1998’s Ever After: A Drew Barrymore Jawn has a complicated relationship with my brain and my heart. The year it came out, I was 12 years old with a dedicated subscription to Seventeen and its monthly updates on what all the cool public school kids were wearing while me and my Catholic school uniform looked on in envy. Seventeen ran ads and features for this weird Cinderella movie with the girl from Scream, and it looked like it would be Romeo + Juliet except the girl wouldn’t behave so irrationally this time, god.
I saw the movie and I loved it. It’s still a fun movie that never fails to cheer me up. Among my circle of friends, it doesn’t hold the same Classic Lady Movie clout as Clueless, Now and Then, or 10 Things I Hate About You, but that makes me cherish it all the more. Truth be told, I think my favorite part of the movie was how little it resembled its cheesy trailer, which carefully omitted from the movie that Drew Barrymore’s Danielle spends 5 seconds whispering “Just breathe” and two whole hours yelling at everyone, especially the Prince of France.
Those are the emotional ties that Ever After has knotted around my heart. My relationship to the movie becomes complicated as I’ve tried to defend this movie as a Genuinely Good Movie. You see, the movie isn’t perfect. Blame the unreliable older narrator who opens the movie, but the historical facts of her story don’t add up. The Brothers Grimm, to whom she’s passing on The True Cinderella Story were working in the 19th century and her “great-great grandmother” had lived these adventures almost 300 years beforehand; the historical prince married a Medici princess before dying at age 40 from injuries sustained during a joust; did Danielle’s father ever mention that Utopia was an extended ironic thinkpiece from Wolf Hall dickhead Thomas More?
Let’s not forget Ever After included in a supporting role Manic Pixie Gay Renaissance Artist Leonardo da Vinci, even though he was way too dead to help Danielle win her prince back. While some of these are absurd comic elements in the story, they also seem to undermine the important ways the movie adapted the Cinderella story for contemporary audiences.
In thinking about this piece, I kept coming back to this idea of historical accuracy and the idea that Danielle’s fictional story could lose some of its strength because these inaccuracies (in a fictional story) undermined the world where she lived and therefore her entire story. However, these errors take nothing from the story; if these mistakes were resolved, they would bring nothing to the story. Ever After derives its real strength from the cast of fully realized female characters, who redefined the Cinderella story with a new way fairy tales should be told. Since this October marks 15 years since Ever After’s release date into theaters, let’s look back at Ever After and how it can inform the way we think about the adaptations, reboots, and remakes that populate our current media.
***
Every repurposed fairy tale work since Ever After has been attempting to capture what it did so well. We should look at the current landscape created by Ever After’s spiritual inheritors, so to speak, because the past few years have seen a resurgence in the repurposed fairy tale. Disney-ABC’s Once Upon a Time vomited the entire Disney canon into a small town in Maine and demanded Jennifer Morrison untangle its meaning (godspeed). NBC’s Grimm… exists? In movies, we have Tangled, Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Jack the Giant Slayer, with more in the pipeline because those weren’t enough. Yet most of these (with Tangled as the exception) have been dismal contributions to their respective fairy tales, particularly the closest analogues to Ever After: 2012’s two Snow White features, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman.
Each Snow White movie had its strengths, like Mirror Mirror’s Bollywood-esque closing dance number and Charlize Theron’s terrifying turn as the queen/stepmother in Snow White and the Huntsman. (Spoiler: the secret to Charlize’s particular brand of majesty is MURDER.) Mirror Mirrorpromised a fun new twist on Snow White, while SWatH seemed a gritty interpretation that literally coated Kristen Stewart in mud and grime when the plot failed to reveal new depth to Snow White’s story. That isn’t to say that they weren’t entertaining, but the movies fell short of their own potential to tell fully realized stories within the fairy tale world borrowed for the occasion.
These latest adaptations of the Snow White story share an interesting feature in that the most compelling character of either movie is Snow White’s antagonist, the evil queen. Each movie gives its queen an origin story and her own history; each shows the choices she made to create the woman who sits on a usurped throne and rules by sheer force of personality. Their realized stories from selfish beginnings to unsustainable ends are well-planned, but they’re too large to fit alongside Snow White’s story. Their unsustainable ends (Mirror Mirror’s queen and her lavish parties/spa treatments, SWatH’s Ravenna and her one-peasant-girl-a-day habit for flawless skin) rush in with Snow White’s resurrection, reducing Snow White to a deus ex machina within the villain’s story as well as her own.
Each Snow White’s lackluster treatment becomes all the more apparent in comparison to the lavish attention paid to the villains in these movies. Snow White becomes a more difficult story to adapt because even in the popular Brothers Grimm version, Snow lacks action in her own story: she buys every damn murderous thing those traveling forest witches/evil saleswomen hock at the dwarfs’ door. She can’t even cough out the poisoned bit of apple she choked on until a necrophiliac prince’s searching tongue dislodges it from her mouth.
Mirror Mirror and SWatH’s Snow Whites have similar passive roles, though Kristen Stewart’s Snow does demand an army of dudes to make her their weapon. She defeats the evil queen by snarling at her, “I’m everything you’re not,” defining her strength by how much she hasn’t done. Actually, that might be enough since the movie establishes that Ravenna maintains her “fairest blood” status in the world with a steady diet of SUCKING YOUNG WOMEN DRY. (Nature, or God, or that crazy Miyazaki stag, or whatever does the magical law-keeping in their world, seems to think it’s a fair cop.) Strength here still isn’t defined by making the right choices, but by the luck of surviving a lifetime of victimization.
(Except it’s Snow White so she still has to survive, then die, and she has to wait for the right Hemsworth to resurrect her. Sorry, Liam. The lips of Thor are the lips of a healer, or something.)
These Snow Whites (like other Cinderellas) suffer from contemporary writers’ desires to portray their “true stories,” and so fail to understand that there’s no correct way of re-telling a fairy tale. Each tale changes constantly through new attitudes, mis/translations, miscommunications, and appropriation, with the woman’s story at the center of each as the only constant. Snow White escapes, finds some friends, and finds herself; Cinderella escapes her stepmother, wins over her prince, and ensures her freedom. It’s up to each artist to take those bare bones and create a new figure that can captivate audiences across centuries and countries. The settings and props can change, but keep the girl and make it her story—she’s the one we came to see.
***
If comparing Mirror Mirror and SWatH to a movie like Ever After that has withstood the test of time seems unfair: I absolutely agree. It’s disheartening, ridiculous, unbelievable, rage-inducing stupidity that has narrowed this field to a handful of movies with enough substance for comparison. It’s unbelievable that fairy tale heroines are so pervasive in our world, yet we’re hopeless to find movies where those characters are women with their own thoughts who make their own decisions and live their own lives. That’s it. That’s all that Ever After does differently. That’s the big secret that Drew Barrymore’s Cinderella has been hoarding all these years: she’s a person with a history and a family, and her own thoughts and desires. That’s it. That’s what so few movies, most of them built on premises and franchises rather than characters’ stories, can accomplish.
Instead of recapping the entire plot of Ever After and Danielle’s story (Cinderella has a name!), we can best gauge Danielle’s definition as a character by looking at her story’s culminating moment. Near the end of the movie, Danielle has been sold to Local Rich Creeper to pay her stepmother’s debts. When the prince learns that she’s been sold, he gathers several men on horseback to join him in freeing his ladylove! The prince rides up to Castle Creeper, but Danielle has already liberated herself by threatening to bisect Creeper with his own swords. Danielle gives the prince a baffled look as he announces that he came to rescue her.
“SO UNREALISTIC,” cried haters. “Women didn’t sword fight in Those Days, or even once in the history of sharpened sticks as weapons, so how could she be good enough to do that?”
Here’s how: Ever After isn’t the story of Danielle growing up. The movie skips from her father’s death to her life several years later. By the time the movie picks up again, Danielle is an adult who knows that her locust stepmother and stepsisters will be moving on when they find the next man to bankroll their expensive life, and she can bide her time until they leave and she can take back her home and live her life. Before that, Danielle had a weird upbringing—she even knows how to read. With her mother dead and her father traveling frequently, and the household servants all old as balls (and only getting older), who was going to protect Danielle while her father was away? Who was going to protect their house, their lands, their animals and crops? The household servants could do their best but, ultimately, it’s Danielle who would manage the property, and Danielle who would prosper or starve depending on its management. The least her father could teach her, as soon as she grew old enough, was how to use a sword.
When we meet her as an adult, Danielle’s stepsister mocks her by pointing out that she doesn’t even sleep in the house, but with the animals. Of course her stepmother will force her to sleep with the animals and of course Danielle will sleep with a knife tucked under her bag-of-oats pillow, because if she doesn’t, someone (like the prince of France) will stroll in at night, take whatever they like, and the household will have nothing to eat.
Danielle, officially a servant in her stepmother’s house, could be imprisoned for theft (like the servant, Maurice, she rescues early on) if she doesn’t take the basic precaution of sleeping in the barn like the metal bitch she is and slicing open the next anyone or anything who tries to steal one of their animals. (Or, as we see in the movie, braining the prince with whatever she has at hand when he steal-borrows one of their horses.) It’s not out of the question that in the 10+ years Danielle has been banished to the barn, she has had to beat the shit out of more than one nighttime thief to make sure her household can eat. This all comes to a head after Danielle defeats Local Rich Creeper and meets the prince with a baffled, “You came to rescue me?” We’ve been told to expect princes to rescue damsels, but why would Danielle expect that? How could she know that someone was coming to save her? No one has before.
Even more remarkable: Danielle’s story doesn’t come at the expense of other characters, or is itself compromised in favor of other characters. Ever After’s antagonist doesn’t overtake the narrative and draw attention from the central Cinderella story, but Anjelica Huston’s wicked stepmother (Rodmilla, for those keeping a tally on “women’s names used at least once in the course of a movie”) has just enough backstory to put the plot into motion. The movie shows that Danielle’s father died shortly after he marries Rodmilla, but his dying words and comfort are for Danielle, not for her. It explains how someone could harbor so much bitterness for her stepdaughter, and raise a similarly mercenary daughter (Marguerite!) who learns to rely on men for money and security but not affection.
It doesn’t excuse Rodmilla, but it explains her, and life with her stepmother shows Danielle another path available to her: she can work to maintain her family’s farm and run her household within its available means, or become her stepmother and stepsister who rely on favors from one rich man to the next for the luxurious life they can no longer afford.
Ever After remains an incredibly fun movie, but it’s a breath of fresh air after years of consuming media where so few female characters have the opportunity to exist for themselves and celebrate their own autonomy. Danielle’s portrayal and her past bears very little resemblance to any other Cinderella version, and its depth of detail makes it more satisfying than adaptations of other fairy tales full stop. That doesn’t make it more or less “correct” than any other version. It does make Ever After better than many other versions of many other fairy tales because it does what so few of them do: it uses a woman’s story to bring viewers closer to that still-beating heart of every fairy tale, the one everyone wants to find and devour to gain some of its power.
***
In revisiting Ever After and the movies that have followed in its suit, two things stand out in the comparisons drawn.
The first point remains particularly important during the current trend for green-lighting reboots and remakes. That point is: old stories do not and should not equal histories. Every historical fact has an expiration date. The next gospel found in a jar, the next excavated coffin-within-a-coffin, even the next development in our self-awareness while writing histories (“Hey, maybe we should refer to x as y because x degrades who/what we’re writing about?”)—things constantly change the existing “that’s how it happened” factual narrative completely on its head. There’s a difference between timeliness and timelessness; binding a work to one specific time and place ensures that that’s where it will stay. Histories, though, can become stories, and stories can last long after the who/when/where they were written. It’s not only the gritty “historical” remakes that are guilty of this, but any movie where the premise or setting is more important than the players. The importance of the players connects to the second point:
A character can make a role, but a role will never make a character. Mirror Mirror wasn’t as good as its visually unique world promised because that Snow White was herself playing a role that we, the audience, know as “Snow White.” This Snow White only had to survive until the end of the movie—because it’s a fairy tale, the spell would be broken, the evil queen would be vanquished, and balance would be restored to the kingdom. Snow White played her role, but she never became an individual distinguished from the other Snow Whites, with the result that Mirror Mirror’s take on the Snow White story won’t stand out among other portrayals of the same role. A character makes a role, and no two characters are ever wholly the same.
I could have made these points in a discussion of big budget action movies, TV adaptations like this fall’s Dracula (NBC) and Sleepy Hollow (FOX), comic book movie franchises, or a piece focusing on a series’ past/present remakes (Sherlock Holmes, anyone?) I chose to focus on fairy tale adaptations for one very specific reason and that’s the large number of central female characters in fairy tales. This part has been the most difficult for me to write because the conclusion on how to improve the quality of female characters’ portrayals is so basic, so easily said and screamed, that I can’t parse it into anything that sounds even remotely articulate. So here it is:
WRITE WOMEN AS PEOPLE!!
Don’t use a devotion to historical accuracy (whatever that means) as the excuse for writing women as less than full-fledged people. Don’t think that because women in the past lived lives different from their male contemporaries (where they had dowries, worked primarily as homemakers, provided a majority of childcare, couldn’t own/inherit property in their own names) that they had no hopes, dreams, desires, or ambitions of their own. Don’t think that because some accounts of history said women were forbidden from doing something that women didn’t do it anyway.
All stories are slices of life. Stories cover very short spans in increasingly longer lives and the even longer history of humanity and the even longer span of time across the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. Too frequently, the roles for women in movies, television, books, fan fiction, ANYTHING LITERALLY ANYTHING, have no life outside their brief roles in other people’s stories. Female characters shouldn’t disappear without a trace once they’ve fulfilled their role in a story; every female character is a person within her world with thoughts of her own and her own life to live outside the story where she appears. This isn’t a test. It’s not a rubric for grading every piece of media ever released. It’s a reminder that if a story featuring women falls flat, there’s a good chance those women weren’t written as people, but as cardboard cutouts with tacked-on breasts.
And why not view these shortcomings in our contemporary storytelling through the lens of fairy tales? They’re some of the first stories that children hear because they provide basic guidelines for growing up in this world: people who do good things are rewarded with the satisfaction of not having hurt someone for personal gain; people who do bad things will be forced to put on red-hot shoes and dance to their death in front of the entire kingdom. Tell stories that work from the basic premise that women are as intelligent as men and that women can also live the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences. Remember that female characters can dabble in moral ambiguity, amorality, and straight up evil, just like their male counterparts. Maybe that story will be respected as a genuine work of art that doesn’t degrade half the world’s population as arbitrarily less complex, less capable than the other half. It’s a decent place to start.
Further Viewing
Ever After (1998) (Amazon Instant Video | Netflix)
Tangled (2010) (Amazon Instant Video | Netflix)
The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella (1976) (DVD Only) (Gemma Craven as Cinderella and Richard Chamberlain as the prince. A (bizarrely beautiful) musical version that spends two and a half hours rubbing its satire everywhere. Check out the songs: What a Comforting Thing to Know, Position and Positioning, and (relevant to the discussion of fairy tale heroines with agency) Tell Him Anything (But Not That I Love Him))
Tags: anachronistic feminism, drew barrymore, ever after, fairy tales, historical inaccuracy, kristen stewart coated in mud and grime, michelle vider, romantic comedies
Too frequently, the roles for women in movies, television, books, fan fiction, ANYTHING LITERALLY ANYTHING, have no life outside their brief roles in other people’s stories.
OH MY GOD LET’S BE FRIENDS. This was fantastic.
Thank you! I’m greenlighting all friendship requests and my hair needs braiding so LET’S GET TO FRIENDSHIP.
15 years? 15. Years.
Also thank you for this, this is wonderful.
Right? I was going to be all astounded and upset and then remembered that no, I totally saw this for my birthday the summer after middle school, and that really was fifteen years ago.
15 years/60 lifetimes, same terrifying difference.
Michelle, can I buy you a beverage of your choice? Ever After stan until the day I die. Yeah–the fairy tale retellings of late have all left me wanting. So much promise in SWatH, squandered! And let’s be real, “historical accuracy” is such a nasty little non-reason to focus stories on who they’ve always been focused on, to exclude women’s stories and the stories of people of color in those historical time periods. Blargh.
(and this “did Danielle’s father ever mention that Utopia was an extended ironic thinkpiece from Wolf Hall dickhead Thomas More?” is K I L L I N G M E. also, the use of “The Mummer’s Dance” in the EA trailer is exquisite, y/y)
“also, the use of “The Mummer’s Dance” in the EA trailer is exquisite, y/y”
YES IT IS! I’m happy I’m not the only one who remembers that.
[has an undisclosed number of Loreena McKennitt albums on her iPod]
[yes I still have an iPod]
I switch out my Loreena McKennitt albums according to season. Obvs we’re in prime The Visit season right now.
~*~*~all sooooouls niiiiiiiiight~*~*~
“historical accuracy” is such a nasty little non-reason to focus stories on who they’ve always been focused on, to exclude women’s stories and the stories of people of color in those historical time periods.
Right, exactly! I mentioned on twitter that this same argument is being used right now in trying to disparage Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity- that she’s an MD, not a pilot or a “real” scientist- why is she even on a space mission? (Which they explain in the first 15min of the movie.) Why is her character on a space WALK when she’s so inexperienced (inexperienced, but completed her NASA training)? (Again, Clooney helpfully chirping in, “you’re the tech who designed this, I’m just your ride.”) Like, what’s the point of these kinds of discussions? “Sorry Dr. Stone agreed to do this thing. She’ll never interfere with [George Clooney]’s spacewalks ever again, promise.”
Not to mention that whatever form of historical accuracy they’re pushing is almost always, um, inaccurate. There really were POC in Medieval Europe. There really were women who were not just competent but accomplished swordswomen. So even aside from the basic objection of, “oh my god it’s a fairy tale where the hell does historical accuracy even come into this conversation,” the objections of people who insist on “accuracy” are also just flat-out wrong.
I might have watched the trailer over and over again for this very reason.
I fell in love with the trailer (I’M SORRY I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL) I still love the movie. Thank you–this was a great piece.
I love it too. NEVER APOLOGIZE.
MEEEE TOOOO. I remember downloading it to my computer using dialup, and the trailer was tiny and fuzzy and I watched it OVER AND OVER. I had the movie poster hanging on my wall!
Oh you are NOT ALONE- I have a playlist that’s just that Loreena McKennitt song and the Robert Miles song in the second half of the trailer (“Fable”). It’s a ridiculously great trailer. Thank you for reading!
Does this mean an article about Blue Crush is coming next? As in a series about movies I love that other people laugh off.
Need to go watch this ASAP. Thanks for writing.
I will write that article. Um.
I would read the hell out of that article
the trailer has some seriously Lillith Fair-ass music happening and I am *into it*. I rewatched Ever After this year, and couldn’t handle Drew Barrymore’s accent situation, but the trailer? I’d watch it on a loop forever.
Yeah, but I mean, you don’t want to walk away from a movie like Ever After saying, “Man, the accents were so ACCURATE.”
ugh true
It still bothers me that they have British accents, but they’re supposed to be in France. I just can’t shut that part of my brain off ;).
Is that because it would be too much like a Liz Lemon compliment? (“The programs were really easy to read.” “The lighting was really neat.”)
I loved this movie so much that I actually bought the soundtrack (WHY) on CD and if I ever watched it again, could recite the lines along with the characters. I also loved the not as mean stepsister (JACQUELINE) who was caught between loyalty to her family & being nice because it was the right thing to do.
Jacqueline is a GEM. I had a section about her that I cut at some point because things were a bit unwieldy. I can’t think of an earlier example of a Cinderella version with a nice stepsister- like I honestly think this version of the stepsisters was the first time that they weren’t interchangeable vicious creatures. Now it’s very much become the standard in new versions (even the Disney Direct-to-DVD Cinderella sequels) to make one stepsister evil and one stepsister good. Jacqueline: amazing stallion of a lady.
I watched Mirror Mirror during a finals week Netflix marathon and I was shocked at how misogynistic it was. The costumes were beautiful, but it seemed like the central theme of the movie was that women are vain and jealous and have to destroy each other to succeed.
A little off subject, but was anyone else really disappointed by the movie adaption of Ella, Enchanted? I had always loved how in the book, Ella is able to break the curse by valuing her autonomy over anything else.
OH MY GOD, YES. I loved Ella Enchanted and thought it was charming and had a really great take on the curse, and then I saw the trailer for the movie and nopetopus’d right on out of there.
Oh man. Yes, so disappointed.
The Ella Enchanted movie was one of the bitterest disappointments of my movie-going life. Ella Enchanted has always been one of my comfort-food books, and I was so psyched to get another feisty, funny Cinderella on-screen. (Completely unsurprisingly, Ever After is one of my favorite movies). Then…whatever that was happened. I don’t understand how movie execs can look at a book like Ella Enchanted and say, “Why yes, we should adapt that! But a spunky heroine with soul clearly will not sell tickets, so let’s strip the story of everything that makes it great before we make it a movie. Ok? Ok!” Still raging all these years later.
On the bright side, there’s so much room for someone to do an infinitely better adaptation.
Oh let’s all gather our pennies make that movie! I don’t understand why it had to be SO FAR off from what the book was? And why it had to add all these stupid magical elements?
Yeah, unfortunately the initial good will I had for Mirror Mirror kind of diminishes every time I rewatch it or really think about it. I like that there’s a real effort in the middle of the film to show Snow White going from pampered prisoner to ninja princess, but. Yeah. Adding the twist that Julia Roberts’s queen is also after the prince (not just for his money, either, but in a pretty overtly sexual way) makes it seem like a longform cat fight. Their character stories are defined by getting the prince rather than interacting with each other in a meaningful way.
BUT SEAN BEAN IS IN THE END, SO.
CULTURAL TOUCHSTONES OF MY PRETEEN YEARS. I mourned when it was taken off Netflix instant (don’t ask me why I don’t have it on DVD, but own the soundtrack because of course I do).
This was all great, and seriously, “Don’t think that because some accounts of history said women were forbidden from doing something that women didn’t do it anyway.”
NOW HAND ME THAT KEY OR I SWEAR ON HIS GRAVE I WILL SLIT YOU FROM NAVEL TO NOSE
The best part of Mirror, Mirror was when SURPRISE SEAN BEAN showed up but you already know this.
my love you know me too well
remember when he bopped along to the song at the end
DO I EVER
Nooo, it’s not on Instant? Now I want to rewatch it but if I order the DVD my husband is going to give me that “Why do you even get to have the Netflix password” look.
OH WELL doing it anyway. Misandrists unite!
Pretty sure that scene was the first stepping stone (in my life, anyways) on the path to this misandrist paradise. Clearly it’s something every woman should have in her home, if only for reference on how to put men in their place when they start reppin’ the patriarchy too hard.
I am not entirely certain that Tangled is an exception.
When Ever After first came out, there was a review talking about how because Danielle saves herself, and the prince at another point, the love story becomes moot…if there isn’t anything heroic for the prince to do, why is he there and how could she love him if he isn’t displaying his heroic prowess? I was a baby feminist at the time, but, to my shame I kind of agreed with that. Today I shake my head sternly at my former self, as now a movie where the heroine saves herself and/or others is totally my thing. Regardless, I’ve never been able to enjoy Ever After, because Drew Barrymore is kind of a terrible actress in my opinion, and she’s super miscast in this. Also inaccuracies.
And Mirror Mirror is the WORST. I’ve written many diatribes about that movie.
Yeah, we’ll have to agree to disagree on Drew- that scene where she’s asking her stepmother if she ever loved her is pretty heartbreaking to watch and convinces me enough of her acting.
Tell stories that work from the basic premise that women are as intelligent as men and that women can also live the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences.
ALL THE THIS. This article was so great – it encapsulates everything I love about Ever After, despite its cheesiness and yes, historical inaccuracy — I absolutely adore it, unapologetically, and these are all the reasons why.
Your words are a balm on my terrible soul, gusface.
On a shallow note, how have we not got around to discussing Dougray Scott’s junk in this film? Dougray Scott’s junk definitely had a hand in launching me into puberty (…maybe that idiom got away from me).
Oh, he wasn’t exactly wearing a codpiece but he kinda was. Like during the tennis scene. And it was a thing of beauty.
And it had like little vents, or pleats. V. distracting to my twelve-year-old self.
you cannot look at modern fairytales without checking out Kate Bernheimer as the current rock star when it comes to repurposed fairytales on the literary scene. The Fairytale Review is the shit.
“SO UNREALISTIC,” cried haters. “Women didn’t sword fight in Those Days, or even once in the history of sharpened sticks as weapons, so how could she be good enough to do that?”
I love you. Let’s be friends OH WAIT WE ALREADY ARE
I’m mad that you didn’t bring up a) the other sister? JACQUELINE? is that the right name? who I remember as being my fave; b) the part where she hoists the prince like a sack of potatoes. Yeah girl x 1000000
I love that Mallory tagged this “kristen stewart coated with mud and grime.” Nasty.
I HOPE TO USE THAT TAG A LOT AGAIN IN FUTURE
ZLOT I mentioned above that I had a section about Jacqueline that I had to cut in an early draft. I think having one sympathetic stepsister in EA might be the first time that Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t lumped together as an evil two-headed beast? Now it’s almost standard in newer adaptations, because WOW, NUANCE.
Oh lord, her carrying the prince away is like the screensaver on my life.
This sums up so much of my feelings for Ever After! I always wondered whether Danielle de Barbarac was meant to be some sort of stand in for Danielle de Poitiers, the long-term mistress/love of Henri II (I blame much of Catherine de Medici’s behaviour on being warped because of this).
Anyway, I was always confused about Danielle’s social position in Ever After. Was her mother really Countess Nicole de Lancret? Did she have an affair with Danielle’s father, and is this why Rodmilla condemned her (for being a bastard)? Or was Nicole de Lancret Danielle’s mother’s maiden name and Danielle just stuck ‘Countess’ on to make it sound pretty? Because otherwise, yes, Danielle has been working as a servant, but her birth is just as good as Marguerite’s or Rodmilla’s, surely? So why is she so embarrassed when they shame her for not being Nicole de Lancret, and just Nicole’s daughter? Maybe I should just put it down to general historical confusion.
I think it’s that Nicole was Danielle’s mother’s name, but she didn’t have a title or had a lower rank than whatever Danielle claimed. I assumed that Danielle’s father was a wealthy businessman or something and Rodmilla married him for the cash since she already had the nice shiny title. It’s possible that I completely made that up out of nothing, but I think it makes sense.
Perhaps I need to rewatch my copy ASAP and take notes…
As I remember it, Danielle’s father was just a wealthy businessman and her mother had no title- her stepmother was really affronted when she heard that Danielle had been referring to herself as “Countess” because her mother was no such thing, while Rodmilla (as she claims) had been born into a title.
it’s been a really long time since i saw this movie so my remembrance of it is fuzzy, but i’m pretty sure i remember rodmilla mocking danielle after she finds out about the whole ruse, for “turning your mother into a comtesse”. so while danielle’s mother’s name was nicole de lancret, the movie seems to imply that danielle added in the “comtesse” part when introducing herself to henry.
Let’s be real. If this movie permitted no anachronisms, then there would be NO CHUNKY GLITTER in the climactic gala scene. And how many of us in those days would have wanted to see a wish-fullfillment fantasy with no chunky glitter?
NONE.
THERE SHALL BE NO WISH FULFILLMENT WITHOUT GLITTER.
(I have strong feelings about glitter.)
Christ, Sara, even I succumbed to the chunky glitter. And it’s Drew Barrymore’s fault. I’m okay with that.
It would be as terrible as A Knight’s Tale without We Will Rock You. The horror D:
She can’t even cough out the poisoned bit of apple she choked on until a necrophiliac prince’s searching tongue dislodges it from her mouth.
This is great. Also can I just point out that in “Snow, Glass, Apples,” Neil Gaiman’s Look I’m Edgy As Shit take on Snow White, the prince is literally a necrophiliac and I can’t remember but probably also a pedophile. That guy.
OH MICHELLE.
“WRITE WOMEN AS PEOPLE!!”
Light the beacons of Gondor and spread the word: this is IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT. And that last paragraph seriously spoke to me. God, I need to re-watch Ever After – when I was 13 or so I remember it was on some cable channel ALL THE TIME and I watched it every time, but probably haven’t seen it since then. Do you have the DVD? I bet you do.
Of course I have the DVD, which you can watch with me wheneeeever you’d like.
(THE BEACONS ARE LIT. GONDOR CALLS FOR AID.)
“A bird may love a fish signore, but where would they live?”
“Then I shall build you wings.”
This essay was an amazing examination of a genre that is deeply close to my heart and intellect but man I am now having all the ever after feelings.
Yay! I can come out of hiding and share my love for “Ever After” without judgement. Jeanne Moreau cameo, spunky kickass heroine and Dougray Scott in those trousers, omg what’s not to love. Beats all the current fairy tale retellings.
Adore that move, adore this piece. I had that copy of Seventeen, which I recall came with promotional Ever After postcards (!!). I wish I had it now.
I had that issue! I wonder what happened to those postcards. I definitely kept them around for a while.
I FORGOT ABOUT THE POSTCARDS! OMG!
I definitely had those postcards taped to my bedroom door for AGES.
Hell yes you live in Philadelphia. I giggled at A Drew Barrymore Jawn.
I could never articulate why I liked this movie so much, because I was old enough to be aware of the historical inaccuracies and the bad accents and all that…but I still loved it. Thank you for helping me explain to myself the reasons why.
I watched the last half of this on ABC Family literally two nights ago and this essay is everything I could ever hope for about it. I never realized how great this movie was, or why it was so different. Thank you, and double thank you for Manic Pixie Gay Dream Artist. 🙂
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but as best I recall Drew’s swordplay kinda had the “out of nowhere” quality to it. I think that they could have put that gun on the mantle in the first act, you know?
Which is the opposite of how I felt about Merida. Here they spend the whole film building up what a good archer she is, but it doesn’t matter at all in the final big fight. That sucked.
Otherwise, spot on. You’ve nailed exactly what was wrong with SWatH – SW was defined by lack of agency. Of course, most superheroes lack agency, too.
I was 16 when this movie came out, and it was definitely a movie that my best friend and I watched a bazillion times. I seriously thought it was the best fairy-tale movie ever. I might have to revisit it at least 3 more times to see if it withstands the test of time.
Don’t think that because some accounts of history said women were forbidden from doing something that women didn’t do it anyway.
I just actually gave a little cheer of agreement. At my desk. At work. This whole thing was amazing, thank you!
I am super late to this piece but I needed to comment about how much I love it! So much! Ever After is a fabulous movie and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. Even my father loves this movie! I remember the first time he watched it with me, he was all grumbly about inaccuracies~ but then he got totally into it, and when Anjelica Huston tells Danielle “How could anyone love a pebble in their shoe?” he actually gasped aloud. “Ice cold,” he said. And he was right! And then he cheered when she rescued herself and laughed when the prince showed up. All correct reactions!
I didn’t realize I associated this movie so much with my father. Huh.
It’s funny, I was about 12 and in catholic school when it came out and we(me and friends) rented it and we were excited to see it but I remember hating it, for some reason, we found it really cheesy if I recall correctly. and now I’ve been seen all this posts about Ever After and thinking our middle-school selves maybe judged too harshly.
Women in the past not knowing anything about fighting? Ha! What about Joan of Arc, Madeleine de Verchères, Hua Mu-Lan, Grace O’Malley, Boudicca, Calamity Jane, Fu Hao, Annie Oakley, Queen Zenobia, or Anne Trotter Bailey? Based on these examples alone, who could possibly say “old-timey” women wouldn’t be able to defend themselves? These women not only knew how to use a weapon..they were just as skilled as the men of their respective eras. I’m pretty sure Danielle could pick up some basic skills with a sword, and I’m sure an ample amount of real women in the past did too. People like to imagine all women in the past being some kind of strangw Dickens/Austen hybrid, but so many of them were anything but!
I applaud and share your opinion Holly. The role of women has always been in the background and has never been given the importance it deserved. This has happened in the war , the arts …. at all . Fortunately , as you say Holly , they have always been there Guerrar fighting in defending their rights, creating art …
It’s a shame you can get to think otherwise. if we study the life, work and deeds that women over the centuries have brought to humanity, surely many people think otherwise.