Sam Downing

Remember those silly, campy, lots-of-zany-”boing!”-sound-effects bits near the start of Moulin Rouge? Mirror Mirror is basically an entire movie of that.

This is Snow White, but not as you “snow” (ha) it: Mirror Mirror takes the classic fairy tale, shatters it, puts it back together with the dexterity of a blind street urchin on a sugar high. The story’s most familiar elements remain mostly intact. A wicked queen (Julia Roberts, who’s having FUN) terrorises her fairest-of-them-all stepdaughter Snow White (Lily Collins, who’s got EYEBROWS. Lord, has this girl got eyebrows), casting her into a spooky forest where she’s adopted by seven dwarves¹ who each embody a different quirky character trait, like Fat, or Frowny, or Short.

The notable departure from that original is, now that we’ve solved sexism, you can’t just have a handsome prince sweeping in to save the helpless pure maiden from an evil older woman who symbolises icky female sexuality. Mirror Mirror gets around this by making its handsome prince, Alcott (Armie Hammer), a buffoon who’s rescued by Snow White as much as she rescues him. (He remains, however, extremely handsome. And frequently shirtless!) Handily, Snow White gains both skills with a sword and a chic haircut (presumably given to her by the Fashionable dwarf), allowing her to fight alongside her prince and defeat the queen together.

You need to be in a certain frame of mind to enjoy this movie. Approach it one way, it’s fluffy fun. Approach it another way, there’s a desperation to convince you that everyone onscreen is having such fun (nowhere is this more obvious than the inexplicable, wildly off-key, isn’t-this-so-such-fun Bollywood dance sequence that plays over the closing credits. No, really).

Eyebrows eyebrows, on the face/You're really distracting, like whoa

In the film’s favour, Roberts gets off some good one-liners (even if she does say them in an accent she apparently learned watching high-schoolers perform Shakespeare), while Hammer throws himself into the thing with admirable energy (and handsomeness. Though it’s a shame his identical twin brother couldn’t star in this one too). The weak link is Collins, a sweet lick of nothing who never makes much of an impression… aside from those eyebrows of hers.

Given it’s directed by Tarsem Singh, Mirror Mirror isn’t as visually over-the-top as I expected. There’s a smallness to the look of the film – I swear that isn’t a coded dwarf joke – which focuses the sense this is a ultimately a children’s film that adults might enjoy.

1. Tolkein spelling, yeah! [↩]

Julia Roberts playing a woman who looks like Julia Roberts, next to George Clooney playing a man who doesn't look like George Clooney

So you’re watching Hollywood Movie, starring, say, Male Lead Played By Well-Known Actor (for simplicity’s sake, let’s say Steve Carell) and Female Lead Played By Well-Known Actress (say, Amy Adams), and Actress’s character comments on her crush on Tom Cruise, to which Actor’s character responds that Angelina Jolie is way more bangable.

What’s really going on here?

Obviously Hollywood Movie is fictional, but scenes like this happen in films all the time, where recognisable actors refer, in character, to their real-life Hollywood peers. What are we to make of these moments?

One assumption is that Hollywood Movie is, in fact, set in an alternate reality where the actors Steve Carell and Amy Adams don’t exist (or at least, where they’re not Hollywood stars); however, a couple of regular, ordinary, non-famous characters who happen to look exactly like our reality’s Steve Carell and Amy Adams do exist.

Alternatively, we can assume that Hollywood Movie is set in our reality, and is about a couple of regular, ordinary, non-famous people who happen to look exactly like the film stars Steve Carell and Amy Adams. The problem with this assumption, though, is that you then have to wonder why none of Hollywood Movie’s other characters (played, presumably, by yet more well-known actors and actresses) ever notice Male Lead and Female Lead look awfully like Steve Carell and Amy Adams. Or why Male Lead and Female Lead never notice every significant person in their lives also looks like a Hollywood actor((Steal this idea: a comedy about a town whose residents do realise they all look like Hollywood actors, and open some sort of impersonation theme park! Charlie Kaufman, are you available to write this thing?)).

The only film I can think of that explicitly addresses this conundrum is Ocean’s Twelve, which has Julia Roberts playing Tess, a woman who looks exactly like Julia Roberts and impersonates her to gain advantage. Yet this just raises more questions – why doesn’t anyone remark on Danny Ocean’s resemblance to George Clooney? Or on Rusty’s resemblance to Brad Pitt, or on Linus’s resemblance to Matt Damon, et cetera?

It seems Ocean’s Twelve is a clumsy mishmash of both of our earlier assumptions: it’s set in an alternate reality where Clooney et all don’t exist, but in which Roberts does exist.