Review: The Witches

After the death of his parents, a 1960s Alabama kid (Jahzir Bruno) is taken in by his grandmother (Octavia Spencer), who tells him all kinds of stories about witches. Witches who hate children, no less. When the twosome check into a hotel, the boy uncovers a meeting for the ladies of the Society for Prevention to Children. However, these ladies turn out not to be mere ladies. They are foul witches, led by the imperious Grand High Witch (played by a camp Anne Hathaway) who announces a plan to turn the world’s children into mice by poisoning confectionary! Stanley Tucci plays the slimy hotel manager.

 

Back in 1990, director Nicolas Roeg mostly delivered the nasty goods with his film version of the Roald Dahl grotesquely amusing classic. In 2020, American filmmaker Robert Zemeckis (“Romancing the Stone”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “Forrest Gump”) and his co-screenwriters Kenya Barris (creator of TV’s “Black-ish”) and Guillermo Del Toro (director of “Hellboy” and “The Shape of Water”) took a crack at it, and the results are much lesser. I was initially unsure of the necessity of transplanting the already excellent and accessible story to an American – and largely African-American – perspective due to its two main characters. I figured why not just go and make a similar film but call it something else? Why are we having soul music staples on the soundtrack to this particular story? I also think Chris Rock’s distinctive voice is wildly inappropriate to narrate the film. He’s hammy and strikes the wrong comic note for what is essentially a grotesque, dark family comedy. However, after a few minutes I started to warm to the change. I realised that the story is still the same, and even the tone isn’t too far off either aside from Rock’s narration. It may lose a bit of innate Roald Dahl Britishness, but the film having an African-American lead character (and his grandmother) will likely open the film up to not just a new generation of kids, but also a wider spectrum of people who will hopefully then go back and read the original novel. So that’s a good thing, though I don’t think that makes it a necessary thing. I can appreciate plenty of stories outside of my own country/culture and always have. I think it’s a lot less necessary than say, the recent reboot of TV’s “The Wonder Years”. There’s a genuine storytelling merit to remaking that show from an African-American perspective outside of just getting a different/wider audience. Still, it didn’t ultimately factor into my feelings on the film as a whole. The real problem here? The film just isn’t very good, regardless of its setting/characters/culture. It might work OK for the younger set, but even then the 1990 version still works better, and Dahl’s novel still reigns supreme over both.

 

Aside from an excellent music score by Alan Silvestri (“Romancing the Stone”, “Forrest Gump”), what I do especially like about this film are two main things; 1) The casting of Octavia Spencer and Stanley Tucci, and 2) I loved the emphasis on the kid overcoming the loss of his parents early in the film. It’s really well-conveyed, if fairly quickly dispensed with to start the real plot of the film. The rest…yeah, it didn’t really do much for me and even Tucci ends up rather wasted. In fact, even Spencer is less interestingly utilised in the film’s second half.

 

As The Grand High Witch, Anne Hathaway looks less like a Dahl creation and more a plastic surgery nightmare envisioned by Tim Burton. That’s not a million miles from Dahl I’ll admit, and Burton might’ve been an interesting choice for director. However, as much fun as Hathaway appears to be having, she’s rather miscast. She’s a fine actress in the right part but here she’s not menacing, she’s not creepy, and she’s definitely not Anjelica Huston (who was pitch-perfect in the 1990 version). She gives it a good go, but it’s a pretty hollow performance. Jessica Chastain or Cate Blanchett would’ve nailed the part. I said that the film might work better for the younger set, and that’s mainly because the weakest part of the 1990 version gets more emphasis here. If you enjoyed all of those cutesy talking mice scenes in the earlier film, you’ll probably enjoy what Zemeckis gives you here. Personally, it’s the least interesting aspect to me as an adult. Dahl usually works well for young and old, but this version felt like a mixture of “Harry Potter” and “Stuart Little”, and I don’t find much appeal in that combination at nearly 42 years of age. And why were the mice walking upright? That was a weird and unnecessary detail. In fact, I thought the CGI rats/mice were fairly unremarkable.

 

I will say this, though. To the accusations that have been levelled against this film as being ableist, as a paraplegic I’d like to believe I’ve got something of a right to speak on something I found very disturbing…and what that something is might surprise you. The film earned some controversy for its depiction of the witches apparently having physical deformities, with even star Hathaway publicly apologising. In my opinion, the accusations are false, unnecessary, and embarrassing. Perhaps those even closer to the issue than I am (I have all of my limbs, some just don’t work) may feel differently about it, but as a disabled person myself I think it makes a mockery of real cases of hurt, insult, and discrimination against the disabled community. Anyone who has read the Dahl book and sees this film should surely be able to detect what are very clearly talons/claws, not missing limbs or digits. As in the book, the witches have talons/claws, they are not missing or deformed limbs. Witches are not necessarily human in this context. It’s a shameful and regrettable controversy in my book.

 

Occasionally watchable, but ultimately inferior adaptation never really captured my interest, despite being a Dahl fan since childhood. There’s a lot of the same content as both the book and 1990 film version, but with far less impact. Octavia Spencer is excellent, the film is ordinary.  

 

Rating: C