Benneth Branagh’s live-action Cinderella is a tale-as-old-as-time retelling, dressed up like a fairy-tale edition of Strictly Come Dancing. The main point of it is to appeal as blatantly as possible to the Frozen crowd – a mission Disney are so determined to accomplish, they’re even putting the film out with the new short, the semi-sequel Frozen Fever, in front.
Then again... Not here the sassy, wised-up revamps of picture-book lore that Frozen and its predecessor Tangled offered. Perhaps mindful that interfering with a good thing could only risk mucking it up, Branagh and screenwriter Chris Weitz stick with almost doggedly traditionalist reverence to Disney’s 1950 animated version, with just a few tactful innovations – like a surprise late scene for the villainness – here and there.
Cinders, played with ample warmth by Downton Abbey’s Lily James, is entirely compliant and almost dripping with the milk of human kindness. There’s barely a hint of Elsa-like spite or indignation towards her bitchy new step-family.
There’s something unashamedly twee about the scenes before they show up – her parents (Hayley Atwell and Ben Chaplin) beam and cavort with her in rolling meadows, the backdrops kitsch to the point of glutinous. Sorrow needs to hurry up and afflict this kingdom pretty fast, lest your teeth start rotting from the confectionery-tin look of it all.
Thankfully, Cate Blanchett’s Lady Tremaine – 50 shades of fierce – is just the pill required. “She too had known grief,” Helena Bonham Carter’s fruity narrator (and fun fairy godmother) tells us, “but she wore it wonderfully well.” This isn’t the half of it. Costume designer Sandy Powell’s magnificently haughty frocks almost threaten to upstage the actress wearing them.
Even wrapped in a leopard-skin dressing gown, Blanchett’s much too wily to let that happen, as she throws constant facial shade at the moronic antics of the Ugly Sisters (Sophie McShera, Holliday Grainger); their ugliness is mostly on the inside, despite a whole lot of horrendous colour-coordination.
Powell trusses them up with gaudy polka-dots and elaborate curls, but they’re in dire need of finishing school: tin-eared piano recitals and portrait sketches fill their mother’s face with equal, eye-widening horror. How will she ever marry this pair of nitwits off? “Your mother’s taste was... questionable,” she tells poor Cinders, meanwhile, after one look at her proposed pink ball outfit, before ripping it apart at the seams and banning her from going.
Branagh's a little overeager to guarantee a jolly time for the kids: the earlier film’s animal companions appear here in chintzy and graceless computer-generated form. Cinderella’s pet rodents are a particular nuisance. I harboured evil, Lady Tremaine-ish hopes that Christopher Walken’s Mousehunt exterminator might sneak in and fumigate the place.
Still, there’s one large-scale effects sequence that works a treat, when the bumpily fleeing carriage – which looks like a giant Ferrero Rocher with the wrapper on – turns back into the pumpkin, footman to lizard, and so on. It’s a bouncing, skilfully-paced highlight which got a spontaneous round of applause here in Berlin.
On the happily-ever-after front, you have to feel a bit for Game of Thrones’s Richard Madden, as a courtly Prince Charming with no good lines. Madden is charm itself, but so soon after Chris Pine’s chest-puffing parody of princely smugness in Into the Woods – and Armie Hammer’s fetching silliness in the better-designed Mirror Mirror – he has little to do but twirl in uniform and look handsome.
More welcome are comic bits from Rob Brydon, as a shambolic court painter, and the reliable Alex MacQueen (The Thick of It) as a hem-hawing town crier. Very little is out of place in Branagh’s do-over, but that’s almost a problem: there’s a feeling, throughout, of going perfectly through the motions. The film is all smoothly-operated crane shots, excellent hair, gleaming teeth. Originality is the glass slipper it never even tries on.
