The first thing that must be said about Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Nutcracker in 3D is that if you are looking to recapture the magic of Tchaikovsky’s much-loved ballet, or even be taken into the fantastical world of ETA Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the ballet was based, prepare to be disappointed. Konchalovsky has taken a hatchet to both the book and the music, and what emerges is not a deconstruction of the fairy tale, but a thorough massacre of it.
In and of itself, there is no reason why taking a well-loved fairy tale apart and reconstituting it in new ways should be a bad thing. Post-modernism is in our blood, and little of the past is safe from our tinkering. After all, conventional productions of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, for all the beauty of the music, have become just a tad shopworn through familiarity. Moreover, it has become common knowledge that fairy tales, such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, were a lot less innocent than the tidied up versions that grace children’s playrooms.
Unfortunately, Konchalovsky has chopped up Tchaikovsky’s music into little snippets and tied them to doggerel verse composed by Tim Rice in what he appears to think is a cleverly ironic fashion. The Nutcracker in 3D never becomes a full-blown musical, but teeters hesitantly on the edge, with a few half-hearted musical numbers. And as for the darkness of fairy tales, Konchalovsky has simply dumped an ungainly heap of Holocaust imagery into the film and turned the mouse king into a fascist dictator. This would be merely ridiculous if it weren’t in such bad taste.
Photo courtesy of Applause Entertainment
The story opens in 1920s Vienna. Mary (Elle Fanning) receives a special Christmas present from her godfather: a wooden nutcracker in the shape of a red-coated soldier. This is in fact a young prince who has been turned into wood by the mouse queen, and whose kingdom has been conquered by an army of rats. These odious rulers take the toys from all the children in the city and burn them, creating a black fog around the city. While not violent, scenes in which dolls and teddy bears are torn from the arms of weeping children who are ineffectually pacified by terrified parents render this movie quite unsuitable for younger children.
Mary brings the nutcracker to life and helps the young prince battle the evil mouse queen. It goes without saying that they are ultimately victorious, aided by a motley crew of dolls that includes a fat clown, a black drummer boy and a cigar-smoking monkey, who are never adequately explained and don’t seem to serve any important function.
That Mary has entered into a dream is underlined by references to Freud, and the reason that Mary’s Uncle Albert is Einstein (E=MC2 even makes it into a song) is another baffling aspect of the film. The 12-year-old Elle Fanning does some of the best acting, putting the likes of Nathan Lane (Uncle Albert, whose Viennese accent is just a crude caricature), John Turturro (the Rat King) and Richard E. Grant (Mary’s father) to shame. Konchalovsky shows a slightly worrying tendency to sexualize Fanning — there are some unnecessary scenes when Mary’s conservative frock comes off the shoulder a little too conveniently — but this is all part and parcel of his uncertainty about whether he is making an edgy children’s film or exploring his own less than edifying neuroses.
Reportedly The Nutcracker in 3D was a dream project that the director has cherished hopes of making for 20 years, and the only evidence that might be presented in mitigation of this car crash of a film is that the poor man simply has had too long to think about the project and in trying to cram in too much has got everything into a muddle.
A final weakness is the “in 3D” so prominently displayed in the title. The film was not made for 3D, and was arguably only converted to this overrated format in an attempt to help sell tickets. This is just one more wrong decision, for 3D conversion is notorious for making a film darker and for reducing contrast, and this has effectively stripped away whatever visual appeal the film may have originally had.
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