Cinderella gets brainy in 1998's Ever After. Well, sort of. It's an escapist fantasy presented as a subversion of escapist fantasy, so you really neither have your cake nor eat it but, ideally, you think you do. It's kind of sweet.
My favourite part is the stepmother and stepsisters. Angelica Huston gives a good performance as the stepmother and she's given a couple scenes where she's allowed to be sort of complicated. Interestingly, one of the stepsisters, played by Melanie Lynskey, becomes sympathetic to the Cinderella character, here called Danielle, played by Drew Barrymore. It was mostly interesting for me because I imagined how much Lynskey's character in Heavenly Creatures would've enjoyed this.
Danielle likes to read and has a fondness for Thomas More's Utopia, though not a great understanding of it. The movie apparently thinks "Utopia" means "paradise". I wonder how audiences would have felt if the film acknowledged that the book was really about a big gated community. It also introduces a chronological problem to the film since, ten years after receiving Utopia as a present from her father, Danielle meets Leonardo da Vinci who, in reality, died three years after Utopia was published. So much for realism.
Dougray Scott plays the prince, the love interest, and he comes off as arrogant but with a basic sense of justice. It's not really clear why Danielle likes him so much since she's supposedly against hierarchy but I guess all that's just a thin glaze of faux-realism. There's no real reason for this movie to have avoided talking mice and pumpkin coaches.
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