Cinderella, a film directed by Kenneth Branagh and reviewed by Carol O’Connor

Carol O’Connor went to see the new movie ‘Cinderella’, directed by Kenneth Branagh. She enjoyed the film, but left the cinema asking the question, “So, what do I find missing that should matter in this film?”

 

TELLING A STORY ANEW

In Kenneth Branagh’s  ‘Cinderella’, as in many fairy tales, the heroine is unwittingly caught up in a world which dictates a destiny. The viewer has lived the story many times, but she only once.  Cinderella must struggle against mighty odds to be true to herself.  She is driven near despair, until a moment of magic happens. Something in the universe cracks open, and justice comes to the unjust. Perfect happiness and fulfilment is on the horizon for the heroine.

The story unfolds by virtue of Cinderella’s nature.  Also, in this version, by her actions. For Branagh’s Cinderella is shown to be a highly relatable 2015 Western modern young woman, contextualised in the extravagant Hollywood arena of fairy tale.  She is intrinsically good. Not a feminist, not complex, though she battles feelings of despair, indecision, and anger.  Nevertheless, she is no victim of her abusive treatment.  She has choices.   Cinderella first meets the ‘apprentice’ Prince not at the ball but earlier when, despairing because of her stepmother’s treatment, she decides to ride her horse fast into the forest. It’s there they fall in love.  And later, by virtue of Cinderella’s giving a begging old woman a cup of milk, the crone is transformed into her fairy godmother.

The settings are sumptuous, akin to a lavish English drama; good taste is assured in depictions of English castles and manor houses. Extravagance and abundance in life are permissible in the film’s terms, so long as they retain a natural purity. The artifice of the sisters contrasts with the artless simplicity of Cinderella; their twin style dresses, like lolly wrappers, portray them as gauche clowns compared with Cinderella’s modest taste. Even in rags and cinder-smudged face, she has unpretentious beauty. 

The film works because it plays on our inner yearning for completion, for beauty, for connectedness, for love.  It places this yearning in a context we all operate in - the world of material things.   

The stepmother yearns for more money, a title for herself and social privilege for her children. She enjoys gambling with her friends. But the film accentuates the viewer’s yearning to have more goodness, more courage, more kindness, despite all the odds. We loathe the stepmother, for she possesses that which we loathe in ourselves: greed, jealousy, insecurity, hardness of heart.  We are sanctioned to loathe her because of her actions.  And those things that she craves, which we crave too, we can push away as irrelevant to the possession of goodness itself.  We sublimate these baser cravings in favour of moral virtue. 

The film shows that if we act from goodness, so then we gain the material benefits, social privileges and romantic attachments that we desire but deny. By subverting the craving for material wealth and the world’s prestige and tarnishing it as evil, the film ultimately condones it as our final reward.  If we hold out long enough, we are eventually given those things we wanted, but forfeited. And in this process, moral virtue itself becomes betokened as a commodity, ultimately measurable and quantifiable in worldly terms.

Subversion works in other ways in the film as well. It plays on our expectations. Though it echoes the opening of the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, the usual structure of is upended, and in so doing we live through the story in a new psychological way.  The film opens with its own narrative sequence of Cinderella’s idyllic childhood - life before her stepmother.  It seemed a period impervious to change, a paradise invulnerable to suffering and loss, until the mother dies.  Death and impermanence are real enough here.

We are shown the paradise we long for, only to have it snatched away.  This emotional trick tantalises our longing for the happy ending. Paradise is regained, of course, by the end of the film. This way, we are given the same old stuff, but with a kind of catharsis, a clearing out of the desire, only to have it re-packaged and served back to us in new wrapping paper by the end of the film.  The status quo is once more endorsed.  We are back to where we began.  But unlike T. S. Eliot’s return to where we started and ‘know the place for the first time’, here we really see it just as an extension of what it was. We are given more - but of exactly the same.

LEFT WANTING SOMETHING MORE

It is ironic that a depiction of life that offers ‘everything’ can leave the viewer only pining for more: we leave the cinema seeing only the less in our own lives.

Is this ultimately sad experience to do with fairy tales themselves? My understanding is that the original fairy tales never purported to depict the whole of life.  They are one dimensional, moral teaching tales, often with gruesome elements. We have distorted their meaning by adapting them to a 112 minute film depicting a vision of how the world works.   

Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Cinderella’ is skilful and original. There is a self-reflecting irony in the guise of the clumsy, pretentious artist who is painting the Prince’s portrait. As the artist struggles to hold the Prince still for a moment for his portrait session, so too does Branagh seem to be confessing his striving to re-tell the story. Cinderella herself declares that she loathes portraits of herself. Fresh representation of both characters is indeed a slippery business for the director.  The dialogue and imagery are witty and often humourous.  Before Cinderella enters the palace, we feel gratitude to the lizard who reassures her that just as she is only a girl not a Princess, he too is only a lizard not really a footman.  And later, Cinderella’s placing of the second glass slipper in the ashes of the household fire is a powerful metaphor for her experienced state of being. 

The film has depth. There are two deathbed scenes. Both demonstrate parental authority as ultimate arbiter of life.  The mother’s dying words are an entreaty to Cinderella to ‘believe’ and hold on to kindness and courage.  In the second deathbed scene the Prince is sanctioned by the dying King to marry for love, and not just for the good of the kingdom, his previously stated expectation. We are never given the reason for his change of heart, nor expected to ask because his words attune themselves so closely to our sentiments.  As the camera lifts upward showing the prince curled up beside his dead father on his large bed, it is a reconciling moment of pathos - Branagh’s hand is at work behind this shot.  As with the deathbed scene of Cinderella’s mother, it purports to give the film gravitas and the character moral substance. The film gains a kind of pseudo-religious elevation.  We learn that meaning in life ultimately derives from parental approval. Individuation only happens after their death, and even then it is in the taking on of their mantle.

For a moment, in both death bed scenes, we suspend judgement.  We do so easily, even though we know all the courage and kindness in the world guarantees no-one a destiny of immeasurable material and romantic fulfilment.  We know that one person’s love cannot completely fulfil another’s life. Or that Princes and Cinderellas live happily ever after. Life itself belies this.

In ‘Cinderella’ we are given a moral compass for the living of a good life. Cinderella’s final words of forgiveness to the stepmother are not said flippantly. Purity of heart is also shown to have a special affinity with nature.  And quite rightly, as in a children’s film, we don’t want to inflict on children a world gratuitously violent and cruel. At least not ‘our’ children; we can still live with the moral ambiguity of refugee children being detained in camps by our Government and who encounter a different reality . 

It’s not as if there aren’t metaphorical godmothers in our own lives, or charming ‘Princes’ who sweep us off our feet, or even glass slippers that are unique to the shape of only our foot.  It’s not as if courage, kindness and hope are qualities to be taken lightly, or that good actions don’t enlarge the hearts of all who come within its surrounds. Dorothy Day, early 20^th century social activist and Catholic convert used to like to echo Dostoevsky’s words, ‘The world will be saved by beauty.’ Aesthetic beauty more than enriches the world, and this film is full of it. 

CREATOR AND SUSTAINER OF EXISTENCE

So, what do I find missing that would overly matter in this film?

Some essential truth is completely absent.  Sumptuous, seductive, complete as this world is, at root it’s not enough.  For all things, taken only on their own terms, leave us eventually very hungry.

There must be a gesture toward the Other. Without this we rob our children of something very important to their development and growth. And our own embodied humanity.

In the film the fairy godmother becomes a representation of ancient mother magic. She is sparkly, passionate, a co-worker with Cinderella in the fulfilment of her destiny to go to the ball.  She is like a trickster God who is much needed but appears unexpectedly, performs providential magic with stated conditions, then disappears.  Her existence is neither overly questioned nor thanked. 

But imagine, if this spirit who can crack the universe open, tear apart the fabric of reality, were understood to be the breath of life itself? And what if this God wasn’t an unpredictable trickster, but shown to be the creator and sustainer of existence? What if this breaking open of the world to reveal fresh paths, doesn’t just happen once but over and over again - a God who takes a deeply personal interest in each and every person?  Who wills the best for us? As Rowan Williams has put it, a God who is ‘the “current” of divine activity that is here and now making us real.’  Not the benefactor of wealthy illusions or the commodifier of virtues, but a grace made known in relationship with one another every day.  By the food on our table.  By the air we breathe, the health of our bodies. And by our ability to give praise and thanks for it all.

The orientation of a life toward God does not mean a turning away from, but a seeing through the illusion.  The world grows rather than diminishes.  Without this sense of an invisible reality informing existence, life is like seeing the picture of a person but never encountering a living being.  Again to quote Rowan Williams, ‘this white heat at the centre’ is unconditional love which seeks to liberate thought, work with our endeavours, inspire imagination. This is a God who fulfils yearning and sets us free, in a way that a world that begins and ends only in itself never can. 

To live in the world without this sense of something behind it all is to go on seeking for more and more of the same.  The cycle of greed, need, abuse  - the stepmother syndrome - inevitably kicks in. To recognise the presence of a loving generous God who wills the best for each of us, is not to deny or lessen the reality of evil or suffering in the world.  It’s to recognise that the stepmother lurks within us all. We need to reconcile her presence inside ourselves in order to let her power over us go. It is to recognise that God sits beside each suffering person, in compassionate listening as well as social action. This means owning the world in its wholeness, and brokenness. And to seek how to faithfully mature our children through it. 

Children will intuitively and innately understand the lifting of this veil of illusion.  Not to at least gesture to this reality is to rob ourselves and them of something profoundly Real. And this can be done in film.  (You can sense it as a backdrop in films by Studio Ghibli, like ‘Totoro’ and ‘Spirited Away’. In these films inner transformation takes place as much for the characters, as it does for the viewer.)

Why do we want to short-change our children about the nature of life itself? Why choose to mould their hearts when, upon reflection, the fabrication is so obvious? Is it because we want them to yearn for something in life that we were taught to yearn for, and were short-changed by, but still believe in for their sake anyway? It was really nice to have the dream while it lasted, even if it’s not real. Like Santa and the Easter Bunny.

Is this a conscious mirroring of the preoccupations of Western society today on Branagh’s part?  I don’t think so.  It would be a stark motive for directing a children’s film; too overt an indictment on we, the parents and grandparents, who are predominantly the people who take our children to see this film. And my 12-year-old daughter loved the film.

But coming out of the film we ask what are the terms upon which we choose to set our lives? We can still have all that Branagh offers his viewers, young and old, in ‘Cinderella’.  But that doesn’t mean more of the same. In recognition of the Other we find that we, particularly most viewers of this film, have a plenitude already.  It’s more we need, in terms of spiritual growth and understanding.