This adaptation of The Witches is mostly a continuation of Anne Hathaway’s big successes wearing wigs and Octavia Spencer dancing like there’s no tomorrow. In early January of this year, I put this movie on my calendar while scouring a list of highly anticipated horror films. When the trailer came out, a lot of folks wrote about the eye-popping color palette and the gestures toward a new setting for an American audience.
Brother called me this morning to let me know that the movie had “two simultaneous plots and no one knew which one they were in but they were all angry to be in the movie,” by which I think he meant, the magical realism of this film, typified in the previous work of Guillermo Del Toro and Robert Zemeckis, does not deliver on the magic or the realism. Put another way, NPR’s Justin Chang says the movie never fully explored its new setting of Alabama in 1968–the way that the just-finished first season of Lovecraft Country pays homage to America in 1965, and Chicago in particular.
Brother also mentioned that the CGI is “embarrassing,” which I can confirm. It doesn’t have quite the same aesthetic of a Chinese Netflix knockoff of a Pixar classic (learned a new term this evening, “mockbuster”), but it’s definitely flirting with some first draft of Slenderman remake quality. The wet cat in the rain is lit strangely and every witch looks like they are acting through a Snapchat filter. Aside from the fact that most of the movie is from the perspective of three CGI mice in CGI backgrounds, it’s prettily shot. Probably the person done most dirty is Stanley Tucci, who, after delivering the most subtle racist microaggression of the movie, is reduced to a crotch bite shot that was neither required or asked for.
There are some glimmers of a truly smart adaptation here. There’s a trailer fake out early on when the boy’s grandmother tries to cheer him up with a song on the record player that I really enjoyed. The way Anne Hathaway stares at Octavia Spencer from across the room at dinner is terrifying. I know that not everyone is a fan of Hathaway’s accent (in this movie or any other), but I like the way it slides around like an alien approximating English–what NPR describes as “Pan-European.” Her wigs are obviously breathtaking, as are all of her dresses and her makeup. Hathaway’s gradual tip-toeing into villany has been much appreciated in the past few years.
My theory for why this movie struggles is two-fold. One is that the story itself is reliant on a strong supporting cast, since so much of the story is from the perspective of an animal that’s not going to film well. In that sense, it shares characteristics with other Roald Dahl movies with strong ensembles like the first adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and less so Matilda, where Mara Wilson really steals the show (not really interested in discussing the chilling BFG). Anne Hathaway does a good job playing the stylish villain, kuckoo-birding her way through the world with her white privilege and her feminine wiles, and Octavia Spencer makes do with the little she’s given, including a very challenging theological outlook that doesn’t feel in keeping with Dahl’s original story or really any modern sensibility, but our main mouse actor isn’t given much of a chance to emote through the rigid and impenetrable mask of CGI.
Second, it does feel like the movie was unwilling to reach for some comparisons between the supremacist beliefs of the witches and those of whites in the Deep South in the 1960s. Anne Hathaway’s big confrontation with Octavia Spencer includes a lot of verbal fumbling for putdowns. The Grand High Witch finally settles on, “You stupid fools” or sometimes just, “You fools,” and occasionally, “You filthy fools,” but it’s already been stated that witches don’t go in for the foolishness of child-snatching and prefer to prey on the poor and underprivileged, so why not reflect on the why of that for a little? Why not have the Grand High Witch spend some of her monologuing talking about how no one is going to believe a crazy old black woman if she reports it to the police? Or have her bask in the ease with which she was able to dispatch with the grandmother’s friend without anyone asking too many questions? Why not make the horror of the witches be that there aren’t many folks who give a damn when a black child goes missing? The grandmother says as much on their first night in the hotel, but her grandson isn’t all that curious as to why.
Please avoid this movie. Watch clips for the wigs and be done with it.
