ENCHANTED
Walt Disney Pictures
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Kevin Lima
Written By: Bill Kelly
Cast: Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, Timothy Spall, Idina Menzel, Rachel Covey, Susan Sarandon, Kevin Lima, Jeff Bennett
Screened at: AMC Empire, NYC, 11/22/07
Opens: November 21, 2007 Filming in Prague has its advantages. The Czech capital is beautiful , historic, has a spacious set of studios, and has been the backdrop of films like “Oliver Twist,” “A Knight’s Tale,” “The Bourne Identity,” “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Dungeons and Dragons.” (See the article about filmmakers in Prague in the November 2007 issue of Film Journal International.) When you come down to it, though, if you’re not afraid of the expense, forget about Vancouver, Prague, and other destinations. The real winner for filming is New York, the center of the universe, the world’s most enchanting city and therefore the obvious place for capturing both the lushness and the ironies of Kevin Lima’s “Enchanted.” Since satire is the name of the game these days, Disney must figure that the studio can make more money laughing at itself than going along with the usual fairy-tale conventions. Bill Kelly’s script thereby conjures a story that spoofs the happily-ever-after naivete of an innocent damsel about to become a princess by marrying a handsome man after knowing him for under one hour in a fantasy land known as Andalasia. After spending a few days in Manhattan with a normal human being, she wonder whether she’d prefer living in our own world, and who wouldn’t prefer to live (pardon my repetition of a known fact) in the center of the universe rather than in Andalasia? Disney is not risking all that much, however. The good guys in “Enchanted” are all beautiful and handsome. The evil Queen Narissa is not, and in fact when the witch turns herself into a crone, she is abysmally ugly. Her chief assistant is, to be kind, portly. This is no “Shrek,” meaning that Disney is not taking the same risks as DreamWorks. The story goes like this… Lima opens with a delightfully animated sequence pitting the evil queen (Susan Sarandon) against a saccharine would-be princess, Giselle (Amy Adams). When Giselle is about to marry Prince Edward (James Marsden), which would dethrone the queen, she is thrust into a well, landing her via a manhole into New York’s Times Square where a thoroughly confused Giselle, dressed in bridal gown, is barely gawked out by New Yorkers. Nor is a searching Prince Edward, when he arrives in full royal regalia, sword in hand, through the same manhole. (New Yorkers have seen it all.) Walking about, Giselle winds up in the Bowery, attracting the attention of a bum who steals her jewels, but also a six year old, Morgan (Rachel Covey), whose divorced father Robert (Patrick Dempsey), puts her up in his apartment though he’s concerned that the arrangement would be discovered by his long-term girlfriend Nancy (Idina Menzel). While Robert attempts to decode the rules of the human race, or at least the conventions of New Yorkers, to the beautiful alien, Giselle is pursued by her own fiancé, Prince Edward, and by Queen Narissa, the queen’s stooge, Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) and by a helpful chipmunk who does its best to get in the way of the evil plot. While neither the songs nor the dialogue would arouse the envy of Lerner and Loewe or Gilbert and Sullivan, the movie delights by its combined animation & human images, its unpredictable gags, and most of all by the charming performance of Amy Adams—who looks not only like someone who indeed could have come out of Andalasia or Brigadoon but out of most any old-fashioned Broadway musical. James Marsden, who takes a back-seat to Patrick Dempsey, has a singing voice to match Adams’s while Sarandon’s wicked stunts are backed up by dynamic and discreetly used special effects. Viewers who do not want to move to Manhattan after seeing this must really love wherever they reside. Rated PG. 107 minutes. © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
| 
