"Snow White and the Huntsman,"starring a fierce Kristen Stewart and an even fiercer Charlize Theron as warring sides of good and evil, is a baroque enchantment filled with dazzling darkness, desultory dwarfs, demonic trolls and beastly fairies. It is an absolute wonder to watch and creates a warrior princess for the ages. But what this revisionist fairy tale does not give us is a passionate love — its kisses are as chaste as the snow is white.
Perhaps they are saving the passion for the sequel, for it seems there is surely one to come after director Rupert Sanders' brilliantly inventive debut. The film's Alexander McQueen-esque illusions of grandeur do a very good job of masking its flaws, and for the story, Evan Daugherty has conjured up a serious feminist twist on the ages old fable. It is his first screenplay to be produced, with later assists and shared credit with veterans John Lee Hancock ("The Blind Side," "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") and Hossein Amini ("Drive," "The Wings of the Dove").
The bones of the tale remain as the Brothers Grimm envisioned it — a villainess queen obsessed with beauty, a truth-telling mirror, a fairer and far younger Snow White, helpful hapless dwarfs, a poison apple and the power of true love's kiss. But it's the way in which the filmmakers have fleshed things out that makes the magic happen. The best addition is a drunken mercenary in the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth), who is pressed by the Queen to track down Snow White.
The script might be based on a Grimm fairy tale in which the princess in peril prides herself on her housecleaning skills. But not since Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West duked it out over a pair of red pumps has womankind been given such an expansive big-screen arena to work out generational issues.
It says it all that Stewart's Snow White dons tomboy leggings under her torn royal garb as she hides out in the woods, while Theron's Ravenna cloaks herself in runway-ready villainy chic as she plots her dirty deeds.
Reaction so far suggests that audiences are ready for such a change of pace.
As Sanders notes, "People called us 'the other Snow White film' for a while," referring to Mirror Mirror, a tepidly greeted comical spin on the same fable that won the race to reach theaters this year. But first is not necessarily best, he notes. "We were the most-viewed trailer on iTunes when it came out."
Many male-driven action vehicles feel free to marginalize women — much online chatter has been devoted to the attention paid to the leather-clad behind of Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow in The Avengers.
But Chris Hemsworth, a 6-foot-3 monument of manly might, is granted a beefy sidekick role as the grief-stricken huntsman Eric hired by the queen to seize Snow White's still-beating heart. Instead of going through with the heinous act, the hard-drinking widower finds redemption as he teaches the runaway princess to fend for herself — and with hardly a hint of romantic intent, either.
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