It’s
been a long time since I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing a complete
camp fiesta on film. Leave it to Miss Angelina Jolie {Voight} to
supply me in droves with what I didn’t know I’d been missing.
Maleficent is a post-modern exploration of one of Disney’s greatest
villains. This is the live-action biopic of Sleeping Beauty’s
horn-headed party crasher, who bestowed the gift of forty thousand winks
upon the beautiful Princess Aurora; an enchantment that could only be
broken by love’s first kiss. Rarely has a social snub been taken so
hard. One can only wonder who this terribly sensitive, frightfully
vengeful creature was and what made her that way.
Beginning at the beginning, we meet a lovely child with the face of a
cherub, graced with eyes of an otherworldly, hypnotic colour. She also
bears a pair of sooty wings and two ram-like horns atop her pretty
head. Maleficent loves and is loved in the moors of the Fae; greeting
and teasing the other denizens as she happily zooms through the air.
The only disturbance in their idyllic world comes from outside their
boundaries when humans occasionally attempt to invade to see and steal
their wonders. This is how Maleficent meets Stefan, the first human boy
she’s ever encountered. The impoverished child thought to abscond with
a jewel to feed his starving family, which, as he learns from a troop of
tree warriors, is not on. In mutual fascination, the manchild and the
faerie girl become friends, learning about each other’s untouchable
worlds, and as time and hormones would have it, growing up to fall in
love. On her sixteenth birthday, Stefan presents his sweet fae with
what he calls “love’s first kiss,” a gift that will bind Maleficent
through Stefan’s long absences as he works at his ambition to live in
the big castle overlooking the kingdom. He is a servant to the king and
is present after the sovereign’s humiliating defeat at the hands of
Maleficent, who has become the strongest of the Fae. As a warrior and
protector, she steamrolls through entire front lines of armoured knights
and calls up unstoppable guardians from the earth’s very trees and roots
to vanquish their foes. Embittered by the royal bum-kicking, the king
poses a challenge that the man who defeats the fae woman will be his
successor. Armed with overpowering ambition and inside knowledge of the
Fae, including the secret to Maleficent’s heart, Stefan brutally saws
off his lover’s precious wings, ensuring his crown and Maleficent’s fury
forever. The embittered faerie isolates herself and her people, nursing
her grudge against humanity, specifically her ex. The birth of Stefan’s
firstborn provides Maleficent with the opportunity for payback she’s
been waiting for. As other representatives of the faerie world have
given benevolent and wonderful gifts of beauty and grace to the newborn
princess, Maleficent presents the child with a very good night’s sleep.
Upon Aurora’s sixteenth birthday, the curse will see the child prick
her finger on an ordinary spinning wheel spindle, placing her in a
deathlike slumber for eternity. The only way to wake the girl is for
her to somehow receive “love’s first kiss,” such as the child’s father
claimed to have bestowed on Maleficent years ago. Will any amount of
hiding the child away steer her from the path the vengeful faerie has
set for her?
It
seems like the instinct is for people to instantly dump on any cinematic
offering from Angelina Jolie; putting their opinions about her personal
life in front of what they see, conveniently forgetting that she’s
already got an Oscar. That perception hasn’t been helped with the
public seeing more of her in gossip rags than on screen. However, every
so she’ll come up with something like Wanted, or the underrated Salt,
which will remind viewers how hypnotic she can be on screen,
particularly when she’s playing a woman in command of her surroundings.
Who better then to portray that most in control, sophisticated and
deeply frightening Disney alpha fae, Maleficent? Jolie was born to play
the horned one in all her archness and venom. Maleficent adds depth to
the wicked one, previously thought to have simply been miffed at the
disrespect of a missing party invitation. We know that the actress is
easy to believe as a warrior plowing through battalions of armoured
knights and bellowing commands at the otherworldly forces at her hands,
but Jolie’s got the chops to put over the heartbreak of not only
Maleficent, but every woman who’s been hurt by the one they loved and
trusted. She becomes a seething spectre of flaming ice and literally
builds a wall around herself. Actually, it’s a barricade of thorns that
shuts out all of the outer world and subjects her once-bright, beautiful
fae lands to darkness and gloom. Like many a young woman betrayed,
Maleficent goes full Goth for the duration of her heartache, draped in
inky, skintight gowns with cool high collars, and at one point a
slithery, dragon-scaled catsuit (dragonsuit?) that makes one
think, ‘This is what you could’ve had, stupid Stefan.’ Her stewardship
of her magical folk is second to her pain, as evidenced by the three
Auntie Thomasina pixies who attempt to undo some of Maleficent’s bad
relations with the humans by offering to protect the baby Princess.
There’s also her offhand treatment of Diaval, the crow rescued to
become Maleficent’s unhappy but devoted slave and replacement for the
wings she lost. Wisely, director Robert Stromberg focuses the
contention squarely between Maleficent and Stefan, forgoing any cliché
jealousy about Stefan’s eventual marriage to the Queen, and even
Aurora’s sentence is nothing to do with the girl other than being his.
That aspect also sets the film apart in that Maleficent eventually
understands the girl is innocent and that she’s done something deeply
wrong; a feeling made all the more clear by years of spying on the child
in her pixie-protected exile. Mistaken (maybe) for her faerie
godmother, Aurora welcomes Maleficent into her life having felt her
protection from the shadows since infancy. Aurora admires and idolises
the beautiful, statuesque woman as she never could the three disguised,
well-meaning, but hopelessly dizzy pixie protectors. To Aurora,
Maleficent is the only mother figure she’s ever known and for all that
the aggrieved faerie refers to the child as “Beastie,” that feeling is
begrudgingly returned; so much so that there’s agreement that the
princess will permanently live in Maleficent’s world.
The
film turns the Disney tropes well on their heads most humourously with
the inclusion of Phillip, A.K.A. Prince Charming, who is a perfect
physical hybrid of every Disney prince and suitor there ever was and
completely as vapid. This noble isn’t nearly as swept away enough by
his passions to fight dragons for his prospective new g/f and can’t even
be counted on to deliver the goods in the smoochy-smoochy department.
This development also brings about one of the film’s wonkier and
unintentionally (?!) campier moments when we discover the true
bearer of “love’s first kiss” for Aurora. I know the scene’s meant to
be some kind of analogy for mother love, but somehow feels like it’s
right on time for Pride Month. I also don’t recall any rendition of
Sleeping Beauty with the purported heroine being such a light sleeper.
Her eternal slumber is more of a catnap, really. Dozing Beauty? I’m
Just Gonna Shut My Eyes for a Sec Beauty? Not quite the same ring, I
guess. The incredibly short duration of the kip doesn’t give the
feeling of truly imperiling Aurora and neither does the curse affect
anyone besides her. Unlike in previous tellings where the whole kingdom
sleeps until the princess awakens, the world goes on as normal. That
odd retooling takes a lot of the urgency out of the dilemma. Also
strange are the freaky CGI head-replaced pixies that look scarier than
Maleficent at her worst. In this version, Maleficent is the one who
adds the proviso about the kiss being able to awaken Aurora, which then
just makes the whole thing seems really silly. Why set a curse on
someone and then tell everybody how to break it? The dragon
transformation that’s so scary in the 1959 cartoon is quite different
here and during a climactic fight against Stefan’ forces, Maleficent,
the magical creature, the seasoned warrior used to unbeatable odds, just
suddenly goes all limp and helpless for plot device reasons.
For
adding depth and a different spin to the character we’ve known and run
screaming from since childhood, this was a valiant effort. Add to that
the idea that in this summer of boy-skewed superhero movies and
transforming robots, Maleficent is a live-action fairy tale that girls
can really identify with (even if some of the war scenes with the
tree guardians are a bit strong for little ones). There were other
people in the cast, but who cares? If you’re coming to see Maleficent,
you’re coming to watch Angelina Jolie and she is amazing in this. She
chews every corner of the scenery with a fork, knife, spoon, shovel,
earth mover, dump truck; om-nom-nom, indeed. It’s pretty glorious.
Every eyebrow lift is classic and loaded with snark, every contemptuous
pout, every line dripping with venom of what we hoped the Disney witch
was thinking is pure entertainment and everything I’d wanted to see.
The camp factor alone is worth the price of admission.
I have
to end this review, cos I’ve gotta dig through boxes of my makeup from
the 90s looking for all the blood red lipstick I used to wear. There's
going to be a run on it after this movie.