Screen Cinderella No Longer Grimm Tale

The Brothers Grimm show up in the first scenes of “Ever After” a bit confused and curious. Subtitled “A Cinderella Story,” and despite castles, princes and glass slippers, contemporary sensibilities give this latest retelling of the fairy tale its revisionist wings.

Since Mary Pickford first played the role in 1915, cinematic Cinderellas have embodied the role and place of women at the time. “Ever After” is no exception, reflecting the wrinkles in the current state of American feminism.

The filmmakers rightly reasoned that no working mother in America is going to drag little Susie from soccer practice to see a simpering, helpless Cinderella in a medieval “Mommie Dearest.” A young, spirited Danielle (Cinderella), played by the young, wild Drew Barrymore, is another story. With a spine and a mind of her own, Danielle stands up to her tormentors, taking command of her own fate to the extent self-determination is possible in the 16th century.

Danielle is meant to be a thoroughly modern role model who sweeps away anachronistic charges of sexism, child abuse and female passivity along with the cinders. “Ever After” director and co-screenwriter Andy Tennant has said, “I wanted to tell a very different version of ‘Cinderella’ because I have two daughters. I did not want them growing up believing you have to marry a rich guy with a big house in order to live happily ever after.”

In this movie, Cinderella is the little scullery wench who could, no one’s victim of circumstance, who illustrates that it’s possible to stand up for one’s self without resorting to target practice. But despite the contemporary twists assigned by each generation, are big-screen Cinderella stories truly signs of women’s progress, genuine paradigm shifts in the way they are perceived, or just the Hollywood version of “You’ve come a long way, baby”?

Before Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published their “Kinder- und Hausmarchen” (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812, folk and fairy tales had suffered a bad rap. They were an oral literature of the poor and oppressed classes. Tales of witches, fairy godpersons, trolls and the like were precisely the sort of fantasy the Enlightenment was intended to cure.

As history and the movies have shown, however, the tenets of both the Enlightenment and feminism failed to take over even if they did forever change cultural styles. It is that evolving style in the long line of cinematic Cinderellas that camouflages as much as it reveals.

German political scientist Iring Fetscher recognized that “the story [of Cinderella] is meant to soothe: Just be patient . . . for the day will come when . . . with the aid of a handsome and powerful prince, you will triumph over your oppressors. . . . It is indeed a beautiful dream, but it deters from action and permits the dreamer to endure his miserable reality. If the fairy tale is to emancipate, it must first be activated.”

“Ever After” is an honorable attempt to activate a more contemporary dream for a new generation of girls. Danielle holds together her father’s estate as best she can in her degraded state, using brains, fists, swords and overripe fruit against thieves, Gypsies, evil aristocrats and snotty relatives. A case study in proactive femininity, Danielle very literally saves herself.

Still, behind all the spunk, smarts and post-feminist heroics, the nature of the happily ever after remains the same. Perhaps the hunky rich man and big house are no longer the sum total of Cinderella’s dream, but they continue to be her reward. The question is, her reward for what? The movies at first told us it was for her virtue, then her intelligence, and then her independence. The fact is, her beauty is the only quality that hasn’t really changed.

*

More than the period romances or animated musicals for the whole family, it is the contemporary variations on a Cinderella theme that are the barometer of women’s evolving cultural identity. Updated Cinderellas have been kicking around Hollywood since the silent era, most notably in “Ella Cinders,” a 1926 jazz age version starring Colleen Moore.

From the poor little flower girl/servant girl/orphan girl roles of Pickford and Lillian Gish to the streetwalker/hash slinger/bad permed incarnations of “Pretty Woman” and “Working Girl,” reel after reel of film history is about downstairs or down-market waifs transformed by the love of a good kazillionaire. Hearts of gold always attract ingots of gold by the final reel.

In the classic feminist tome “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir decries how the Cinderella myth leads “the young girl to expect fortune and happiness from some Prince Charming. . . . In particular, she can hope to rise, thanks to him, into a caste superior to her own, a miracle that could not be bought by the labor of her lifetime.”

What has made Cinderella such a beloved and enduring tale throughout the world is the optimistic miracle of a servant girl wedding the prince. In the modern U.S. of A., princes marry Anna Nicole Smith all the time. There is no sense of a benign universe and virtue rewarded when silicone and botox injections routinely turn Cruella DeVil into Cindy Crawford.

Historically, the movies, like the popular Brothers Grimm version of the fairy tale, underlined the point that the heroine transcends the caste system by persevering with such good grace. She is rewarded for her inner virtue, not her outer beauty, even if that virtue occasionally amounted to little more than enduring poverty and a dirty face.

In psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s forward to Margaret Hunt’s 1944 translation of the Brothers Grimm, he declares that “painful as is the process of separation and individuation, fairy tales assure the child [read: audience] that it is a necessary and inescapable developmental task, and one that turns out to be for the best. Cinderella’s stepsisters, who are indulged all their lives by their mother, who demands nothing of them, come to a very bad end because they never learned to cope with frustration.”

In other words, pain builds character, and movie Cinderellas are ostensibly rewarded for showing that character. Courtesans and street walkers in “Gigi” and “Pretty Woman” win their princes only by first rejecting them and their shoddy offers of unrespectable luxe.

The Brothers Grimm describe the stepsisters as “beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart,” but in crossing to America and the movies, several generations of stepsisters and their surrogates apparently took ugly pills. It was Cinderella who got to be beautiful, and the stepsisters plain. Leslie Caron in “Gigi,” Loretta Young in “The Farmer’s Daughter” and Audrey Hepburn in “Sabrina” and again in “My Fair Lady” were literal reflections of the beauty supposedly hidden by their station in life.

Although virtue frequently goes punished in life, for a time beauty rarely went unrewarded in the movies.

*

Poor waifs, ingenues and blue-collar gals saved by a heroic leading man began to sound and look different about the time women across America began torching passive/submissive femininity along with their bras. Cinderella started using the F-word, having premarital sex and even holding the prince up to ridicule and contempt. She had intelligence, quick wits and street smarts. But she was still beautiful.

In 1970’s “Love Story,” smart scholarship babe Jennifer Cavilleri belittles uber rich preppy Oliver Barrett until he proposes. She acknowledges that she’s attracted to him in part because he’s rich. The fact that he gets disinherited and she dies is ostensibly beside the point since they graduated from Harvard.

An entire generation that came to see beauty as a burden turned on any woman, even an oppressed, unpaid laborer, who relied on her looks at the expense of her mind and character. Hollywood Cinderellas born of the modern American women’s movement bore the paradoxes in the tug of war between feminists over beauty.

Since Naomi Wolf published “The Beauty Myth” and feminist commentator Camille Paglia proclaimed her a “twit” at M.I.T., “the beauty question,” in Paglia’s words, “has been a very perplexing one for feminists.”

The first wave of feminism in the ‘60s revolted against the tyranny of beauty, a position that’s hardened into party line. Renegade feminists like Paglia insist that feminist ideology has ossified, that women can now choose to be sexy as well as smart and self-sufficient. Both Hollywood and Paglian feminists believe in make-overs.

*

Even though brains supposedly replaced virtue as the saving grace for aspiring Cinderellas in the ‘70s and ‘80s, traditional standards of beauty remained a given. Virtue became more or less optional.

Take Melanie Griffith’s character, Tess, in “Working Girl.” Tess lies, deceives, pilfers and vacuums topless, but she gets Harrison Ford and an office with a window because, as she says, she “can’t help it if [she] has a head for business and a bod for sin.”

At the movies, virtue and inner beauty had had its day. Modern Cinderellas with intelligence and chutzpah were the ones exalted by the end credits. It was supposed to be a coincidence that these liberated movie Cinderellas were beautiful. It was beside the point. Didn’t they often triumph over equally statuesque femme fatales? Didn’t they show more moxie than the stepsisters, lady bosses and pert cheerleaders?

Despite the shifts in popular consciousness about the female qualities with which Prince Charming and society should fall in love, the fixation on beauty never changed. Now in the ‘90s, it’s time once again to revisit the definition of who truly qualifies as a cinematic Cinderella.

What gave Cinderella such international, totemic resonance was the unlikelihood of her transcending her station. In today’s Hollywood, the unlikelihood is transcending one’s looks. That’s why the modern cinematic Cinderellas are more plain Jane than prostitute.

We expect, even demand, our beautiful Cinderellas to ascend to love, fortune and revenge over old enemies and oppressors. But Minnie Driver landing Chris O’Donnell in “Circle of Friends”? Now, that’s a fairy tale. (Forget for a moment that Driver has converted to Paglianism, lost weight, worked out and now specializes in pretty girlfriend roles.)

Most critics likened “The Truth About Cats & Dogs” to Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac.” But Janeane Garofalo was one part Cyrano to three parts Cinderella, an unsuitable, average-looking serf for the dashing Prince Charmings of L.A.

Character actresses Joan Cusack (“Working Girl,” “In & Out”), Rosie O’Donnell (“Beautiful Girls”), Rikki Lake (“Mrs. Winterbourne”) and Garofalo (“The Matchmaker”) are the Cinderellas of our time. Like Eve Arden before them, they are quick-witted and golden-hearted but rank far less than 10. They embody on screen the qualities demanded by life, if not success, in modern society. If that’s not the pitch for Cinderella, what is?

Filmmakers with hip Cinderella stories are now as ambivalent about beauty as the feminists. Previously consigned to the ash heap of love and money, plain Jane Cinderellas now sometimes get both before the final credits but still rarely without a make-over first.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Maybe that’s just part of the myth of having it all in a moralizing culture that wants its folk tales and movie stars to have a happy ending.

There are more modern alternatives. In political scientist Fetscher’s real politik version, Cinderella becomes Norma Rae, leading a successful strike by servant girls and founding a maids and servants union. The fact that she ends up in prison, her union crushed by an anti-labor monarch, ultimately forced to emigrate to America, is perhaps a more enlightening if less satisfying dream.

Unless, of course, this Cinderella sells her story to Hollywood and Neve Campbell signs on for once upon a time.