The Witches review: this sappy, CGI-soaked remake is an embarrassment to Roald Dahl
Dir: Robert Zemeckis; Cast: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Jahzir Bruno, Chris Rock, Stanley Tucci, Morgana Robinson, Charles Edwards, Kristin Chenoweth, Codie-Lei Eastick, 106 mins.
Roald Dahl’s The Witches has the pungent power we associate with his best books, a formula which bubbled over wickedly into cinema once before. Nicolas Roeg, of Don't Look Now fame, was mired in a creative rut when producer Jim Henson picked him to direct the 1990 film. The result was a seriously warped, wonderful adaptation which only failed in two respects. Dahl was appalled by the change to his ending, and the release got tangled up by a corporate merger, hobbling its box office.
2020’s uncertainties have consigned the new remake to an uncinematic fate of its own – straight to VoD – which is no longer an automatic indication of something sub-par. (The same is happening with Pixar’s Soul at Christmas.) With the best will in the world, though, it’s hard not to watch Robert Zemeckis and his cast dig back into this story without rooting for a redo that’s significantly more special.
The first iffy innovation is a Chris Rock voiceover, giving us the basic facts about witches up front – they’re real, they’re out to get children, and he should know, since he was a young orphan in 1968 Alabama (played for the remaining duration by Jahzir Bruno), and ran into a whole coven.
Before the hotel stay where this showdown will occur, the film’s best twenty minutes idle by, thanks chiefly to Octavia Spencer’s reliable warmth as grandma, helping depressed, eight-year-old Charlie through the trauma of a snowy car wreck which killed his mom and dad.
An African-American spin on Dahl’s tale might have played as a more laudable idea if Zemeckis hadn’t dumped it in the kind of cornbread neighborhood, familiar from The Help, that feels like a lazy shorthand for the South, and dropped the needle every few minutes on a deathless soul classic to jimmy things along.
But there’s a bigger problem in making Agatha (Spencer) a more passive character than Dahl or Roeg imagined. Despite having escaped the clutches of the Grand High Witch as a little girl, she has grown into nothing like the zealous witch-hunter Mai Zetterling immortalised. Every hushed word about witches ought to come from this boy’s stern granny, not from a grating Rock as adult Charlie, or the myth is pointlessly diluted.
For Roeg, Anjelica Huston played the Grand High Witch with magnificent contempt. Find a more hair-raising moment in fantasy cinema than her wig removal during the witches’ committee meeting, revealing the hideous crone beneath. Anne Hathaway strains for an original angle on this fount of all evil, and you definitely feel the strain.
To be fair, she’s trussed up with campy, femme-fatale flair by Zemeckis’s usual costume designer, Joanna Johnston, but the fun stops there. Pushily imperious, this is not divine villainy – it’s nearer to head girl’s star turn at an end-of-year revue. Her accent wanders effortfully from Norway to Transylvania via... the Hebrides? Little is gained from having her levitate. The scary elements of her witch – a mouth that gapes ear-to-ear with razor-sharp gnashers, and arms that extend disjointedly across whole rooms – are all down to Zemeckis’s typically overworked CGI department.
Once Charlie and his new English pal Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick) are transformed into mice, the film settles into a kind of plucky Stuart Little groove that feels tonally at odds with everything Dahl was writing about. The plot’s overexplained as if we lack faith kids could follow it, and sappy learnings sink a whole series of dialogue scenes into mush. Spencer rather recedes into the furniture – it’s all about mouse heroism to the finish – while Stanley Tucci, in the Rowan Atkinson role of officious (now low-key racist) hotel manager, finds few rewards in the part, unless you count one almighty flap when he’s molested by flying rats.
The chaos unleashed by Henson’s puppeteers in the first film was brilliantly grotesque, but it was Roeg’s twinkling eye for the uncanny in the banal English seaside setting which made it sing. Revisiting that one, you get to know the faces of a good dozen witches plotting in their individually crazed ways.
Here they’re little more than extras, lined up and neglected while Hathaway vamps and raves. This production sticks with Dahl’s ending – at least, it likes to think it does. He wouldn’t recognise it, and would undoubtedly be aghast at everything else. He might even beg Roeg’s forgiveness in the afterlife, for bestowing a redemption that succeeds like good magic, cancelling out the bad.
