Snow White (2025)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Rachel Zegler, Andrew Burnap, Gal Gadot
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw In the case of live-action Disney reboots, it isn’t a matter of whether they’re a hate crime, but how egregious a hate crime they are. We expect dead-eyed CGI renderings of what were once astonishingly evocative hand-drawn miracles. We expect the shameless tokenism that sees race as a costume white people take on and off at their diversity balls and the feckless, tossed-off malaise that mercenary money-grabs can never entirely shake. Despite all that, despite the built-in stench of failure that attends these spectacles like miasmas of bluebottle flies on gas-bloated corpses, the Mouse keeps pumping them out, beholden to an accounting ledger they bind like a script. The goal isn’t art or expression, nothing so lofty. The goal is a percentage–a shareholder-appeasing PowerPoint presentation delivered by a board of directors, not a single one of whom would otherwise be trusted to form a graceful turn of phrase or produce something that could flower into a product that is culturally significant in a nurturing way. They are stripminers, colonizers of your childhood, overburdening resources for personal gain. Their legacy will be how they took our memories and replaced them with further evidence that there is nothing good the dullest, emptiest people in the world won’t exploit for profit.

And make no mistake, Uncle Walt’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, from 1937, is, indeed, one of the good things. America’s first feature-length animated film, it changed everything–for both the worse (it arguably single-handedly ossified animation as a “kids'” medium in the United States) and the immeasurably better, inspiring the likes of 1941’s Princess Iron Fan, China’s first animated feature (a partial telling of the novel Journey to the West), and the legendary animators of the Soviet Union’s Soyuzmultfilm studio, who studied and innovated the Disney studio’s techniques to arrive at 1957’s The Snow Queen, which Hayao Miyazaki declared his favourite film and primary inspiration. Does that mean Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is not an 88-year-old artifact packed to the tip with regressive attitudes concerning disability and gender politics? Stop it. Fucking grow up. Which is not to say there aren’t manifold issues in deciding to adapt the Brothers Grimm, however Disneyfied, in the 21^st century, just that your modern lens isn’t quite as clear and sharp as you might want to believe.

In a January 2022 appearance on Marc Maron’s podcast, not long after this new Snow White was announced, actor Peter Dinklage said, “I was a little taken aback by [the fact] they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You’re progressive in one way, but you’re still making that fucking backward story of seven dwarves living in a cave. What the fuck are you doing, man?” Dinklage’s words reminded me of my thoughts on the controversy surrounding the Ancient One–the quintessential stereotype of the old Asian dude who teaches a white dude how to kung fu, created by white guys in the 1960s–in (I must disclaim, my friend) Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange. In the midst of that uproar, the most popular “fix” suggested by “allies” was to have Michelle Yeoh, a woman of Malaysian and Chinese descent, play this, wait for it, Tibetan monk. Let that marinate for a while. Can I tell you how grateful I am not only that in casting the great Tilda Swinton in the role, “Ancient One” was reconstituted as a title as opposed to a description, but also that obsequious manservant Wong, who spent most of the comics fetching laundry, was granted a new life in the MCU as Sorcerer Supreme? It is likely impossible to tell a story about “dwarfs” that is not going to be offensive in some way to a modern audience, is what I’m saying–and impossible to inoffensively replace them, too. This is the WOPR’s conundrum in WarGames: the only way to win the game is by refusing to play. But we’ve already talked about why they would make this movie.

Marc Webb’s Snow White is awful and unwanted, in other words. That much is to be expected. But unlike many of its facile contemporaries, it’s trying very, very hard to update its material to be inoffensive to everyone except white supremacists, who will be distracted by that video game with a girl ninja and a cameo from Yasuke soon enough. The outcome of all this toil? The Dear Evan Hansen version of Snow White, complete with breathy milquetoast love interest (Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), here a Robin Hood instead of a prince), a handful of instantly forgettable would-be off-Broadway anthems, and a real groaner of a revamp in which “the fairest of them all” refers not to the beauty of Snow White (Rachel Zegler) but rather her sense of, well, fairness. This raises the interesting question of how it is the evil stepmother (Gal Gadot) could ever have been the fairest of them all and, moreover, why she would care about being thought of as fair when she’s essentially a wealth-hoarding, genocidal hypocrite it’s fun to equate, trait for trait, with, oh…Zionism, let’s say. I mean, what’s effective about the original conception of the Queen is how great beauty is not a reliable barometer of kindness or evil. It’s Snow White’s sense of fairness, after all, that convinces her to overlook the Queen’s “witch” disguise and accept the poisoned apple from her when every instinct of self-preservation would suggest she not partake. Once Snow White in Webb’s film is poisoned, the mirror affirms the Queen is now the “fairest,” but that would imply her murder of Snow White is a just act, no? And why a mirror if beauty is no longer the prize? It seems the rejiggering of “fair” is a lot like the casting of Will Smith as a blue slave or Halle Bailey as a castaway on an island in the heart of the chattel slave trade. It is, in other words, a kind of ideological tokenism.

The original Grimm fairy tale from 1812 is explicitly and only about beauty and envy. Snow White’s mother pricks herself one winter day while sewing and beholds three drops of blood as they fall to the ground. She wishes for a daughter who is white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony wood. There is a racial component to the story, as the Grimms’ Queen “blackens” her face three times to disguise herself as a peasant woman: the first time to suffocate Snow White with a corset, the second to give her a poisoned comb, and the third to kill her with the apple. Is there a hint of Uncle Walt’s notorious antisemitism in how his Queen is depicted in the European tradition of witches, who were, after all, derived from hatred and suspicion of Jews during the Black Plague? It’s possible. Is there a sense of the Biblical Eve in this story of a young woman who experiences a sexual awakening after biting a fruit? It’s overwhelmingly an apple in the Western telling of the fable, at least, though geographically, it should be a fig. Disney’s version makes no mention of Snow White’s biological parents, incidentally. In Webb’s, her parents are alive for the opening number, in which Snow White’s sense of fairness is exhibited through her kindness towards a common girl. The mother perishes giving birth to her in Grimm.

At the end of Webb’s version, there’s a big showdown for the throne between Snow White and the Queen in which Gal Gadot espouses the glory of power over life and death when wielded on a population of civilians. Snow White triumphs because she recognizes the humanity in each individual member of the Queen’s court versus the homicidal madness of a fascist mob. Where Walt began his long tradition of bad guys plummeting to their deaths as the panacea for all ills with the Queen falling off a cliff, in Webb’s take, Quigg, one of Jonathan’s “Merry Men,” played by little person actor George Appleby, disarms her. See, the “dwarfs” may be nightmare CGI-mapped things, but Webb and co. have added a few authentic extras, including the deus ex machina of the whole shooting match, to distinguish fairy tale dwarfs from human beings with dwarfism. Tidy? No. But on the bright side, it is patronizing and super-embarrassing. Good news, little people community: Snow White treats you like children.

I guess I’m saying a live-action Snow White should never have been. I’m sure it will turn a slight profit, someday, while everyone dances on the grave its disappointing opening-weekend returns dug for it, so even though people won’t be expecting a live-action The Rescuers or The Fox and the Hound, they’re coming. See, it won’t please anybody, but it will eventually get enough eyeballs through the sheer force of nostalgia-harvesting to clear a certain percentage and thus justify its worth, in the same way there’s an acceptable volume of bug parts in canned soup. It’s a film worth dissecting for the depth of its misguidedness–for an example of a creature that is the product of many not-artistic people drawing a horse, guided only by a description from someone who remembers seeing one 30 years ago but it was actually a llama. It is a project steered not by an artistic vision but by the theft and reconstitution of dozens of dead artists’ visions. AI will make this exact process–this unholy, machine-pressed simulacra of a soul, this assassin bug’s camouflage of the shiny plates torn from its victims’ carapaces–faster and more ecologically disastrous.

I think about a sequence in David Cronenberg’s The Fly where the brilliant but socially awkward scientist discovers his teleportation device doesn’t “understand” what is unique and ineffable about the flesh. He solves the problem but only halfway, failing to teach the telepods to distinguish between what is human flesh and what is insect. In hindsight, it’s as eloquent a metaphor for the limitations of AI as I’ve encountered to this point, and it makes total sense that the people most excited about AI also have no understanding of the elegant and unteachable poetry of people. Especially creative people. Grimm’s version sees the Queen devour what she believes are Snow White’s lungs and liver (the Huntsman has slain a pig in place of the too-pretty-to-kill Snow White), unable to differentiate people from swine by taste. Webb’s, similarly, has her mistake an animal’s heart for a girl’s. Either way, it tracks in this film that also does not seem to know, or care to know, the difference between a work of Man and the work of an algorithm. Snow White is the octo-parrot from “The Simpsons” who squawks, “Ach, I shouldn’t be.” It shouldn’t be. Do as our ancestors did with things found to be unnatural and foul: kill it with fire.