Of all Disney heroines Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty, was the least inspiring. Not her fault: how much spark can you wring from a Forever Nap, especially one that’s cut off by a kiss from a prince named after the Duke of Edinburgh?
Which may be why my 16-year-old, who’s going through one of those inexplicable regressions into Disney toddler fare that seem to hit girls in their teens and beyond, made it through all of five minutes of the 1959 Sleeping Beauty, then went back to binge-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But my girl really grooved to Maleficent and, in a rare confluence of inter-generational pop taste, so did I. And after all, what’s not to like when the spotlight shifts to the (allegedly) wicked fairy, as channeled through the bone structure of Angelina Jolie?
I say allegedly because Maleficent, capably directed by Robert Stromberg from a sharp script by Linda Woolverton (who also wrote Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King) sets out to explain why the chilly lady turned into such a hater. That’s a very American question: The vibrantly pre-Freudian Brothers Grimm, who wrote the 1812 Briar Rose story that built on Charles Perrault’s 1697 original tale, regarded both evil and good as immutable character traits that needed no explanation. The battle between them was the story.
Maleficent muddies those waters in ways that may upset moviegoers looking for visceral action, though it surely doesn’t lack for battle scenes. At its core the film wants us rooting for the bad fairy, and, to push things a little further, to suggest that humans make much more natural evildoers than their ethereal neighbors, especially when rendered in 3D.