From the Vault: Maleficent

In which I review a movie from my collection.

I can't help but wonder if I'm cheating with this week's From the Vault.  I actually do own the revisionist Disney remake in question.  I only saw it this weekend, however, because while visiting my parents for Easter, it just so happened to be their Netflix DVD for the week.  But since Ghostbusters hasn't arrived in the mail yet, I'll have to make due this week with being technically correct.

When Maleficent - the strongest and most beautiful of the moorland faeries - befriends the human Stefan, it appears to be the first step toward repairing the warring kingdoms' strained relations.  But when Stefan's ambitions cause him to cut off her wings in the dead of night and present them to the dying king, he makes a powerful and, above all, vengeful enemy.  And although she curses his only daughter to suffer an eternal, death-like sleep, she ends up loving the child instead: unable to reverse the doom that she placed upon her.

In the vein of Grendel and Wicked, Maleficent is a feminist retelling of a familiar story from the villain's point of view.  It's hard to say why, exactly, Maleficent is so highly regarded among Disney villains.  It's more than Sleeping Beauty's uniquely flat art style, more than than the character's timelessly wicked iconography.  It's even more than the fact that she transformed into a dragon in what is easily Disney's most perfectly realized animated climax.

If I had to put my finger on exactly what makes Maleficent so beloved among Disneyphiles, I would put forward that it has to do with her total commitment to the bit.  She's not just evil: she is all-consumingly evil.  She's not just petty: she's absolutely malicious.

Whereas a lesser villain would have simply killed Aurora where she lay in the cradle, Maleficent wanted her parents - and by extension, the kingdom - to suffer.  Her curse wasn't just the princess' eternal slumber, but the inevitable certainty of it.  She didn't just keep Phillip from saving his true love, but rubs his nose in his failure.  When you square off against Maleficent, you're not just fighting the witch, but "all the powers of Hell."

To remake the film and set her as its chief protagonist begs the question of how you make such an unrepentantly vile character sympathetic while still staying true to her villainous roots.  As it turns out, it's all just a matter of context.  While her reimagined back story as the warrior princess of the fae is a bit overly elaborate for my tastes, it does succeed at setting her up less as of an outright villain as it does an vengeful victim.

What I have always found most interesting about this film is that subtextual readings of Maleficent's mutilation seem to be strictly divided along gender lines.  Women generally seem to draw a parallel between her pinioning and forced mastectomies: focusing the social repercussions of removing a highly visible part of her anatomy.  Men, however, aware of Stefan drugging her and having his way with her body while she sleeps, tend to identify her story most closely with date rape.  This last interpretation actually frames the rest of the narrative as a rape revenge story in the Disneyfied vein of movies like I Spit on Your Grave (which is probably an article's worth of topic all by itself).

Moving beyond its uncomfortable subtext, the narrative plays out a lot like Frozen: both in its sly condemnation of "love at first sight" and its indifference toward the alleged importance of romantic love as a whole.  Despite having met only in passing, Sleeping Beauty rouses Aurora from her slumber with his true love's kiss, because they were simply meant to be together.  When repeated in Maleficent, it doesn't work, reminding us of the superficiality of their previous interactions.

It's Maleficent's love that wakes Aurora this time around: the very same woman who cursed her in the first place.  In the context of this particular narrative, however, she is the only person who makes any sense doing so.  With her mother dead, father insane and "aunts" hopelessly clueless, there's only Maleficent: the shadow that stood behind her her entire life, watching out for and looking after her despite her worst intentions.

Consider, however, the actual wording of the curse.  The film established when Maleficent attempted to unweave her spell that technical language woven into the enchantment was as important as the magic itself:

The princess shall indeed grow in grace and beauty, loved by all who meet her, but before the sun sets on her sixteenth birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a sleep like death: a sleep from which she shall never awaken [ except] by true love's kiss.

A condition of the spell she wove - doubtless intended only to be a poetic extension of the previous gifts of Beauty and Grace - was that she would be loved by all who meet her.  While this doubtless means that the prince's love was true, I would have to imagine that true love's kiss is a reciprocal affection.  Aurora was certainly enticed by the handsome young prince, but could hardly have loved him by then.  But Maleficent, under the glamour of her own spell, fell in love with the "beasty" and Aurora, though her naivete and fascination, fell in love with her.

Although its added back story is needlessly excessive, there's hardly anything that Maleficent can be faulted with.  The production design is excellent, the feminist core of the story is well-crafted and Angelina Jolie is so absurdly perfect in her role that it's a wonder they actually managed to cast her in it at all.  The resulting film is surprisingly nuanced for a Summer blockbuster and makes for an interesting companion piece to Enchanted, Frozen and Into the Woods.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  As long as you're not too defensive of the animated classic.

So what's your favorite version of the story of Sleeping Beauty (Disney or otherwise)?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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