Disney’s Maleficent – 2014

I clearly need to stop being such a pill about new movies. I’ve thrown myself so wholeheartedly into discovering, watching and enjoying classic movies that I’ve developed a snobbish streak about new movies and how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to.” I’ve decided that is not a healthy attitude. I also clearly need to start ignoring movie trailers. I didn’t think I’d like Frozen and I did like it and I was convinced I wouldn’t like Maleficent and I liked it. Angelina Jolie won me over and I’d never liked her in a movie before.

Though perhaps my expectations were just so low that the movie was bound to be better.

It made me think of the days when a studio would put together movies that were specifically vehicles for their greatest stars, like Bette Davis? Jezebel is so totally a movie designed as a tour de force for Bette Davis, who dominates the film and dwarfs the other characters, but that’s what she’s supposed to do. Maleficent is a bit like that. I don’t know if they deliberately set out to do that, but Angelina Jolie completely overshadows everyone else (who I scarcely recall) and it doesn’t seem to matter too much because we’re not watching the movie for anyone else, anyway.

Maleficent did a decent job, I thought, in showing what can be a very difficult feat to accomplish: how Maleficent “goes bad.” That was the problem Star Wars had in trying to show how Anakin could become Darth Vader; they never convinced me that he had sufficient cause to harden his heart so thoroughly and be so murderous. They avoid that pitfall in two ways in Maleficent: they give her sufficient cause to hate and they don’t actually make her evil (which could also be seen as a cheat).

The makers of the film and Angelina Jolie both said that when Stefan drugs her and cuts off her wings near the beginning of the film, it was meant to be a metaphor for rape and it is a very effective scene, especially when she wakes up afterwards and realizes what has happened. Maleficent has been betrayed and violated, essentially by all mankind. They’ve tried before to bring down the moor where all the fairies are, but Stefan, she thought, was her friend and loved her and now he has brutally robbed her of a part of herself.

But she doesn’t become completely hard core evil. She’s not running around committing random acts of unkindness just because she can, like Maleficent does in the animated Disney Sleeping Beauty in 1959. That Maleficent is pure, unadulterated evil. It’s marvelous. But for Jolie’s Maleficent, there is purpose and direction to her evil. She is seeking revenge, without thought of who it will hurt and she has walled herself and the fairies’ moor off from the kingdom of men. She makes herself ruler over the other fairies, but she is not willfully hurting them. And the reason, you could argue, that she has walled herself off and made herself ruler is out of a reflexive reaction for having failed the fairies earlier when she lost her wings. Now, in her mind, the only way she can protect them is to make herself ruler and use her magic.

Where I felt the movie become most interesting is when the three good fairies (remarkably inept and childish fairies, slightly annoying) take Aurora off to the cottage in the woods to hide her for sixteen years. In this movie, Diavel, the raven, discovers Aurora right off the bat and Maleficent strolls by the cottage to see the baby. She sniffs and sneers and makes scary faces, but you can see she is curious and the baby smiles and coos back at her. And then Maleficent sticks around.

Maleficent with unafraid toddler Aurora, played by Jolie’s real-life daughter, Vivienne

It absolutely cracked me up how she is always just hanging about as if she has nothing better to do, and she quickly loses focus on her hatred for King Stefan. He has sequestered himself away in his castle, cutting himself off from people and obsessing about how Maleficent wants to kill him and how he will stop her; slowly losing his mind, really. But not Maleficent. She gets distracted by his baby.

The three fairies know nothing about raising babies – they even offer the wailing child radishes – and so in order to keep the baby alive so that her curse can come through, Maleficent has to kind of vicariously raise the child, with the aid of Diavel. She’s always about, causing trouble among the fairies, sneering at the growing child, calling it beastie, watching the child, protecting the child. And the child knows it. She knows that there is someone who is there, watching out for her and calls her, much to Maleficent’s surprise, possible embarrassment and mild chagrin, her fairy godmother. It’s embarrassing to have your persona so easily seen through by a child.

Ostensibly, the reason Maleficent is protecting her is so her curse can come through all right, because after all, if you are going to curse somebody, professional pride dictates that it must come off; but as my cousin pointed out, she also has an instinct to protect. She was the protector of the moor and that instinct rises up again, whether she knows it or not. It’s kind of funny and very realistic how after sixteen years of looking out for her and then meeting her officially and spending time with her, she drifts into caring deeply for Aurora. But she cannot revoke her curse.

It really isn’t a very chatty movie and Jolie’s Maleficent doesn’t monologue. We get all of her character transformations – good to bad, bad to good – by seeing her face and actions. And she doesn’t engage in any histrionics; it’sfairly restrained, actually.

One thing that has fascinated me – and I don’t cite this as a criticism – is how in attempting to subvert and update fairytale and story traditions, Hollywood has essentially created a whole new set of tropes, clichés and traditions. For example, true love’s kiss. It started with Enchanted, when true love’s kiss was not the man that she had supposedly fallen in love with at first sight, but it was still a man she loved. Then Frozen came along and true love was not a kiss, but an act or action, and this time true love came through the sister, and you can probably guess where true love’s kiss comes from in Maleficent.

It’s not nearly as dark a movie as I was expecting and Maleficent’s realm is far brighter than it was in the cartoon from 1959, perhaps symbolic that her soul is not as dark as the other Maleficent’s. It’s actually a fun movie – though the beginning and end drag a bit (it’s the middle I like) – and I enjoyed watching Maleficent’s journey into hate and then back into love again.