Enchanted (Widescreen Edition)
by Kevin Lima
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DVD details
Actor: Amy Adams, James Marsden, Patrick Dempsey, Rachel Covey, Timothy SpallDirector: Kevin Lima
Brand: BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-03-18
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Walt Disney Video
Product features:
- A fairy tale comes to life in this thoroughly original, new Disney Classic. Drawing inspiration from itsic heritage, Disney creates an inspired story unlike any you've experienced before. Filled with excitement, fun, and incredible music from the legendary Alan Menken, ENCHANTED is the ultimate fish-out-of-water adventure. For princess-to-be Giselle, life is a fairy tale -- until she's ba
DVD Reviews of Enchanted (Widescreen Edition)
DVD Review: From Someone Who Still Believes in The Big Happy Ending
Summary: 4 Stars
Once upon a time, there were spoilers.
I admit, I put off seeing this movie for the longest time. I really should have seen it when it first came out. It got rave reviews, and lots of people liked it, but then, lots of people like lots of things that I don't, and from the film's description, I was fairly certain that I wouldn't enjoy it at all, so I just didn't watch it.
In fact, I only watched this because it was recommended to me by my brother, who not only suggested it to me, but was good enough to loan me his copy of the DVD. So, I decided to look at this film, and judge it from my own perspective. I actually love the old fairy tales, and especially the quiet nobility with which many of their protagonists faced the world, and I very much expected this film to be nothing more than a full-on deconstruction of not just fairy tale tropes, but the precious nobility and ethics they represent as well. Still, a free movie is a free movie. Needless to say, I went into this film expecting to be disappointed.
The story starts with a meeting between Giselle; a beautiful peasant girl who dreams of marrying a prince (and has a large cabal of talking woodland friends, who help her do chores and make clothes for her,) and Edward; a powerful warrior prince, who ties up a thirty-foot troll in his first scene on screen, and seems to have a very honorable, if somewhat untamed and ferocious spirit. They meet and fall in love within seconds, because that's the kind of world they live in.
I admit that this first scene didn't impress me. I watched Sleeping Beauty less than a month ago, and I don't remember any of those animals talking, much less calling the princesses "honey," as the squirrel of Giselle's group does. On top of that, it seems like they sort of rush through this bit, because the whole, bare-bones setting, and the near-total lack of back story for any of these characters makes it seem like more of a parody of a fairy tale, as done by someone who didn't know anything about fairy tales. Still, I sat through the scene.
Apparently, Prince Edward's mother (a sort of mash-up of the Wicked Queen from Snow White, Maleficent, and Gozer from the Ghostbusters) only has control of the throne until he marries, because she does everything she can to get Giselle out of the way, short of... you know... actually thinking about it. Her first attempt against Giselle is to shove her into a magic portal to our world, and yet, later in the film, we learn that she has poison apples too, and shoving her through the portal just winds up making it harder to poison her, so I really don't see what the point was. I'm on the verge of calling this a plot hole, but as we find out later, the Queen isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Once she winds up in our world, Giselle goes through several uncomfortable scenes of acting very goofy and trusting in the middle of New York City, until she meets up with a lawyer named Robert. He's shown handling a potential divorce case in more than once scene, and this is the only case we see him handle. Furthermore, it's later stated that he actually requested the case. Still, I hesitate to call him a "divorce lawyer," because there's nothing in the film to suggest that he never takes other kinds of cases. All the same, this is a severe black mark on his record. Where I come from, divorce is a sin, not a living.
Fortunately, the poor schlub runs into Giselle, which is as fortunate for her, since she needs a place to stay for the night. He lets her stay at his place, and this is where the movie really starts to shine. Giselle's ability to encourage animals to do chores for her, and her tendency to break out into impromptu song and dance numbers, as well as her wholesome, if somewhat naive outlook on life, immediately turn Robert's world upside down. I really enjoyed watching these scenes; not just because Giselle was a charming onscreen presence, but because these are the kind of things I like to see in a movie. To use a well-known potterism, it's all about giving the muggles a scare.
Still, even when Robert is scared of Giselle, he seems to realize that she's a benevolent force, and he takes her around town for a while. There's a scene of Giselle reacting badly (as well she should) to the very concept of divorce, though she doesn't seem to understand how, exactly, to keep a relationship from breaking down. Fortunately, the couple figures it out on their own; that it's all about making sacrifices and toughing it out for the purpose of the good times they have together, though it's a rather subdued message, and not dwelled on enough.
By this time, Prince Edward and his pal Nathaniel; who's secretly in love with the wicked queen, show up in our world too, looking for Giselle, and there's a subplot about Nathaniel trying to poison Giselle with the apples I mentioned earlier, as well as a chipmunk named Pip, who tries to save her, but frankly, I have nothing to say about it. It's the usual bland, stupid cinema fare, in which the bad guy has an unaccountably easy time disguising himself as bystanders, and coming up with implausible excuses to give her apples, all while acting uncommonly like one of the Three Stooges. He's never threatening, and I don't find him funny either, so to me, these scenes are just meaningless filler.
While spending time with Robert, Giselle learns about a "date," in which people spend time together before getting married. She's very confused by the concept, because it seems like the idea of spending time with someone before marrying them is new to her. I was going to call nonsense on this, because they did have courtships in the middle ages, but then I remembered that Giselle is from a parody of the middle ages, so I'm keeping my mouth shut for now. Still, I think it would have made it a big challenge for Disney to paint Giselle as imperfect if she'd seemed to have the savvy for courtships, commitment and marital sacrifice. I'm not surprised that they refused to take up that challenge, but I am disappointed.
Eventually, Giselle and Edward are reunited, and they go on a date. Giselle wants to go to a costume ball with him too, and here's where the movie takes a brief nosedive in quality. It's been a while since Giselle has done any musical numbers, or interacted with any animals, and now we have a scene of her being taken shopping by Robert's daughter, who swipes his credit card and buys her a dress, which, in the real middle ages, would have gotten her mistaken for a prostitute. Honestly, I found that dress the least realistic thing about the whole movie, and yes; that includes all the magic and talking animals, because there is no way that a girl from the middle ages who is innocent in pure would ever dress in something that seems designed to show off as much of her upper back, shoulders, arms and bre... Oh, wait. My mistake. Again, Giselle is from a parody of the middle ages, so I can't really lodge this complaint properly, since I know nothing about the weird, mixed-up rules that her world runs on. It still felt out of place, though, and combined with the seeming loss of her "princess powers," left me with the depressing sense that Giselle was becoming the worst thing you can ever be. Normal.
I'm going off on a rant here, so if you want, you can skip this paragraph, because it's just about my personal view of this. Throughout the first half of the movie, Giselle seems like Pippi Longstocking to me; a strange character in a real world, who changes everyone's lives for the better because she's so different from them. As the film progresses, however, she gradually changes into a party pooper of sorts, who no longer sings, no longer hangs out with animals, and wears the single most butt-ugly dress at the entire costume ball. I don't know if they did that on purpose, but suddenly, I found that Giselle had been diminished into a mere muggle by her experiences, and that doesn't fly with me. I didn't want her to accept her lot and become normal. I wanted her to continue exalting everyone else. At this point in the film, I was starting to get very mad with it.
The evil queen shows up, poisons Giselle, and here, it's revealed that Robert is actually her true love. To his credit, Prince Edward accepts this graciously, though he hasn't been as impressive as Giselle for most of the film, unfortunately. He seems more than a little dim; failing to understand long words, and calling people "peasant" wherever he goes. Still, as I said, he accepts the disappointment of losing Giselle without skipping a beat, and he is chivalrous enough to clearly care about her well-being, and want what's best for her, instead of being selfish. I think that in the end, the person who really won out in this film was Nancy; the girl he winds up marrying in fairy tale land. Still, he could have been a more charming prince.
Wicked queen turns into a dragon; kidnaps Robert, and the princess rescues him with a sword and a chipmunk. Honestly, I was a little annoyed by this, because while by itself, it's harmless, there's been an uncomfortable trend of men being emasculated and needing to be saved by women in films recently. Still, as I said, if it weren't for that trend, this one exception wouldn't be a problem. It's almost like America is trying to apologize for Japan for some reason, and is becoming just as annoyingly predictable in the process.
Anyway, there's an ending sequence where we see Edward and Nancy getting married, and Robert and Giselle apparently wind up together in the real world, which is what I was afraid of, though we do get some scenes of her making clothes with the help of animals, implying that she can still sing and do her doctor dolittle thing when she wants to, which I guess is a relief.
Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this film, because it doesn't seem to want to take a stand on anything. It points out that both Giselle's world and our world are weak and imperfect, which is true, but it's a meaningless statement, because Giselle's world is just a straw man world created as a parody of fairy tales. Of course it's ridiculous. It's a parody. Parodies are made to be ridiculous. I just don't see the point. There are hints that the message is that love is more complicated than in fairy tales, hints that it's not, hints that love is, but dreams and wishes can still come true and we should be optimistic, etc, etc... However, all of these potential messages are muddled by the others. It's like a whole crowd of writers were trying to pen this movie at once, each with different ideas of what the moral at the end should be, and none of them really got their point across sufficiently.
At the end of the film, I find that the only thing that really made an impact on me was Giselle herself; at least the version of her from the first half of the film, who, as I said, came across as Pippi Longstocking, with a dash of Mary Poppins sprinkled in, but if that's all they wanted to accomplish with this movie, one wonders just why they didn't keep her like that for the whole film, instead of doing so many adjustment subplots. Yes, I get that it's character development, but I honestly thought that it only served to take away from the movie's total quality.
At the end, I have to give this film a B-. I didn't hate it the way I thought I would, but there was certainly room for improvement, and they still need to clear up just exactly what Robert does for a living, and encourage him to stop defending divorce. Other than that, it's not a bad film, though it has a lot of mixed messages, and it might be unwise to show it to your kids without watching it once yourself first. Or you could just avoid the problem altogether by renting Sleeping Beauty instead.
Description of Enchanted (Widescreen Edition)
Studio: Buena Vista Home Video Release Date: 12/26/2008 Run time: 107 minutes Rating: PgBestsellers in DVD
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