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THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS
Directors: Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston Cast: Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Helen Mirren, Matthew Macfadyen, Morgan Freeman, Eugenio Derbez, Richard E. Grant, Omid Djalili, Jack Whitehall, Tom Sweet, Ellie Bamber, Misty Copeland MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:39 Release Date: 11/2/18 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 1, 2018 The Nutcracker and the Four Realms isn't based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 story or the 1892 ballet, set to the music of Tchaikovsky and choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. It's not even "inspired by" either of those works, and in a way, that's fine, because the story is easily available and anyone who wants to see the ballet can find a production of it almost anywhere around Christmastime. The screenplay for this movie, written by Ashleigh Powell and Tom McCarthy, instead receives the suspicious descriptor that it was "suggested by" both the story and the ballet. Of all the ways to imply some kind of prestige, saying that a work was "suggested by" another might be the one that engenders the least amount of confidence. That's appropriate, because there doesn't seem to be much confidence in this material on the part of the filmmakers. At this point, we must exclude the obvious care and hard work of the movie's design teams, who have created elaborate sets and costumes that at least give the movie the look of some carefully considered fantasy world. It's always a shame to see such craft wasted on a story that's as generic as this one. To be fair, Powell and McCarthy don't have much with which to work, especially since this story takes most of its cues from the ballet. Anyone who has seen it knows that there isn't much in the way of a plot, even for a piece that's entirely about dance. On Christmas, a young girl finds herself caught up in a battle between toy soldiers, led by one in the form of a decorative nutcracker, and mice. With the mice defeated, the girl and the nutcracker, now a human prince, are treated to a great celebration held by the Sugar Plum Fairy. The rest of the ballet is a plot-less showcase for assorted dancing. There's a lot of plot in this broad and rather unimaginative interpretation of the source materials. It mostly begins in the same way as the story and the ballet, in which Clara (Mackenzie Foy) has some establishing business with her father (played by Matthew Macfadyen) and her godfather Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman), a wealthy inventor who holds a grand Christmas party at his London mansion. Clara's mother has died recently, and the family, including an older sister (played by Ellie Bamber) and younger brother (played by Tom Sweet), is still in mourning. Clara is mad that her father wants to go about business as usual. She goes to her godfather looking for a way to open a decorative egg that her mother left as a final Christmas present. In the process, she finds herself transported from the mansion to a magical kingdom of four realms, where she meets Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight), the nutcracker soldier (who already looks plenty human), and discovers a world at war. War may be key to both the original story and the ballet, but at this point, we've seen so many of our simple fantasy stories transformed into tales of political intrigue and ferocious battles that it has grown tiresome. That's the case here, as Clara learns that Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren), leader of the Land of Amusement, has waged war against the other three realms since Clara's mother, who discovered/created this world, disappeared from it. The other realms are of flowers, frost, and sweets, and their envoys want Clara to stop Mother Ginger. Sugar Plum (Keira Knightley, in a very amusing performance that combines a baby voice and a sultry way of talking about the life-size tin soldiers), the head of the Land of Sweets, is especially keen on this idea. If Clara can retrieve the key to start a life-giving machine, Sugar Plum can raise an army to defeat Mother Ginger. The rest of this goes as you probably anticipate, with a twist involving the real villain of the story, lots of computer-generated effects, and an assortment of fights among fantastical entities (including a mass of mice, forming a bigger mouse, that is guaranteed to terrify anyone with a fear of rodents). The movie's most daring move, though, has nothing to do with its politics, its battles, or its mixture of design styles (We don't see much of this world, save for a three-shot montage of Clara visiting the other realms, but we do get a winter forest, a twisted circus, and an onion-domed palace). Instead, it's a ballet production, plopped right into the middle of the exposition, with stagehands maneuvering moving set pieces, as the back story of the magical kingdom plays out in dance. We expect ballet here, but it still comes as a surprise once we realize the movie has other, less artful intentions. After that, though, directors Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston offer no other inklings of the material's origin in that art form—unless one counts Clara's high kicks to the faces of a couple of soldiers as a kind of dance. Despite its origins in distinct mediums and some of the obvious craft behind it, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a bland and uninspired fantasy adventure. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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