Cinderella, Review: Kinder Ella and some Branagh courage

Eschewing 3D and confining the classy animation/effects to only relevant scenes, Cinderella is a new take on the fable of the tortured step-daughter and her Prince Charming, with major roles played by animals and objects, led by a dazzling and highly desirable glass slippers that many teenagers would be willing to die for. It is the same old story, with minor cinematic license and major positive shift in logic.

Ella (Eloise Webb) is an only child who lives with her wealthy parents in a beautiful estate in a peaceful kingdom some 200-300 years ago. From a young age, she is taught by her loving mother (Hayley Atwell) to believe in the existence of magic, allowing her to befriend the many animals on the estate, and learning to understand their communicating sounds, especially the mice (extremely well-used in the sound-track). Everything is perfect, until her mother contracts a fatal illness, and dies. On her deathbed, she makes Ella promise that she'll always have courage and show kindness to others.

Years later, when Ella (now grown-up and played by Lily James) is a teenager, her merchant father (Ben Chaplin) reveals that an old acquaintance, Lord Tremaine (Master of the Merchants’ Association), has passed away, and that he has chosen Tremaine's widow (Cate Blanchett), who has two daughters of her own, Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger), as his second wife. Ella welcomes her step family warmly, despite the stepsisters' less than pleasant attitudes and her needing to protect her rodent friends from her stepmother's cat, Lucifer.

Soon after, Ella's father goes also dies. This new loss results in Lady Tremaine revealing her true cold, cruel and jealous nature. One morning, after Ella, not wanting to sleep in the cold attic, sleeps by the fireplace, her soot covered face leads her stepsisters to name her Cinder-ella, by which moniker Lady Tremaine (and even Ella herself) calls her. Crushed by their cruelty, Ella goes for a ride in the woods, where she encounters a hunting party. She meets (Richard Madden), who claims to be an ‘apprentice’ named Kit. Unknown to her, he's actually the only son of the land's dying king (Derek Jacobi), and the two fall madly in love with each other.

Cinderella (2014-15) is a classy take on the fairy-tale, by Kenneth Branagh (1989's Henry V, 2011's Thor and 2014's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit). The finish is that of a theatrical production, very British, well-rehearsed, with few loose-ends (director Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1981 and was knighted in 2012). If there a few loose ends, they are because you can do only so much with a well-known children’s story. Screen-playwright Chris Weitz first attracted notice when he and his brother Paul made American Pie. He since went-on to direct The Golden Compass, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, About a Boy and, most recently, A Better Life. Cinderella avoids the usual tropes and trappings, even by-passing the vital ingredients of the original story, in an attempt to be different. And different it is. 

In Cinderella, Weitz was tasked with simultaneously modernising and keeping the heart of one of the most famous fairy tales of all time. “Well I think a lot of people nowadays would look at the character of Cinderella and wonder why she doesn’t fight back, why she doesn’t talk back. Why she doesn’t have her Stepmother arrested by Social Services.” Weitz justifies her attitude, using her devotion to her late mother as the peg. Her mother instills in her the twin virtues of kindness and courage, and she embraces them to a fault, never wavering even after her mother is dead and gone and she has become a young woman. Note: The ‘virtues’ are kindness and courage, not ‘wimp’iness and bravura. Incidentally, Weitz started the project with Mark Romanek as director, and ended with Kenneth Branagh.

Lily James (Broken, Fast Girls, Wrath of the Titans) is confident and fresh, while Scottish actor Richard Madden (Worried about the Boy, Chatroom, Robb Stark in HBO's Game of Thrones) is a perfect foil, albeit not as spell-bindingly handsome as one would, perhaps, expect. Cate Blanchett as Lady Tremaine can hardly go wrong, while Helena Bonham-Carter as the bumbling Fairy Godmother has a ball, thankfully keeping her indulgent accent in check. Stellan Skarsgård as The Grand Duke and Derek Jacobi as The King are good pieces of casting. Commendable support, mostly and aptly comic, comes from Hayley Atwell, Holliday Grainger, Sophie McShera, Nonso Anozie as Captain and Ben Chaplin. By and large, the dialogue is genuinely witty as well as comprehensible, which is one of the plus points of a British English film.

Cinderella comes as a banded offer with a Frozen short, titled Frozen Fever, that plays before the feature film. You’ll enjoy that too.

Rating: ***

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20DF6U1HcGQ

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From Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s (original) Cinderella, written in the late 18^th century and revised in the early 19^th.

‘Rook di goo, rook di goo!

No blood's in the shoe.

The shoe's not too tight,

This bride is right!’