CINDERELLA

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Doing Justice to a Legend
Kenneth Branagh Classically Treats the Classic Fairytail

Sturdy as a brick lighthouse, Kenneth Branagh’s live-action rendition of this timeless fairy tale is nothing less than exquisite. Branagh’s experience producing, directing, and acting in film versions of Shakespeare’s plays echoes in the context of a much-beloved, (formerly animated) children’s classic.

Refined dramatic beats build through the superb performances of skilled actors (some classically trained) using a detailed storytelling process that fills in the cracks of a narrative so well known that children can recite it in their sleep.

Not a stranger to creating lavish set pieces for pictures like “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Branagh crafts opulent visual compositions that are stunning for their brilliant balance of color, light, and scale. Magical.

Branagh’s recurrent director of photography Haris Zambarloukos uses swooping camera shots to add movement and scope to the enchanted proceedings. Low and high-angle camera shots reveal levels of nuance that range from the humorous to the suspenseful. The cinematographer’s rich use of Kodak film stock mitigates the movie’s necessary use of computer-generated graphics for scenes like the metamorphoses of a pumpkin into a shimmering chariot, and of four mice into magnificent horses.

Special attention is given to the first act in establishing Cinderella’s backstory. Young Ella (Eloise Webb) lives an idyllic existence in a countryside mansion estate with her loving mother (Hayley Atwell) and doting dad (Ben Chaplin). Kindness and courage are virtues that Ella’s parents instill in their happy-go-lucky daughter, before harsh reality turns her world upside down. If losing her adoring mother to a creeping disease weren’t bad enough, Ella’s father remarries Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett), a woman far less generous than Ella’s biological mom, before himself dying while away on business.

Ella ages into “Downton Abbey’s” Lily James. Blanchett’s increasingly cruel Lady Tremaine; her two cur-like young adult daughters Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) and Drizella (Sophie McShera) demote Ella to the mansion’s cold attic. They recast her as “cinder”-Ella because of the soot that frequently covers her face since she has been relegated to serving as housekeeper.

The casting of Lily James as Cinderella proves a coup. James’s modest beauty works in the iconic character’s favor. Positioned opposite Richard Madden’s impossibly blue-eyed Prince Charming, James levitates though the role of a girl whose fortunes turn with the aid of her very accommodating Fairy Godmother (played to perfection by the ever-typecast Helena Bonham Carter). Choice casting delights for other supporting roles stand out. Rob Brydon elicits sly chuckles as a painter charged with executing a portrait of the King (Derek Jacobi). Branagh makes sure to provide the gifted Shakespearian actor Jacobi with as much screen time as possible, adding emotional gravitas to the inevitable coupling of his son with the girl who wins his and the viewer’s heart.      

The movie could very well be entitled “Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella” for its no-nonsense “speak-the-speech-I-pray-you” approach. It is a fairy tale taken seriously enough to flirt with a sense of magical realism. The glass slippers that Cinderella wears are certainly the most divinely beautiful pair of shoes you’ve ever imagined. All is as it should be.

Rated PG. 112 mins.

THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY

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Meshing Japanese animation styles with Mary Morton’s beloved 1952 children’s novel “The Borrowers,” animator-cum-director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and co-director Gary Rydstrom create a delightful adaptation.

Tokyo’s famed animation production house Studio Ghibli (“Spirited Away”) provides ample resources that the filmmakers utilize in setting their version apart from British and American television and theatrical renderings.

With a delicate script tailored by Studio Ghibli’s most famous director Miyazaki Hayao (“Princess Mononke”), this beautifully animated film revels in deep-focus compositions of detailed dark and bright images.

This is a fairytale is about a tiny family of three “borrowers” living beneath the floorboards of a suburban Tokyo home. Light and perspective are put to dynamic use in emphasizing the scale of 13-year-old Arrietty’s miniature world she shares with her stoic father Pod (voiced by Will Arnett) and worrywart mother (voiced by Amy Poehler).

The historic family home sits in a secluded setting teeming with foliage, birds, and insects. A powerful sequence of violent spectacle involves a crow getting stuck in a window screen. Black feathers fly with a fury that matches the trapped bird’s desperate shrieks. The animators lean more toward realism than not. A cantankerous plump cat roams the grounds with a particular curiosity about the borrowers he instinctually senses are lurking about.

Unbeknownst to the small family, a young human boy named Shawn (David Henry) arrives to stay at his grandmother’s house in preparation for an operation. Shawn’s days could be numbered. During Arrietty’s maiden borrowing expedition with her dad—to obtain a cube of sugar and piece of tissue paper—Shawn sees her, as he lies wide-eyed in his bed. The house-climbing escapade allows the animators to demonstrate some vibrant flourishes of action, as when Arrietty boldly fends off a cockroach bigger than she is. The animators’ cinematic approach expands on Morton’s source material with captivating results.

“Once a borrower has been seen, the human's curiosity can't be stopped.” Pod’s ominous warning to Arrietty doesn’t prevent her from entering into a courtly friendship with the mild mannered Shawn. The film’s primary source of suspense comes from housekeeper Hara (wonderfully voiced by Carol Burnett). Meddlesome Hara has heard stories of the borrowers from the family whose passing generations have occupied the home. She conducts an intrusive quest to prove her belief once and for all.

From a thematic viewpoint the story is about the ability of second-class citizens to squeak out a living under the noses of the very wealthy. When the affluent have so much that removing something so small as a sugar cube hardly constitutes stealing, it raises questions about the responsibility of the upper class to support those less fortunate.

Arrietty’s condition as an only child leaves her vulnerable to needing interaction with another child, however temporary that encounter might be. When she finally meets a borrower boy—named Spiller—he is an inarticulate primitive. Arrietty’s worthy aspirations to rise above her social class are clearly founded on her ability to connect with the human world that the benevolent Shawn navigates with difficulty due to his own physical limitations.

“The Secret World of Arrietty” is a well-balanced children’s fairytale that gains from its multicultural influences. Cecile Corbel’s contributions of nuanced harp-and-vocal renditions of poems written by the director add layers of musical texture filled with passion. Prepare to be charmed.

Rated G. 94 mins.

PAN'S LABYRINTH — THE CRITERION COLLECTION

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Dark Journey

Guillermo del Toro Relishes the Horrors of Childhood

In discussing the leftist political themes of "The Devil’s Backbone" and "Pan’s Labyrinth," gothic horror maestro Guillermo del Toro responds by condemning what is considered "normal" because "normal creates inadequacy immediately."

The transplanted director from Mexico embraces abnormality and moral ambiguity in "Pan’s Labyrinth." It's a film he wrote and directed as a deeply personal treatise on the defense mechanisms of a child dealing with war and death. "Pan's Labyrinth" is a surreal and dark fairytale about resistance and sacrifice from the point of view of a resourceful child.

Ofelia (played with immeasurable grace by child actress Ivana Baquero) is uprooted with her ailing pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) during Franco's 1944 postwar Spain to go live with Ofelia’s stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) of Spain’s Civil Guard. Mother and daughter arrive at an abandoned rural mill that Vidal has converted into a military headquarters to oppose the local "maquis" freedom fighters. Ofelia momentarily escapes the farm’s oppressive ambience to explore an old garden labyrinth where she meets a peculiar faun (Doug Jones) who acts as a mentor. The strange creature assigns Ofelia three tasks to prove her royalty as a princess.

Ofelia's dark fantasies of fairies and monsters are matched by the savage hostilities incited by Captain Vidal’s obsessive reign of power. The hideous but friendly faun gradually becomes beautiful as Ofelia fulfills his commands of obtaining a key from a repulsive toad, visiting a pale monster with eyeballs in the palms of his hands at a banquet from which she must not eat, and releasing the blood of an innocent. This is thought-provoking stuff that del Toro presents with fluid attention to detail. You couldn't hope for a more visually lush experience.

After the film’s premiere in Cannes del Toro said, "In this movie, I think the fascist is more terrifying than any of the creatures Ofelia encounters in her fantasy. I feel that the more humanist point of view is the one that I like. I love "Beauty and the Beast" by Jean Cocteau. I love "Frankenstein" by James Whale. I like "Night of the Hunter."

Taking into account del Toro's stated influences, you can see where each have an impact on the film he has crafted from every angle. Here we have gothic horror combined with fantasy in a purely original way that nevertheless breathes with a sense of tradition.

"Pan’s Labyrinth" is set at the end of World War II when the Spanish resistance still had a fighting chance against Franco’s regime if allied support arrived in time. The movie works intriguingly opposite Steven Soderbergh’s "The Good German" as a phantasmagorical reflection of an underground reality seething beneath the scorched and bloody soldier-inhabited earth above.

Guillermo del Toro is a bold creator of modern fairytales in the tradition of the Grimm Brothers, as mixed with a healthy sprinkling of Greek mythology. In planning his films, the director draws colorful drawings of the creatures he will bring to life, such as the mandrake root that Ofelia places in a bowl of milk-and-water beneath her mother’s bed to cure her sickness and protect her unborn child.

As del Toro points out, "There is a mythology that you can grow a baby out of a mandrake." Mandrake is another name for ginseng, but del Toro proposes the plant was traditionally born under the gallows at the feet of hanging victims who spasmed as they died. "You had to look for it under a full moon with a black dog and wear protection on your ears because, when the dog digs for it, the mandrake screams and the dog dies. And if you don’t have protection, you die." The childhood desperation that permeates his dramatic sensibility is elevated by del Toro’s sincere devotion to imaginary belief systems rooted in cycles of nature.

Del Toro says, "Pan’s Labyrinth" is an adult movie about being a kid. My favorite kid movies are "The 400 Blows," or "Au revoir, les enfants" by Louis Malle or "The Tin Drum." None of these are movies that I would play along with "Chicken Little" for my daughters, but they are movies, nevertheless, about childhood."

Add "Pan's Labyrinth" to that list.

Rated R. 120 mins.