Review: Cinderella Is the Hip-to-Be-Square Take on the Fairy Tale You Never Wanted

Writer-director Kay Cannon’s Cinderella kicks off with the denizens of a fairy tale kingdom singing and dancing to Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.” Not only will this opening sequence likely leave audiences scratching their heads wondering what thematic relevance this ‘80s dance anthem about racial equality has to the narrative of the Cinderella story, it also announces the film’s obnoxiously cheeky postmodern sensibility. In short, Cannon’s movie musical resembles less a reimagining of the classic fairy tale than a fashionably woke dissertation about the antiquated nature of fairy tales in general.

The film hews closely to the Cinderella narrative, with the eponymous heroine (Camila Cabello) living under the thumb of her cruel stepmother, Vivian (Idina Menzel), and, after being transformed into a princess for a night, falling for Prince Robert (Nicholas Galitzine) at his kingdom’s ball. Only Cannon’s version never wants you to forget how hip it is.

Indeed, seemingly every scene in the film feels like an excuse for an overload of winking, sardonic wisecracks that poke fun at everything from retrograde women’s roles, to stuffy courtship practices, to the old-fashioned romanticism of the Cinderella story. Even though there are character interactions here whose cadence at times intriguingly recall a classic screwball comedy, too often the easy potshots taken by the characters feel like those that audiences might direct at the screen during a midnight screening of a film.

This sense of humor, while certainly knowing, becomes a self-inflicting wound. There’s a moment in the film’s final act, in which Vivian and Queen Beatrice (Minnie Driver) speak of lives full of regrets and dashed dreams from living as women in a suffocatingly patriarchal society, that’s governed by an earnest empathy. But that’s also the kind of serious, heartfelt sentiment that the film previously goes out of its way to make fun of, as in the various quippy digs directed at Cinderella after she states that she wants to be a dressmaker.

If the film is in its comfort zone snarking up a storm, its musical numbers are uninspired, sometimes outright messy. For one, its indiscriminate song choices, from the White Stripes’s “Seven Nation Army” to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star,” suggest that this Cinderella was inspired as much by the fairy tale as it was by a Just Dance playlist. And save for the finale, almost every number is defined by its denial of cinematic spectacle. In one scene featuring Vivian and Cinderella’s stepsisters, Cannon blandly shoots the characters in close-up as they perform Madonna’s “Material Girl” as a dialogue exchange.

This is a film that announces its fairy tale bona bides via voiceover, yet it practically rejects the concept of fantasy whenever the characters speak like empirical citizens of 21st-century America, ironically commenting on the mythical world they live in. At one point, when Cinderella is transforming into a princess for the ball and remarking on the process, her Fairy Godmother (Billy Porter) mentions that she should let the magic moment happen and not ruin it with “reason.” This is a lesson that the film should’ve taken to heart, since this Cinderella doesn’t just display a subversive attitude toward fairy tales; it’s also contemptuous of them.

Cast: Camila Cabello, Nicholas Galitzine, Idina Menzel, Minnie Driver, Pierce Brosnan, James Corden, Tallulah Greive Director: Kay Cannon Screenwriter: Kay Cannon Distributor: Amazon Studios Running Time: 113 min Rating: PG Year: 2021

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