Ella Enchanted

As soon as the intro begins voiced over by Eric Idol and backed by the disco hit Strange Magic you know that this film is going to have a silly sense of humor. You would not be mistaken. I have seen this film billed as a live action Shrek or a new The Princess Bride. While it is true that this film has the fairy tale quality and the whimsy of those films I am concerned that it relies on the current popular state of affairs and may not age as well as the other two films. Where Ella Enchanted pokes fun at fairy tails Shrek tore monstrous gaps in them. Where Ella Enchanted tells of a teenage love story The Princess Bride tells a love story of epic proportions. Ella Enchanted has all of the ingredients for a fantasy film; it just doesn’t play them with enough force.

This film stars Anne Hathaway as Ella of Frell a young woman who was blessed as a child by a godmother with particularly bad taste in gifts. Ella’s gift at birth was the gift of obedience, from ’stop crying’ to ‘call yourself stupid’; Ella has no choice but to obey any and all direct orders thrown her way. Though perhaps useful during infancy this particular gift caused her considerable trouble. This all comes to a head when her father remarries, for money, and Ella is suddenly saddled with an evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters. She is not made to sweep out the chimney like Cinderella, but that is only because the evil step-family has only just moved in, they haven’t thought of it yet. As Ella grows up she realizes that she has to break this curse so she embarks on a quest to find her ditzy fairy godmother and have the obedience spell lifted.

Into the story enters a pinup prince named Prince Charmont played by Hugh Dancy. He is a typical heartthrob who has appeared in teen magazines and has to appear at mall openings for malls complete with medieval escalators. Of course evil step sister number one is the president of his fan club. As a mob of girls pursue the dashing prince he runs into Ella, the one woman protesting the abuses of his uncle’s reign and the one woman who challenges the young prince to be more than he is.

In a casting coup Cary Elwes the hero of The Princess Bride here plays Prince Char’s evil uncle Prince Regent Edgar, an over the top villain with a talking pet snake. He oozes evil from every pore and rules the kingdom recklessly enslaving giant, making ogres outlaws, and forcing all elves to work in the entertainment industry. The film freely mentions the Grimm Brothers and blames them for many of the misconceptions about the different races that inhabit Ella’s enchanted world which the Prince Regent has strongly reinforced.

As with every quest the heroine meets up with a strange group of companions. On the way she picks up not only Prince Char, but an enchanted book named Benny played by Jimi Mistry, previously seen in the cute The Guru, and an elf named Slannen played by Aidan McArdle who refuses to dance and sing and yearns to be a lawyer. As the group travel they wander through the exotic lands ala The Wizard of Oz. First there is an elf town which they try to sneak through because all elves are forced to start chorus line numbers as soon as a visitor shows up. This enforced happy labor is one of the funniest gimmicks in the film as dancing singing elves are rounded up in a paddy wagon to be forced to perform for the princes.

In general this film is about different people working together, about love, about responsibility, and most of all about choosing your own destiny. In this last the film offers a different twist on the stroke of midnight plot. Perhaps that is the limitation of the film. It is about too many things and appears somewhat saccharine. If they had trimmed it down to one moral instead of three or four perhaps it would have gone down better. The film ends with a fun dance number that reminded me of the end of Grease and left all of the good guys living happily ever after.

Related posts:

1. Shrek 2