I Don’t Know Why, But Snow White Is Totally About Lefty Infighting

I don’t actually know how to judge these live-action Disney remakes on any relative scale of quality. The bar is so low, and what people seem to want from them — a tickle of nostalgia, the familiar rendered new on a technicality, 109 minutes of child-friendly distraction — feels so different from the usual standards. So: Snow White is not as bad as it could be, while not being anywhere near good? It’s better than, say, 2019’s Aladdin, which was awful but nevertheless made a literal billion dollars. It’s garishly ugly and padded out with new tunes from Pasek and Paul that are as smooth and unremarkable as river rocks, all of which may or may not matter to its target audience, who could just be basing their decision about whether to see the movie on how unacceptably woke social media has informed them it is. But while the movie itself is devoid of delight, there is something delightful about getting to actually see the thing after the years of culture-war skirmishes that have preceded its release like a wrathful red carpet and discovering it’s about lefty infighting.

The shortcomings of Snow White — which was directed by The Amazing Spider-Man’s Marc Webb and written by The Girl on the Train’s Erin Cressida Wilson — aren’t on star Rachel Zegler, who, despite being set up as a fall gal by the studio, gives excellent princess face while communing with CGI animals and belting out the chorus of the remake’s newly added “I Wish” song, whose role in the film you will not miss, given that it’s called “Waiting on a Wish.” But the funny thing about her take on the storybook standard is that, in the context of the movie, the character is effectively a normie lib dithering about how to fight back against the fascist takeover of her kingdom by her stepmother, the Evil Queen, played by Gal Gadot in a glittery wimple and a performance so incredibly stilted it almost swings around to being good-bad. Snow White’s father is gone, his fate uncertain, and she dithers about the castle in a demoted role, fretting about how her people are suffering outside. Snow White is an institutionalist, which I suppose is a given for a princess, pining for the idealized era of Obama’s/her father’s leadership, when her family would make apple pies so the working folks could have a small taste of luxury, and unable to conceive of a way to fight the Queen, who may be pretty flashy but who also came into power via the standard methods (marriage and magic).

Snow White eschews violence and gets awfully sniffy about property for someone who’ll later let herself into the Seven Dwarfs’ home, scolding her future love interest, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), when she discovers him stealing food from the royal kitchen. In this revamped take, Jonathan is not a prince but a rebel leading a group of bandits who hide out, Merry Men style, in the forest. Thanks to these plot changes, Snow White doesn’t include one of the animated original’s most famous songs, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” instead opting for a new number where Jonathan taunts Snow White about her “princess problems.” It’s a tale as old as time — a sheltered Ivy League girl meets a rakish dirtbag leftist who lives with a bunch of roommates and who radicalizes her by negging her about her privilege. What’s left for a girl to do but attempt some coalition building among a ragtag crew that includes her septuple hosts, who I will not try to fit into this larger political allegory on account of their being abominations who can only be described as garden gnomes who’ve come to life while retaining their shellacked sheen. As Snow White pleads to her bickering would-be allies, all the Evil Queen wants is for them to fight among themselves while she sits on her throne room, eating caviar and, no doubt, getting fillers and Botox from her in-castle aesthetician off-screen.

When Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, it was history-making — the first U.S. feature animation and a hit that proved that audiences wouldn’t just turn up for full-length animated films but embrace them. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would cement fairy tales as an inextricable part of the Disney brand, in rides and merchandise and Broadway musicals, to the point where 88 years later, Disney is still in this game, albeit in an eating-its-own-tail fashion where the media giant is no longer just iterating on a well-known story but on its own previous take. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was born out of the landscape of early animation, owing as much to the era’s high jinks–centric shorts as to the Brothers Grimm. Snow White is, for better and (mostly) worse, a product of a corporation that has for years been lumbering after its idea of the Zeitgeist with all the agility of an aging colossus. (The recent deletion of a trans story line from a Pixar series is a reminder that the company is just as willing to make a clumsy heel turn out of the same impulse.) That, in chasing something vaguely progressive and YA-inspired with Snow White, Disney has turned out a film with some hilariously timely choices is a great joke, though I wouldn’t call it an intentional one. The most pragmatic aspect of Snow White is that with its plasticky set design and gift-shop-tacky costuming, it already looks like it takes place in a theme park — no adaptations necessary.