The Rise Of The Princess Warrior: Stewart Breaks Out The Armor In "Snow White and the Huntsman"

Not so long ago, the sight of a woman in chainmail could only have served as the butt end of a joke in a Hollywood film. But by the time scenes of Kristen Stewart in armor roll around toward the tail end of Snow White and the Huntsman, her metal attire is not a laughing matter at all. “You look good in mail,” comments Chris Hemsworth’s grizzled Huntsman and, besides being a flashy pun on the part of the all-too-clever writers, the comment rings with sincerity. The Huntsman means no humor in pointing out Snow White’s dress; she does look good in the armor.

Kristen Stewart dons armor for her role in Snow White and the Huntsman; via altfg.com

Directed by first-timer Rupert Sanders and written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock, and Hossein Amini, Snow White and the Huntsman isn’t so much a return to the darknesses of the original Grimm Brothers fairytale (moving away from Disney’s light-hearted 1937 film, which has come to define the story in the modern day imagination) as it is a revisionist, feminist take on the tale, as both Disney and Grimm defined it: the helpless princess is a creature of the past.

More today than ever before, the archetype of the damsel in distress is an embattled figure in the modern film landscape. Twilight’s Bella Swan (conspicuously also played by Kristen Stewart) might be the last of a breed; the admiring eyes of tween girls seem to have shifted to The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence in the recent film adaptation) and Stewart’s incarnation of Snow White as potential role models. Not only are these young women strong and independent, they possess the warrior spirit, the special knack of roughhousing with the boys but escaping the tags of either ‘tomboy’ or ‘femme fatale.’

I like to think of Hollywood’s acceptance of something as a kind of societal measuring stick: how far have we made it? Take, for example, Sean Penn’s Best Oscar win for his portrayal of Harvey Milk in 2008; that acceptance into the inner Oscar circle represented an important cultural victory for gay rights in the U.S. As the final frontier of American culture, once a movement or social concept breaks down the battlements of Hollywood, then it’s there to stay—perhaps even to rule. The successes seen by Katniss and Snow White—The Hunger Games owns the distinction of being the first film in the top-grossing action films of all-time helmed by a female lead and Snow White and the Huntsman has already grossed over $100 million in the worldwide box office—will not be isolated ones; I suspect that we will see a parade of warrior princesses in the near cinematic future.

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As culturally relevant as the film might be, the question remains of whether or not it’s any good. As it turns out, Sanders et al have turned out a pretty decent popcorn flick. Chief among its delights are Charlize Theron’s turn as the evil queen Ravenna and the stunning visuals, put together by cinematographer Greig Fraser, who served as director of photography for Jane Campion’s Keats biopic Bright Star, another film that played around in the lushness of nature. Fraser’s eye for detail sometimes feels overwrought, but he hits the right note in key moments, like the woodsy charm he provides the fairy paradise, which could easily have teetered into ham-handed hokeyness.

The plot is a bit convoluted and the characters, besides the queen and Snow White, are a little too shakily drawn to be of any enduring interest. Both the Huntsman and William, Snow White’s aristocratic love interest, beg for further development. All around, the acting is no better than you’d expect from a summer blockbuster; Stewart’s turn as Snow White is the one bright spot in the film. (Although I admit the talent I detect in her performance might be partly due to how little the Twilight series asks of her in comparison.) Either way, I admired how she balanced a character composed of equal parts muted anger and wide-eyed wonder, of singleness of purpose and self-discovery. She is both warring firebrand and sensitive caretaker. One might go so far as to say that this incarnation Snow White is even a series of paradoxes: a paragon of innocence edged with anger and violence, a damsel in distress who does not ask for our help.

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Beauty, as a cultural entity, finds itself under attack in this film—not only literally, as in the case of Charlize Theron’s CGI-assisted facial wrinkles, but also conceptually, in terms of how humanity chooses to understand beauty and the pursuit of its ideal. After all, every story of Snow White—no matter how revisionist—begins with the same question: Who is the fairest of them all? It seemed like a harmless, natural question when I came across the story as a child (and probably still seems that way in the recent film Mirror, Mirror), but this film transforms the question into a much darker dialogue.

One of the film’s most successful scenes is that in which Ravenna is speaking to the mirror on the wall, which, it ought to be noted, has oozed off its Zildjian-cymbal surface and taken human form. However, Ravenna’s brother, whose point-of-view is picked up as he spies on his sister from around a corner, sees her speaking to no one; the mirror remains motionless on the wall. It is a brief, but powerful point about the captivating power of one’s own image and the obsessive battle that some people have with their own likenesses.

Additionally, the film implicitly questions the notion of an ideal of beauty. Once Ravenna asks the mirror who “the fairest” is, she enters into a relation with the world in which beauty is a measurable commodity, in which women can somehow be slotted onto a scale. It is, of course, a nonsensical notion—one that you hope could only ever exist in a fairytale…except for the fact that it doesn’t. Many people carry that kind of illogical conceptualization of beauty with them through their everyday lives.

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The best moment in this film is the end. (Spoiler alert, if you somehow didn’t sense the parade of spoilers headed your way.) Snow White is crowned queen and the court, which fills the castle hall, looks on in joy. The film gives us close-ups of the Huntsman and the duke’s nephew William. They both flash admiring (adoring?) glances in the direction of Snow White. In the final shot, the camera backs down the hall’s center aisle, away from Snow White’s throne, and out the heavy wooden doors, which close in on us. The credits roll. Crucially, the closed door cuts us off from the romantic entanglements of the story; the film provides Snow White with a choice, but it doesn’t make her choose. The two male suitors are left hanging. They may or may not be chosen by Snow White. Unlike her counterpart Bella Swan, there is a third choice (outside of Edward and Jacob)…that being no choice. However, that’s not the end of the door’s significance.

The most famous door closed in the face of the audience is, of course, the door swung shut on John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers. It might come off as humorous at first, but the closed door is, in fact, weightily symbolic, serving as a reminder of the separation between the audience and the character and vice versa. When the door closes on Wayne’s receding back, it contextualizes an obvious statement: we can’t get out there and he can’t get in here. It seems to me that the door at the end of Snow White and the Huntsman serves a similar purpose.

It remains to be puzzled out, however, who we, as the audience, represent and who Snow White, as a fairytale character, represents. In my reading, Snow White represents a new kind of female hero, who may or may not be separated from the rest of the world—the rest of Hollywood in particular. I think there’s room, however, for her kind of character on our outside. Indeed, I consider myself one among many who would like to see a world filled with young women who choose one version of Stewart over another—the Snow White version, of course. And who doesn’t want to be a princess?