Bustle
At one point in Kenneth Branagh’s new,live actionCinderellastarring Lily James,
The story ofCinderella gets abad rapamong contemporary critics —it’s ripped apart as a lesson to girls that beauty and passivity will be rewarded with the ultimate goal of marrying rich. But feminism and fairy tales don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and Branagh walks the fine line between traditional romance and modern empowerment with surprising grace.
Maybe every generation gets theCinderellait deserves. Disney’s 1950 animated incarnation is about a good little homemaker who is rewarded (with a prince!) for her commendable domesticity. Andy Tennant’s 1998 adaptation,Ever After, features a true heroine of the ’90s, a democratic idealist and a leader among the servants in her cruel stepmother’s household. Now Branagh’s take, starringDownton Abbey’s Lily James in the title role and Cate Blanchett as her wicked stepmother, is here to tell us who the Cinderella of the 2010s is. But do the 2010s even want one?
The filmbegins with Cinderella’s dying mother leaving her with one piece of advice: “Have courage and be kind.” This mantra is repeated throughout the movie, but Cinderella’s commitment to her mother’s last bit of wisdom gives her a strength that counteracts her passive legacy and gets to the truer meaning of the story.
Fairy tales are not meant to be taken literally, but are a distillation of the human experience. Nobody watchesCinderellaand learns that their favorite shoes will never fit another human being; nor should anyone take away from it that oppressed, lonely girls who do as they’re told will eventually get rescued by a handsome prince. Less specific but more to the point, the story teaches that having the courage to be kind and remain hopeful in an utterly hopelesssituation can save you in a way that you might never expect — and that is a positive lesson for anyone.
Branagh’sCinderelladoesn’t deviate far from tradition, and it comes off like a stubbornly old-school reaction to the recent revisionist fairy tale trend as well as the story’s critics. Not that the film is antifeminist — it just refuses to make its heroine outspoken, tomboyish, or at all badass in a forced effort to appease modern audiences. It does allow for some updates; Cinderella and the prince first meet before the ball, for example, so we know that he admires her for her character and doesn’t engage in that horror of all horrors, love at first sight (a plot device Disney has been trying desperately to eradicate, with suchanti-romantic fairy stories as Frozen andMaleficent).
There’s nothing inherently antifeminist in most classic fairy tales, only in our past retellings of them (e.g., “Someday My Prince Will Come”). The fact thatCinderella ends in marriage doesn’t teach little girls that a wedding is the only thing to aspire to; marriage is simply a signifier of maturation and independence as those things would appear in a faraway kingdom.“Happily ever after,” however, is a powerful device — it only means that the heroine, having overcome her story’s obstacles, is now grown up and equipped to handle whatever challenges life gives her – challenges like those fleshed out in Into The Woods that show her cheated on by her prince.
Don’t let the movie’s shiny surface fool you; this is still your mother’sCinderella. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.