'Magnificent!' said a friend of mine; 'mediocre-cent!' said many of the critics. Now that I've finally seen it for myself, I discover I'm somewhere in the middle. For every good aspect of the film (the make-up and costumes! sets! Jolie's central performance!) there are closely-connected bad aspects (the tweeness of the film's fairyland! the weirdly cack-handed pacing! the misfiring comic moments!). What's really strong here is, I think, twofold: one, the central fable as symbolic narrative of sexual abuse, which is very potent -- the scene where Maleficent wakes up to discover her wings have been amputated is as powerful as everybody says. And two, connected with that, is the central section where Maleficent goes b-b-bad to the bone. It stands in relation to the 1959 Sleeping Beauty rather as the Star Wars prequel trilogy does to the original trilogy: a female Darth Vader how-she-got-here narrative. Martha Vader, you could say. Now, obviously (!) it's better than that prequel trilogy in many ways, but there's one key way in which it is worse. For all their manifest failings, at least those George Lucas films were able to take Darth into the dark side and leave him there. Maleficent does such a good job of dark-siding its title character that the reverse motion, back into Goodness again, felt not only unconvincing and forced, it felt somehow like radically missing the point of the picture. Maleficent is a film about what it feels like to be hurt or betrayed (or both); and then a film about how very good it can feel to be bad. That it also wants to be a film about how true love's kiss actually dwells in the wicked queen/evil stepmother's lips is almost a betrayal of this potential. In effect it's saying: women don't really go to the bad. Women aren't really capable of leaving behind the maternal nurturing sweetness in their delicate little feminine hearts.
There were some odd moments, too. It's pettifogging, I know; but I was bothered that Maleficent can't fly after her wings are cut off. Symbolically this works, I suppose: her abuse has grounded her. But since she can do the Jedi thing of elevating whole troops of armed soldiers and spinning them through the air -- and since she can turn her pet crow into a big fuck-off dragon, upon whose back she could presumably ride, I was puzzled that she spent so much time skulking about on the ground, ducking and bobbing past the iron spikes in the castle's corridors and the like. By which I mean: her magical powers were determined by the needs of the specific plot-points in this scrabbily put-together storyline, rather than anything larger.
This is part, I think, of the uneasy way the text negotiates its relationship between 'take this tale according to its in-story logic' on the one hand and 'take this story as an allegorical fable about female oppression' on the other. Especially towards the end I got the sense of a film not so much about elemental forces and the wrath of violated womanhood, and more about the grumpiness of the ex-wife after her husband had gone off and married a younger model.
But the most fundamental problem here, I think, is that the central scenes of wicked Maleficent generate so hefty a sense of magical estrangement and wonder it makes the earlier and later scenes of the blithely twee fairyland look, well, stupid. Magic ought to have a dark glamour, a weird edge of the uncanny; and a magic realm, a place where ordinary mortals fear to tread, needs to be more than a sunlit glade through which young girls in red lipstick fly about complimenting the trolls on their nice hats. It needs to be less bourgeois, in other words.
When the Disneyland castle of the credits mapped onto the castle of the human kingdom, I did wonder if this was going to be another Disney/Pixar self-reflexive allegory, like Wall-E: the traditional, old-fashioned human actors of the Disney kingdom set against the brightly CGI splendors of the Fairy/Pixar one. I don't think so, though. Oh: and what was the deal with the accents? The accents were all, so far as I could see, alien to the actual accents of the actors playing those characters (South African actor must speak in Shrek-like mangled Scots! English actor must attempt hit-and-miss Oirishry!) and, Jolie aside, the accents were all awful. Still: overall I did enjoy it. So did my kids; although when King Stefan was (SPOILER) lying broken on the patio* of his castle at the end, my 6 year-old, Dan, did call out in a loud voice: 'oh, who CARES', which slightly undermined the pathos of the moment.
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*I am reliably informed that medieval castles came equipped with extensive patio areas. For barbecuing and the like.
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