It's Christmas time. The moment when the Disney machine starts to flood children's entertainment rooms. The latest: The Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms by Lesse Hallström and Joe Johnston. A reinterpretation of Hoffman's tale and Tchaikovsky's ballet carried by Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.
A worthy heir to Alice in Wonderland?
In 2010, Disney embarked on the business of readapting all its animated classics into live action. It begins with Alice in Wonderland entrusted to Tim Burton. Since the Disney classics live version abound in the cinema, often for the worse, sometimes for the better (The Jungle Book). In short, Lesse Hallström and Joe Johnston (Captain America – First Avenger) tackle Hoffman's tale in a visual atmosphere very close to Tim Burton's approach to Alice. The sets are sumptuous, delicious mix of special effects and good old traditional methods. Likewise with costumes and creatures, which embellish a visual universe provides. Above nothing to say Disney has gone to great lengths to create a magical and visually stunning universe. This application reached the pinnacle during Tchaikovsky's all-too-short ballet re-staged.
The viewer falls back into childhood in the spirit of Christmas, thinking he has landed in a worthy heir to The Wizard of Oz. The Nutcracker features many different realms and naïve characters of all distinct genres, such as Victor Fleming's classic, as well as imaginative creatures like this giant composed of mice. Then, we have this little Narnia side that also comes to play on the nostalgia of younger spectators, with this entry through a mouse hole into a snowy world. A little more and we expected to see James McAvoy land in Wildlife. The Nutcracker therefore offers an imposing visual world, but once the element of surprise is overcome, the viewer finds himself stuck in an endless trap.
But where has the direction of actors gone?
The Nutcracker finally tells a story of grief. Little Clara finds herself catapulted into this parallel world in which her mother would have been the queen. She will have to walk in his footsteps to save the four kingdoms. The Nutcracker tells the story of how this kid will have to overcome the sadness of her grief to continue to live, flourish and evolve. A classic allegory of her real world then takes place with the character of Keira Knightley. The latter is also totally freewheeling and overplays the Sugar Plum Fairy, sometimes with a lot of self-mockery, often with a lot of annoyance. She goes into sharp monologues and over-reactions sometimes hilarious, sometimes embarrassing. This game is like the rest of the movie.
The Nutcracker ends up being dripping. Endless, the film chains in a terribly ostentatious way the sets and characters without the spectator being able to absorb what has given him to see. Everything is moving too fast in a terribly artificial way. The situations follow one another without any real vision of editing or staging, underlined by the incessant lines of Private Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight): "We are safe here". You have just walked 10 meters away from the danger of brothel, when are you safe?But hey let's move on and say that this is a Disney for children. But it's not this childish side that is the only problem with the film. Besides Helen Mirren who is still wondering what she is doing here, the dialogues are terribly repetitive. Nothing awakens your mind that gradually falls asleep in front of childish and blocked conversations on the same information throughout the film with recurring themes: maternal inheritance, the threat of Mother Ginger, and… That's pretty much it. The great final confrontation will not take place in the end, and sounds more like a wet firecracker than a theatrical conclusion. The Nutcracker ends up going around in circles, and especially empty, as the big Disney machine knows how to do: a beautiful and tasteless film.
Once the element of surprise and this little aftertaste of the Wizard of Oz passed, The Nutcracker becomes a film of a leaden boredom that accumulates bad acting, repetitive situations and insipid dialogues. Too bad because the sets and images are sumptuous.
