dvd of the week
Maleficent was sold to us as Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the villain, with Angelina Jolie vamping about and camping it up. It’s not: It’s a complete rewrite of the fairy tale. The story is structured by two neighboring kingdoms, one human and ruled by a nasty king, the other peaceful and communal and full of happy, magical creatures. One day, in the latter, a teen boy is caught trying to steal a jewel from the fairy kingdom, and a winged and horned teen girl saves him from the anger of some tree creatures. The girl is Maleficent, and the boy is Stefan. They fall into a teen love before Stefan grows up to become an ambitious, vicious lapdog to the king. When the king inexplicably decides to invade the fairy kingdom, Maleficent is now an adult and the protector of the realm. She and the tree warriors handily beat back the human army. The king says that anyone who defeats her will be made his successor, so Stefan rekindles his romance with Maleficent as a trick. Jolie only has a few snarky lines, and nothing really for even a low-rent drag queen to work with. I appreciate the feminist reconstruction of the story, making the central bond about mothering and sisterhood and not about a mythically perfect prince. But this was done much better in Brave and Frozen, and not at the expense of drama.
