The Queen of Evil (with a Heart of Gold)

Our recent look at Sleeping Beauty, Disney’s 1959 animated masterpiece (they call all their animated films masterpieces), prompted me to think back on Maleficent, their 2014 loose remake of the film. In basic form it does follow the design ideas and story beats of that original film, although that’s mostly because the original film doesn’t really have a lot going on in it. It’s less a story than a collection of scenes leading to a prescribed ending. Stuff happens, and then the fairy tale ends, but I wouldn’t really call that a real story.

Think about it: no one in Sleeping Beauty has a real character arc. The three good fairies start and end in the same place, personality wise. Maleficent is little more than an evil force, but she’s given no character development. Prince Phillip shows up for only a couple of scenes so you can do something heroic, but there’s no substance to his character. And Aurora, our title character, has so little to do in the film that her falling asleep is the biggest character moment in her entire story. Sleeping Beauty is a lovingly made film with no substance at its core.

In remaking the film the Disney team realized they had to change that. They needed some kind of hook, some way to hang a real story on this threadbare collection of scenes. Their original concept was an animated film fleshing out the backstory for Disney’s iconic villainess, but that eventually evolved into a live action version, and as the scripting process went on, the story added more and more depth to the character of Maleficent. It became a study of a person driven by hurt and anger who does a very bad thing, cursing a child, and then learns to regret their decision. That’s not just looking into the subtext of an original work; that’s finding a whole new meaning and reinventing a story completely. But then, Sleeping Beauty needed it.

In Maleficent, our titular character (played as a young child by Isobelle Molloy and then as a teen by Ella Purnell as teen Maleficent) was a fairy living out in the Moors, a magical land of fairy tale creatures near a human kingdom. The Moors were a forbidden place for humans, and if humans went in they weren’t likely to come back out. But a young man, Stefan (played as a child by Michael Higgins, and as a teen by Jackson Bews) came to the forest, looking to steal what he could to survive, and instead of punishing him, Maleficent let him go. This led the two to building a fast friendship, a friendship that quickly turned into love.

But Stefan (played as an adult by Sharlto Copley) was hungry for power, and he saw a chance at grabbing it. When the king demanded that someone kill the defender of the Moors, Maleficent (played as an adult by Angelina Jolie), Stefan snuck into the Moors to see his former friend and lover. He drugged her, intent on killing her, but wasn’t able to go through with it. Instead he cut off her wings as proof he could take back to the king that she was “dead”. This led the ailing king to make Stefan his heir, but it gave Stefan a powerful enemy: Maleficent, hurt, angry, and raging at the betrayal. And when the time came for her to get her revenge, she knew exactly how to do it: she’d strike as his first-born daughter and curse her with death… well, almost…

Maleficent has a few tricks up its sleeve, and the first of those is that it doesn’t even get to the story of Sleeping Beauty until we’re well past the end of the first act. This, despite the fact that the film has a 97 minute run time and is already pretty short. But then, when you consider how threadbare the story of Sleeping Beauty was, and that it was 75 minutes itself, it was clear the production team had a lot they could work with to make a tight, but fast moving, adaptation of the Disney classic.

Spending time with Maleficent before she becomes the villain of the story is a great move. It gets us invested in her story and makes us care about her when she gets betrayed by Stefan. It colors every decision she makes, including the curse she inevitably puts on the baby. But the film is also willing to play with events and change things up. In the animated film, the curse was death but the fairy Maryweather softened it with her gift to the child, turning it into an eternal sleep that could be broken with true love’s first kiss. In the remake, Maleficent softens the curse herself, creating her own loophole for the film to exploit later. It makes her action slightly less wicked and cruel than it was in the animated film.

Softening Maleficent is a key goal for this movie. After giving her a moving backstory, the film can’t let her be the villain afterwards. As such, she spends time watching over the child, keeping an eye on her. Ostensibly it’s so she can keep track of the kid and see that her curse comes to fruition, but we quickly see her gain affection for Aurora (played as a child first by Vivienne Jolie-Pitt and then Eleanor Worthington Cox, before Elle Fanning takes over the role), who she calls “Beastly”, falling into a kind of “fairy godmother” role for Aurora.

This adds a lot of shading and nuance to Maleficent. Her actions, like causing trouble for the other fairies (Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple as Flittle, Knotgrass, and Thistlewit), come across less like a villain bringing evil into the world and more like a petty bitch causing mischief against those that betrayed her. She’s not evil here, and in fact she protects the child multiple times when the other fairies seem unable to have her best interests at heart. She’s both the girl’s defender but the one that caused the girls inevitable and inescapable fate.

Of course, what really makes the film work is that Angelina Jolie was cast as Maleficent. The producers have noted that Jolie was their only choice for the role; there was no list of actresses that could play the (reformed) villain. If Jolie had said “no”, then the movie wouldn’t have been made (at least, so they say). And watching the film you can see why. She invests fully in Maleficent, playing all aspects of the character, from vamping witch to betrayed girl, loving stepmother and vengeful goddess. It’s a fabulous, at times scenery-chewing, performance, and I’m not certain anyone else could have played the role nearly as well.

Not that the film lacks otherwise. The film is stacked with solid actors, the visual effects are pretty great (working well to create a look similar to the animated feature), and the whole thing feels like the team worked hard to honor what came before while finding their own twist on the material. And twist they do, especially in the last act when they let the story diverge from Sleeping Beauty in important, and necessary, ways. The film is a loving tribute to the original animated work, and its star villainess, but the team understood when to be faithful and when to move away from Sleeping Beauty, and it works to the movie’s benefit.

Going back and watching Maleficent again, I was reminded just how good this movie is. It’s one of the rare Disney live-action remakes that really holds up, in no small part because it’s not completely beholden to the original story it’s remaking. It finds its own hook, does its own thing, and wows the audience with a great story about loss, love, and rebuilding. If Disney made more of these kinds of live-action reboots, I don’t think anyone would complain. Sadly, great remakes like Maleficent are in short supply from the House of Mouse.