Movie Review: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Someday My Axe-Wielding Drunkard Will Come

A beautiful daughter is born to a king and queen. The queen falls ill and dies, leaving her family in mourning until, many years later, the king rescues in battle the fairest of them all--golden-haired Ravenna (Charlize Theron)--falls in love with her then crowns her the new queen. But she is a wicked one, beholden with magical powers and an omniscient mirror, kills her husband, and enslaves her stepdaughter (Kristen Stewart). If the story sounds familiar, it should.

It's the Snow White fairy tale of course, a story that--as fairy tales are particularly apt to be--has been reimagined and rehashed many times over. Here, as the title Snow White and the Huntsman suggests, it focuses on those two characters. The Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) is hired by the queen to find Snow White after she escapes the castle dungeon. The drunk Huntsman, who has yet to recover from the death of his wife, accepts the offer and sets out with Ravenna's brother and right-hand man, Finn, along with a small crew into the Dark Forest to find her.

But he doesn't kill her. And when the two eventually join forces, the story is as much his redemption as it will be Snow White's revenge. Hemsworth is quite good here and coupled with his Thor from the Marvel movies is turning into a reliable action/fantasy hero. But while he works with Stewart fine, I wish there would have been a more palpable sexual chemistry between the two, of which there was none.

Stewart has had the somewhat unfortunate burden of being, at least in some circles, famous only for her appearance in the Twilight movies (talk about lack of sexual chemistry!). I mean, we shouldn't feel too sorry for her, given I'm sure she's earned an exorbitant amount of money for it. But it's a shame she's more known for her Bella, as boringly passive a heroine in a major pop culture phenomenon as one can remember, when in other roles she has shown the pluck and resolve that befits her Snow White in this movie. In the Huntsman's opening narration, she is described as being known as much for "her defiance as much as her beauty." And Stewart has always had that mischievous rabble-rouser quality to her. ("You got spunk," as Lou Grant once said.) In that way, she works better as the insurgent tomboy than in a later scene during her inspirational monologue assembling an army, where she seems too slight, unlike the more commanding and physically imposing Theron.

Theron herself has always had something sinister lurking beneath her jaw-dropping beauty--a wry smirk always hides behind her pretty smiles--a quality that's often been either overlooked or underused during the course of her career (though it was an integral part to her role in last year's Young Adult). Here, of course, it's front and center and Theron plays Ravenna with juicy relish. She hams it up just enough, but never pushes things over the edge into full-blown camp.

And that's important, given that the rest of the film plays everything straight. The movie, while adding some new twists to the story that most of us know (by which of course I mean the 1937 Disney version), doesn't try to reinvent the fairy tale or, more thankfully, turn it into some sort of meta-commentary about the genre itself. It's simply a straightforward fantasy. In spite of that--maybe, actually because of it--Snow White and the Huntsman is able to explore some of its themes (such as beauty and power, and the sacrifices that come with having either one of those in possession) primarily as subtext, rather than having to be ostensibly about those things.

For a $170-million-budgeted summer fantasy, the film feels particularly frill-less. Even on a technical level, the CGI and special effects are here to serve the story, not overwhelm it. Gone are the unnecessarily overlong and visually loud action sequences we've become all too familiar with. The action itself is just incidental to the story. Because of that the movie has a visual cohesiveness the lack of which other movies try often to hide with bells and whistles and whiz-bang editing.

When the CGI does take center stage, it does so not in battle, but in rendering the beautiful, Eden-like Sanctuary, where Snow White and the Huntsman find--along with a "small" group of friends--a brief respite from fleeing Finn and his search party. The beautiful change in nature that emerges is brought about by Snow White's presence, proving her "chosen one" or fairest-of-all status. So the visual effects are as character-driven as they are plot-driven, a bit of a rare thing in spectacle-happy Hollywood.

The film moves at a fairly brisk clip for one that runs just a bit over two hours. Even with that slightly long running time, the finale seems oddly truncated, and I wish they could've exploited a potential love triangle between Snow White, the Huntsman, and William--her childhood friend and Robin Hood-like troublemaker. Alas, those are minor quibbles for a film that I happily enjoyed--both during and (so far) ever after.