Matt Maw | rawr reviews
Mustachioed dictators and bacon-and-sauerkraut casserole aren’t the only dark patches in Germany’s history. The Grimm Brothers’ 1812 fairy tale “Little Snow-White” is a barbaric tapestry woven with jealousy, torture and human organs salted to taste.
It’s time to straighten out the facts. Forget the wicked stepmothers of films like Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” this year’s blockbuster “Mirror, Mirror” from Tarsem Singh and Rupert Sanders’ “Snow White and the Huntsman.” In the original version the antagonist is Snow’s family, her own flesh and blood.
“Mom” is a queen with unparalleled beauty. She laughs in the face of birth-induced stretch marks and wishes for a baby “as white as snow, as red as blood” and as black as the frame of her favorite sewing window. Disney’s queen didn’t boast such a diverse group of gentlemen callers, but things were different in 19th-century Germany.
Events continue as expected in enchanted kingdoms — narcissistic monarchs admire themselves in their talking mirrors, dwarves mine for more whistling tunes in the mountains and bunnies poop rainbow pellets all over Keebler-elf gardens. At this point the story isn’t so different from the Disney-fied fantasy.
The Grimm Brothers’ nightmare begins after the child’s seventh birthday. Lil’ Snow gets a figure and the suddenly-envious queen institutes a new child organ donor policy. She tells a huntsman to carry the girl to the woods and “stab her to death,” then bring Snow’s lungs and liver back as proof. The queen adds that she’ll “cook them with salt and eat them” to allay any of the man’s concerns about her sanity. The tale’s lack of singing squirrels and frolicking deer suggests he killed everything else in the forest, so he’s probably too bored to question the idea.
The yarn gets more twisted. Not a single male in the story is capable of keeping his wits around the girl because of her 7-year-old beauty, though by Walt’s grace they keep their pants. The queen repeatedly tries to kill her daughter and the dwarves house Snow in a glass coffin when the queen’s third ploy poisons her.
A prince procures her and spends his ample free time watching her — just watching her. Grade-school teachers hit boys with yardsticks whenever they catch them staring at the dead girls who sit in front of them, but manners are murky here, after all.
A disgruntled servant tires of moving the casket at Prince Freaky-Fetish’s whim and smacks the poisoned apple piece out of Snow’s mouth. Snow awakens just as the prince runs out of tissues and he marries her the next day. The unwitting queen arrives at the wedding, and they stuff her feet in red-hot iron shoes and make her dance until she dies.
Here are universal lessons not offered amid cinema’s rampant confusion. It’s important to remember that pretty people always get their way, men are single-minded idiots and torturing in-laws makes for fun weddings. Yet the nameless servant exemplifies the story’s most critical lesson the huntsman forgot.
When stuff gets real, sometimes it’s best to start smacking people.