Maleficent

Art & Culture

Angelina Jolie, with strong support from her eyes and her digitally-razored cheekbones (by way of Cruella de Vil), manages the seemingly impossible feat of breathing new life into an all too familiar fairy story, by giving it what I might even call a feminist slant. Matriarchy rules!

We all know the story of the Sleeping Beauty, and how, at her birth, she was cursed by a wicked witch who hadn't been invited. The curse being that the child, at the age of 16, would prick her finger and sleep until a kiss of true love awoke her. The traditional version a) demonises women (or makes them passive spectators) and b) gives power to men. Even Joey Barton can see that, surely. So what this film does is to inquire into why the wicked witch was so pissed off, and even whether she was wicked or a witch in the first place.

Maleficent is not a name you normally give to a child with a sunny disposition since it means someone who does bad stuff, but if you say it right, it sounds like magnificent, and Angelina Jolie is nothing if not magnificent. We meet her character first as a fairy with wings who zooms around the happy kingdom in which she lives with carefree abandon. She meets a boy called Stefan, and they hold hands, though not much more. Fast forward a few decades, and he is now in line for the throne of the local kingdom which adjoins Happy Valley, while she is now even more Magnifique than before.

Stefan (now Sharlto Copley) is not such a good egg as he once appeared, and perpetrates an act of dastardly cowardice on his erstwhile sweetheart which renders her both less magnificent, and mightily cheesed off, leading to the curse, and its consequences. Though even those are not as you remember. The baby is spirited away by three gormless fairies, totally incapable of looking after her, so that Angelina has to take over with the help of her sidekick Diaval (Sam Riley) who gets morphed from bird to human at regular intervals, mostly unwillingly. And that of course leads her to become more and more attached to the child, now played by Elle Fanning.

That's enough plot to be going on with; the point of the film, and the reason for its success, is that it takes you into unexpected areas, with none of the all-too-familiar signposts. It's far from perfect, but the cast is mostly strong, there are some laughs, some drama and some impressive action sequences. And there's Jolie. Still under 40 after what seems decades in movies, she has the ultimate movie face; stunningly beautiful, expressive and impossible to take your eyes off. She's enough of a reason to go and see the film on her own.

7/10