It’s
Magic
By
Ann Morrow
Enchanted
Directed
by Kevin Lima
The
most delightful movie for the whole family this holiday season
doesn’t have a Santa, snow, lessons on giving, or even a traditional
family. It does have animation, live action, songs by Alan
Menken and Stephen Schwartz, and an effervescent sense of
humor. Enchanted, directed by Kevin Lima, is an ingenious
tweak on classic Disney films that opens in an animated fairyland
and morphs to a live-action cityscape. The portal is a wishing
well that ends in a Manhattan sewer, and the arrivals of characters
from the fairyland of Andalasia to Times Square are some of
the film’s most deft touches.
Giselle (Amy Adams) is a fair maiden with an entourage of
woodland creatures. While singing to her animal friends of
her hopes for a true love, she attracts the attention of valiant
Prince Edward (James Marsden), who rescues her from a troll
he hadn’t quite vanquished. And because this is fairyland,
they both magically know the lyrics to “True Love’s Kiss,”
and become engaged during a duet. But even in fairyland, the
course of true love ne’er runs smooth, and on her way to the
palace for the wedding, Giselle is pushed into the wishing
well by the alter ego of Narissa (Susan Sarandon), the evil
queen of Andalasia. The power-mad queen doesn’t want her stepson,
the prince, to marry, and so Giselle tumbles down the well
to “a place where there are no happily ever-afters.”
But of course, there are, because this is a Disney film. Yet
Giselle’s humorous (and hummable) trip to the altar isn’t
quite as expected, and director Lima (who helmed the marvelous
1999 animated Tarzan) sends her on some wonderfully amusing
adventures. Much to her astonishment, Giselle is transformed
into a flesh-and-blood damsel upon her arrival, and wanders
the mean streets in heart-tugging befuddlement (Adams has
all the charms required of a fairy-tale princess). She is
given refuge by Robert (Patrick Dempsey), a stuffy divorce
lawyer and single dad—though it’s Robert’s imagination-deprived
young daughter who spots Giselle trying to return to Andalasia
through a movie billboard. Meanwhile, Prince Edward bravely
follows his beloved down the hatch, and promptly does battle
with a bus. He is followed by Nathaniel (Timothy Spall), the
queen’s besotted henchman. Foiled in his attempt to poison
Giselle with one of the queen’s poison apples, Nathaniel goes
undercover in a restaurant—and accidentally becomes a crowd-pleasing
waiter.
While waiting for Edward to find her, Giselle discovers that
in the real world, going out on dates is what people do before
saying “I do.” And so she has a date, and likes it. Gentle
complications ensue, including the dismay of Robert’s romance-starved
girlfriend, Nancy (Idina Menzel), and the foibles of Pip,
an animated chipmunk squire that the youngest audience members
should find irresistible. Grown-ups will appreciate the film’s
zippy twist on modern relationships (and Sarandon’s dragon-lady
caricature), and just about everyone should fall under the
spell of Enchanted’s storybook costuming, perfect casting,
freshly silly pratfalls, and the art direction’s glorious
homage to New York City in springtime.
Land
of Violence
No
Country for Old Men
Directed
by Ethan and Joel Coen
A lone hunter, perched in a rocky shelter amid a barren Texas
plain, takes aim at some game, sets off in search of his take,
and stumbles upon a grisly yet highly lucrative find. Such
are the underpinnings of the plot that is Cormac McCarthy’s
No Country for Old Men, an intense, largely interior
and, one would think, difficult-to-adapt-to-screen tale, dealing
with big questions like redemption, fate and grace. While
I had never been a huge McCarthy fan, I found, around the
time I had my first child, that I could no longer adequately
focus on his intricate shadings and dense psychologies. More
to the point, perhaps, was that at that time of joy and wonder,
I chose to block out McCarthy’s despairing hopelessness. I
wondered, truly wondered, how such a story could make the
successful leap to big screen.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the brothers Coen have
succeeded beautifully, turning No Country for Old Men into
one of the absolute best movies of 2007.
From that austere yet impactful beginning, the movie follows
the trajectory of Vietnam vet and welder Llewelyn Moss (an
outstanding Josh Brolin) as he, literally, takes the money—$2.4
million to be exact—and runs. On his trail, besides some irate,
faceless Mexicans, is a one-man vigilante with a really bad
Prince Valiant haircut, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). As
the cat-and-mouse game builds, and the body count rises, it
becomes apparent that Chigurh is not “in it for the money,”
but rather, for some deeply personal reasons of moral righteousness,
making him far more dangerous than somebody like, say, bounty
hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), who prides himself
on his professional detachment and skill.
As Llewelyn hides out in a series of faded motels along the
Texas-Mexico border, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones)
contemplates the nature of evil as personified by Chigurh,
and expresses his inability to comprehend such wickedness:
“You put your soul at hazard to be part of it,” he tells his
deputy. The notion of his own mortality and his diminishing
skill set weigh on his mind. In essence, he’s done, and he
knows it; his role is more akin to a Greek chorus, reminding
us all the while that we live in a world vastly different
from anything we’ve ever known.
No
Country for Old Men is harrowing and bloody, and yet,
there are traces of acid humor dropped among the corpses.
At one point, a deputy observes that a crime scene is “some
mess,” whereupon Sheriff Bell responds that if it isn’t, it’ll
do until the real mess comes around. The Coens display an
uncanny knack for getting the vernacular and speech cadences
of the West Texas just right, and it adds immensely to the
movie’s sense of time and place. Interestingly, one of the
best performances comes from the Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald,
who imbues Llewellyn’s wife Carla Jean with a quiet yet fierce
dignity. Her confrontation with Chigurh, in which she refuses
to accept that life and death are whims of a coin toss, is
the film’s defining moral moment. Like a flower blooming incongruously
among the cracks of a broken sidewalk, Carla Jean is the one
reminder of a frail integrity that might yet linger in our
society, and it is the only thing approaching hopefulness
in an otherwise dark and despairing movie.
—Laura
Leon
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