Enchanted
Directed by Kevin Lima (PG)
A princess, forced to leave fantasyland, winds up in real-life Manhattan.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
***
Disney tries to revise the fairy tale with Enchanted, but doesn’t stray too far from familiar Mouse House mythologies, said Christopher Kelly in the Fort Worth Star- Telegram. In a faraway land, there lives an animated princess named Giselle, who has just met her prince. But his evil stepmother sends her to a place where there are no happy endings—real-life New York. When Giselle emerges from a manhole as Amy Adams, she is soon rescued by a divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his daughter—at least until her prince (James Marsden) crosses over to find her. Disney’s typical heroines aren’t exactly icons of feminist self-reliance, but Giselle proves even more “terminally clueless” and insipidly male-dependent than most. She isn’t really desperate for a man, said Julie Washington in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Rather, the film’s premise is to challenge Giselle’s fairy-tale pieties, until she realizes that she has “the power to write her own perfect ending.” The character might be a gimmick, but Adams brings her to life, said Frank Gabrenya in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. Her comic timing comes naturally and her “sincerity never allows Giselle to seem foolish.” Enchanted lets us snicker at Giselle’s dreamy idea of true love, and Adams restores our faith in what passes as romance here in the real world.
