Cinema review: Mirror Mirror

Snow white and the seven dwarves, slightly remixed.

Being a spy in Hollywood must be so much fun. Finally we got to the first unconventional remix of Snow White that Hollywood gave us in the space of two months.

This is supposed to be the fun whimsical version so we got a lot of terrible gags and puns while the look is reminiscent of “The wizard of Oz”.

It’s fairly innocuous and entertaining stuff, nothing really bad. The problem is that every now and then we catch glimpses of the movie that could have been, and that one is so much better.

Case in point. The stated intention of the filmmakers was to somewhat convey the point of view of the evil queen, the director, Tarsem, even went on to say that she is not really evil, just insecure. This is all wonderful in theory but when she starts acting and moving like your usual movie villain it looks like somebody lost the memo or, puns aside, it looks like Hollywood can’t really put on screen a sympathetic antagonist.

This is really a shame because every now and then we see glimpses of this. There are some interesting monologues and, particularly at the beginning, we start to relate to her point of view, but then random villainess starts and we are back to Cruella De Vil.

On the other hand Julia Roberts is a splendid casting choice as the evil queen. She clearly has a lot of fun with the role and manages to connect it to that archetypical stepmother figure that is present in everybody’s life.

Speaking of the director Tarsem is a director with an extremely peculiar style. His other outings (The Cell, The Fall and Immortals) are all been panned by the critics for his visual histrionics. I can partially agree that its stuff while very pretty and extremely original is also too often disjointed and meandering here he sadly went into the opposite direction.

Every now and then we catch traces of the Tarsem of old, some incredible decoration, an absurd background, but on average he really reined himself too much. This is not a Tarsem movie anymore, this is standard genre fare with some touch of madness.

Special mention to the Mirror scenes. At least for one of the pivotal moments of any Snow White adaptations Tarsem gave himself free rein and created something stylistically unique.

Conclusion: A fun caper, in my opinion the best Snow White movie of that year or at least the more entertaining.