Fantasy vs. Reality

The reality is, fantasy is a sure thing in the movie business

By D.K. Holm

Families have taken over the movie-going audiences, and family values have taken over the movies. The past few big openings have been given over wholly to family fare. Enchanted made almost $18 million on November 21, followed by the otherwise little acknowledged This Christmas, which added $8 million to its take. The previous weekend, the Thanksgiving holiday, Enchanted made almost $50 million, while This Christmas (again second) opened with $27 million. And before that, Beowulf (an animated movie, though rather adult) and Bee Movie battled for and exchanged first places and millions of dollars. ‘Tis the season.
 
Back in the old, old, old days of, say, the 1950s, a mature drama such as Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder would attract just as many viewers as would Have Rocket, Will Travel, the Three Stooges movie released the same year—in fact, they would attract the same audience members. In even earlier times, audiences (once called “general”) would flock to both the surprisingly cynical Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Wizard of Oz. But no more. There are now too many media, too many distractions for there to be a “general audience,” and so in order to attract mass attendance, movies are descending to the common denominators: horror, vulgarity, and family fare. We can expect more of the same for the rest of the season.
 
Few of the season’s kids’ movies will likely be as successful as Enchanted, however. In this film, a fairy tale princess, Giselle (Amy Adams of Junebug) is banished to modern New York City by the evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon). She emerges in the middle of Times Square, where, ironically, the eventual musical version of this movie will probably make its debut. Giselle is pursued by the new love of her life, Prince Edward (James Marsden), who proves to be less baffled by the new environment and who is assisted by the chipmunk Pip, and in turn is chased by the Queen’s henchman Nathaniel (Timothy Spall, Wormtail in the Harry Potter movies). In Manhattan, Giselle runs into a single dad and divorce lawyer named Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey, looking like a cross between Sean Penn and Tatum O’Neal) who gives her some help and whose cynicism cannot withstand her musical blasts of love propaganda.
 
It’s Snow White meets Taxi Driver on the Great White Way. Direction is credited to Kevin Lima (a Disney house director) and the writing to Bill Kelley, who specializes in “fish out of water” tales, plus songs by Disney regulars Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz—but ultimately these names don’t matter beyond their artisanal indices, for this is a well-tooled machine designed to deliver reassuring storylines, happiness, tears, and smiles.
The key to the invariably successful formula of recent kids’ movies—at least those released by Disney (Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., Little Mermaid) and DreamWorks (the Shreks, Antz, Bee Movie)—is to mix the flexible world of cartoons and fairytales with wised-up reality. When Giselle summons animals to help clean up Robert’s real-world apartment, a Dracula’s worth of rats stream out of gutters and lice-ridden pigeons plant themselves on the couch. They do clean the place up nicely, though.
 
But one not-fully acknowledged tenet of the modern Disney movie is its self-reference. While the DreamWorks movies quote pop culture in general, the Disney movies draw upon their own heritage. There is now such a large body of Disney films that they serve as hundreds of iconic jokes in and of themselves. Thus it is no surprise that Enchanted draws upon Snow White and scores of other Disney films in loving mockery.
 
What’s curious is not that the film is so popular, given its crossing of genre lines from animated to live action, but that it is a hit while crossing the threshold of fantasy and reality. If you recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero was a notorious bomb back in 1993 because audiences supposedly couldn’t accept the action star mocking his own genre’s conventions or follow a plot that moved from on-screen to a harsh reality, like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (which also happened to be New York City). In retrospect, Last Action Hero is a deeper and more complex movie than it at first appeared to be; perhaps someday the same will be said for Enchanted.