Kenneth Branagh tells the old story straight, with no winks and no revisions, and most of the time that is enough. Lily James is warm, Cate Blanchett is better than the film needs, and the prince is a well-dressed gap.
Kenneth Branagh has made a Cinderella with no irony in it. Nobody turns out to be secretly the villain, the stepmother is wicked because she is wicked, the slipper is glass and the pumpkin becomes a coach. Chris Weitz’s screenplay takes Charles Perrault’s story and adds a few rooms: a dying king, a scheming duke, a meeting in a forest before the ball. It is a good film of its kind, slow to start and a little pleased with its own virtue, and at 105 minutes it does not outstay the story.
Dante Ferretti builds the Tremaine house as a cluttered merchant’s home, with a kitchen you could cook in and an attic you could not sleep in, and the palace as acres of pale stone and gilt that Haris Zambarloukos lights so the ballroom seems to glow from inside. The colours are pushed high: the stepsisters wear pink and yellow that quarrel in every frame they share. Sandy Powell’s costumes do more storytelling than some of the dialogue. Blanchett’s gowns are cut like something from the 1940s, veiled hats and a nipped waist, and they say she has been elegant for a long time. The blue ball gown moves like water, which is the whole job of it.
The ball is the film’s best stretch and Branagh knows it. Patrick Doyle, who has scored his films since Henry V (1989), writes a waltz that rises exactly when it should, Martin Walsh cuts between the dancing couple and the staring court without once losing where anyone is standing, and the camera moves with the skirt. We are not easily got at by a frock. Yet the first time James turned under the chandeliers and the dress lifted off the floor, we felt the lift the film was reaching for, and we did not resent it.
Lily James has the harder part and nearly brings it off. She plays goodness as a decision rather than a temperament, and she smiles with her mouth closed, which keeps it from cloying. The script does not help her: her mother’s dying words, have courage and be kind, are repeated so often that by the ball we were saying them along with her. Blanchett has a part somebody has thought about. Her Lady Tremaine is cruel in a voice pitched for the drawing room, laughs a beat too long at her daughters’ jokes, and gets one shot alone on the stairs at night, glass in hand, that is lonelier than anything the heroine suffers.
The men are thin. Richard Madden’s Prince is given nothing to want except her, and his scenes with Derek Jacobi’s dying King, the old man asking him to marry sensibly, the young one asking to marry well, read as if written to a word count. Stellan Skarsgård’s Grand Duke mutters and plots, and the second half lets him into a bargain we will not describe. Nonso Anozie has the warmest male part as the Captain, mostly by looking amused. Helena Bonham Carter, who also narrates in a tone of mild astonishment, arrives as the Fairy Godmother, turns lizards into footmen and a goose into a coachman, and is gone inside ten minutes. The film is better and sillier while she is in it.
The first half hour drags. Ben Chaplin and Hayley Atwell are given the loving parents and the early deaths, and Branagh lingers over the house, the garden and the mice for longer than a story everyone already knows can carry. Weitz’s additions, the forest meeting most of all, help the romance and cost the pace, and there is a preaching streak in the writing that none of the actors can quite hide.
This is of a piece with Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993): sunny, sincere, fond of a big room and a speech said straight. See it with children, or with someone who will not groan at a pumpkin. It carries a U, and for once that is the point: there is nothing here to warn anyone about except the goodness, and there is a great deal of that.
