayal of "evil" involves wearing black clothes, sitting on a throne that looks like a rib-cage, and punishing a man who totally deserves it.
It's almost as though screen-writer Linda Woolverston (or perhaps just writers in general) are afraid to have women fall from grace through foibles and weaknesses of their own. A man has to be involved somehow, whether he's rejecting her, betraying her, or raping her.
***
For instance, perhaps Maleficent's evil could have been somehow linked to the Queen (here credited as Queen Leila), who is a non-entity in the animated version and who likewise has nothing to do here but struggle under the weight of her massive headpiece. This was a golden opportunity to flesh her out a little, but instead she dies off-screen from some unspecified illness. Maybe it could have been some sort of misunderstanding or animosity between Maleficent and the Queen that led to the cursing of Aurora.
Or maybe there could have been more exploration of the three good fairies as characters and not caricatures. The animated version drops a few hints as to their history with Maleficent, so why not build a backstory around that as the genesis of Maleficent's evil?
Or perhaps – how crazy does this sound? – they could have foregone the need to explain or excuse Maleficent's diabolic evil, and simply had her exist as she does in the original animated version: as a towering spectre of malevolence and power. Because that was pretty damn awesome, and it's not like Angelina didn't pull it off in the single scene that she's allowed to channel this implacable evil.
***
Angelina Jolie exudes charisma in every scene she's in, and I enjoyed her rapport with both Diaval the shape-shifting raven and Elle Fanning's Princess Aurora. The most difficult role any actress can play is the Princess Classic, for unless you can manage a sense of down-to-earthiness (Angel Coulby in Merlin) or a streak of brattiness (Mia Sara in Legend) you're going to be doomed to cloying sweetness and saccharine. Elle Fanning as Aurora just manages to toe the line between innocent sincerity and mawkish treacle. And she gets marginally more to do than just fall asleep.
But there are other things that grated. The fact that Maleficent never actually slips into full-blown evil means that her name (a mash-up of "malevolent" and "magnificent") makes absolutely no sense, especially when she's first introduced as an innocent child. Why not give her before and after names, as with Lucifer and Satan? Woolverston had enough presence of mind to switch the raven's name from Diablo to Diaval, so why not Maleficent as well?
Connected to this, though more of an observation than a criticism, is the oddity of Maleficent having both angelic wings and demonic horns. In the animated film the horns are a headpiece that's worn to intimidate, but here they're actually an organic part of her body. The transition of the good/evil iconography of wings/horns to this film where both are considered entirely natural doesn't quite gel (at least not to me), though I guess it fits in surprisingly well with the narrator's attestation that Maleficent was neither hero nor villain, but both.
Speaking of the narrator, can someone PLEASE end the damn voiceovers? If you need a narrator to explain to the audience what’s going on, then you're probably not writing a decent script.
A flaw of the animated film which is still present in Maleficent is the fact that Aurora learning the truth about her past and identity is completely glossed over. The girl discovers that her entire life (including her very name) has been a lie and now she's expected to go from a cottage in the woods to the majesty of a castle. Her parents are still alive, she's betrothed to a prince, and she'll have to answer to the name "Princess Aurora" instead of "Briar Rose." Total mind-melt. It works a tad better in Maleficent, since Aurora is at least raised with that name and given a glimmer of personality, but it's still a nugget of potential character development that's never mined.
There were other annoyances here and there: the fact that the three fairies were at Aurora's Christening, even though the entire film is based on the fact that Stefan's kingdom hates and fears the inhabitants of the Moors, that Stefan decided to spare Maleficent's life when he cuts off her wings (clearly for plot-related necessity rather than for any non-existent character depth) and that the final battle between Stefan and Maleficent feels less like a long-awaited reckoning than the world's weirdest custody battle.
To sum up, there are a lot of neat ideas in Maleficent, but they're greater than the sum of their parts. I'm disappointed at my disappointment because I really wanted to love this movie, but as a character study that explored Maleficent's fall into true evil, not one that painted her as the victim of an asshole. Demonic evil is infinitely more compelling the banality of man, and to pit Maleficent against Stefan is to pit her against someone who is not even remotely in her league. If she had to have an antagonist (she didn't) couldn’t she have gotten one who was more interesting than pond scum? Not for his sake, but for HERS.
(As it happens, this tendency to diminish male characters in order to elevate female ones also makes any potential romances fall completely flat. This Prince Philip achieves nothing throughout the course of the film, so I've no idea why on earth I'm meant to root for Aurora to hook up with him. At least the animated version gets a guy who knows how to sing, dance and slay a dragon).
Coincidentally, Tor recently published an article that also discusses the feminist nature of Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent, which provides a contrast/comparison to some of the issues I've raised here. But I honestly think that on a fundamental level, Sleeping Beauty is the better film. There's no better way to demonstrate this but to post each film's version of Aurora pricking her finger on the spindle and let you judge for yourself which holds the greatest tension, atmosphere and emotion:
(Come on, there's just no comparison!)
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