A ‘Snow White’ As Bleak As It Is Grimm

The ads for Snow White and the Huntsman show a glum Kristen Stewart dressed for battle, obviously playing the huntsman. Hold the phone, she’s Snow White. Another storybook heroine turned warrior! Just like the princess in this year’s first Snow White picture, Mirror Mirror, who not only goes mano a mano with her patronizing, patriarchal prince, but tells him she’s sick of stories in which damsels take their distress lying down.

No, Snow White and the Huntsman is not your father’s Snow White, and more to the point not your Uncle Walt’s. It’s definitively anti-Disney, bleak and brutal, rife with starving peasants, the tone close to Game of Thrones, with a stepmother queen played by Charlize Theron who literally sucks the youth out of female prisoners in an attempt to keep wrinkles at bay.

This queen, Ravenna by name and raven-like by nature, seems strongly influenced by feminist commentary on the Brothers Grimm: She declaims that in a world where women are subjugated, she has power only as long as she has beauty — the irony being that the arbiter of beauty is her mirror-mirror-on-the-wall, who’s distinctly male. It’s no wonder Theron’s queen spends half the time carrying on like a diva and the other half slumped on the hard floor bemoaning her impotence.