Movie Review - 'Enchanted'

Enchanted

Starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden and Susan Sarandon
Directed by Kevin Lima
Rated PG

The main advantage Enchanted has over August Rush – this week’s other trip to fantasy land – is that one of these movies embraces the sheer impossibility of its story, revels in it, and lets the audience in on the joke.

A modern day fairy tale with a knowing wink to princesses and sleeping beauties of the past, Enchanted is the most Disney-like Disney movie in a while, even though it playfully kicks sand in the face of Disney movies. Acknowledging the notion that all girls want to grow up to find a handsome prince waiting to sweep them away then giving that notion a rude awakening of reality, Enchanted has an uncanny ability to be good natured and self-deprecating at the same time.

That’s not to say this is great entertainment; there’s still an awful lot of Happily Ever After that gives the movie a lower set of expectations, which, frankly, it keeps trying to lower as the movie progresses.

However, there is something at the very least disarming about watching a fairy tale princess (Amy Adams), displaced to New York by a wicked Queen (Susan Sarandon), summoning all the animals she can find so they can sing a song about cleaning up a filthy apartment. The song has a hook big enough to catch a great white shark and the animals helping with the chores are, naturally, rats, pigeons and cockroaches, those filthy landmarks of New York City.

There are a couple of other scenes that stand out as the Princess invades the life of a jaded divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey aka McDreamy) and waits for her one true love (James Marsden) to rescue her from this strange place. The entire opening sequence, a cartoon deeply indebted to the classic Disney style of traditional animation, is a nice touch, and a series of foiled attempts to feed the princess a poisoned apple are sufficiently clever.

Amy Adams, a Best Supporting Actress nominee a couple of years ago for Junebug, may have really hit a home run here. While it’s not hard to expect that she doesn’t want to keep doing princess roles in movies, lest she become Anne Hathaway, Adams nails the mannerisms, the voice, the necessary naïveté, everything. At the same time, she’s not too syrupy sweet, which saves this from being a movie you can’t root for.

In Enchanted, Adams is as close to being a real fairy tale princess as you could get, especially one struggling to live her fantasy in the real world.