Ella Enchanted (2004)
In 1999, NBC aired a television adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, starring a host of celebrities, like Whoopi Goldberg, Gene Wilder, Christopher Lloyd, and Tina Majorino, the girl who played Deb in Napoleon Dynamite. It won some Emmys and was heralded as a great technical achievement. In my memory, it was very cheesy and, despite using the best CGI available, it looked ridiculous. It couldn’t escape the “network TV movie” quality that has such a negative connotation to it. This film - which came out five years later - doesn’t feel far removed from that.
A fairy godmother (Vivica A. Fox) curses baby Ella with the “gift” of obedience - she has to do anything anyone commands. It’s actually awful, especially once her evil stepsister Hattie catches on and starts abusing it. After her mom dies warning her to keep it secret, Ella (Anne Hathaway) grows up, meets Prince Char (Hugh Dancy), and finally sets off to find the fairy godmother and undo the curse - picking up an elf named Slannen (Aidan McArdle) along the way and falling for Char, who’s dealing with his own evil uncle Edgar (Cary Elwes). Things blow up when Edgar discovers her curse and commands her to kill Char at midnight; she tries to chain herself away to dodge it, but the fairy godmother frees her and she’s forced back to do it. Right at the altar, Ella breaks the curse herself by commanding her own free will, but gets arrested before she can explain. Her friends break her out, they expose Edgar’s plot to poison Char’s crown, crash the coronation, and it all ends with Edgar defeated and Ella and Char getting married and toasting to equality.
In 2001, Shrek was a mammoth hit, sending up fairy tales through crude humor and Smash Mouth. This is very clearly trying to pull some of the shine, only to come off like a hollow imitation geared to an even younger generation. Elves, ogres, and giants, all living in “lands” of their type, segregated because of the current king. But it’s nowhere near as clever and really falls flat when it tries to engender the characters. Much of that is due to stunt casting here and there (Heidi Klum? Really?), but it’s mostly because everything feels half baked. The satire has no teeth to it - the “giants are discriminated against” subplot gestures at something with real-world resonance, then abandons it the second a visual gag about ogre butt cracks presents itself. Even the anachronistic gags, clearly meant to be the movie’s calling card, land with a thud; a musical number set to Queen’s “Somebody to Love” should be a showstopper, and instead it just sits there, technically executed but never actually funny. The whole thing wants the anarchic energy of Shrek without doing the work to earn it, so what’s left is just the shape of a joke with nothing inside it.
The bright spot is Hathaway, who demonstrates through this (and her earlier work in The Princess Diaries) that she has a knack for physical comedy. She commits fully to Ella’s involuntary dancing, marching, and confessing, selling bits that would be unwatchable in lesser hands, and her comic timing is sharp enough that you can see the better movie this could’ve been if the script around her matched her effort. Dancy and Elwes are perfectly fine, with Elwes clearly having fun as a mustache-twirling villain who never quite gets mustache-twirling material, but neither leaves much of an impression next to her. It’s a shame the film surrounding her never rises to meet what she’s doing, because a sharper, meaner version of this story - one willing to actually follow through on its ideas about coercion and consent buried under all the slapstick - might’ve been something special instead of a forgettable also-ran from the mid-2000s fairy-tale glut. Then again, it is aimed directly at elementary school kids, so it clearly isn’t for me. It could still be done better.
2.5 out of 5 Stars
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