Kristen Stewart.

The idea underpinning Snow White and the Huntsman is a charming one. Epic summer movies use the language of fairy tale and myth to tell stories about contemporary heroes (who are The Avengers but a bunch of Olympians?); why not cut out the middleman and make a movie about a story everyone already knows?

Unfortunately, Snow White and the Huntsman expands strangely on the story every child knows before even hearing of Iron Man or Batman, making it a melange of fairy-tale and dull contemporary romance. Snow White, here, is not the sweetie who lives with seven hapless dwarfs—but, with little in the way of characterization, she’s a cipher.

Played by the vague and disassociated Kristen Stewart, Snow White spends the movie evading capture by the evil Queen’s army, but her most prominent character trait is her apparent beauty. At one point, a pursuing troll decides not to kill her simply because he gets a good look at her. Snow White, in the fairy tale and the Disney animated film, is not a dynamic character, and this film is true to form, placing at its center a young woman whose fairness has obviated the need for a personality.

As is so often the case, the film’s most intriguing character is the villain, Charlize Theron’s Ravenna. She is obsessed with her beauty and with consolidating power over Snow White’s unnamed kingdom, a land that she took over after killing Snow White’s father. Ms. Theron, chewing just the right amount of scenery, builds out the Queen into a character one misses whenever she’s not onscreen. She’s aided by the truly remarkable costume design and CGI work and hindered by the screenplay; far more thought was put into a bodice adorned with tiny bird skulls than into the specific rules governing Ravenna’s magical powers. Sometimes she gets power from sucking the beauty out of women, sometimes she does so by killing men. Ravenna can only be killed by the one person more beautiful than she—Snow White. While it’s unsporting to rank actresses according to their pulchritude, this movie’s conflation of beauty with virtue (in the case of Snow White) and power (in the case of both female leads) makes it an unfortunate necessity. Leave it at this: Kristen Stewart is more beautiful than the world’s most beautiful actress because the movie tells us so.

Given the general lack of elaboration as to Ravenna’s powers and Snow White’s character, the middle scenes of the movie are airless. In scene after scene, Snow White evades capture by the Queen’s henchmen simply by running out of the way; as an action caper, Snow White and the Huntsman lacks narrative ingenuity. Returning to Ravenna’s castle yields diminishing returns as well. Crafty though she is as an actress, Ms. Theron can shout "Bring me Snow White!" or a variation only so many times. If we miss her when she’s offscreen, we yearn for her appearances to have real heft.

Both Snow White’s adventures in the forest and the Queen’s ramblings in the castle may be doomed by director Rupert Sanders’s visual imagination. The movie is truly splendid to look at, and the vast tools at Mr. Sanders’s disposal stand in for any real narrative development. Snow White undergoes surrealist hallucinations, then goes to a fairy-ruled domain that Jean Cocteau might have directed if he had the budget for CGI. The Queen’s mirror drips onto the floor and re-forms in the shape of a man. With tricks like this, why wouldn’t a director keep using them again and again in place of scenes where Snow White reveals a motivation beyond survival?

The film’s greatest and most misused visual effect is Chris Hemsworth, who has overcome the burden of remarkable good looks to become one of the most charismatic young actors in Hollywood. Smeared in dirt, Mr. Hemsworth affects the movie’s sole convincing accent (the American, South African and Australian leads of this movie all play crypto-British) and plays the most interesting character. His huntsman, contracted to kill Snow White, is mourning the death of his wife and is unmoved by Snow White’s dubious charms. The movie, though, constructs a love triangle with Snow White’s childhood friend as the third wheel; this feels de rigueur, as though the screenwriters knew Kristen Stewart choosing between two men is more appealing at the box office than Kristen Stewart independent and fighting for survival.

It hardly seems coincidental that the film’s most interesting character is the one freighted with the least baggage; Snow White and the Queen are already well-known characters despite the fact that neither of them are interesting in their particulars. The attempts to push back against the commonly held awareness of who they are end up making Snow White inert rather than nice—she just isn’t convincing as the warrior princess she becomes at film’s end—and the Queen monomaniacal in a repetitive fashion. If one is adapting a well-known public-domain story to the screen, that story should have the adaptability to bear imagination. Snow White is not an interesting character, but she is a character to whom interesting things happen. Altering those events to a repeated series of narrow escapes (the dwarfs, here, are foot soldiers for Snow White, which is as bizarre as it sounds) and casting a notably uncharismatic actress as the woman who keeps making those escapes does the tale no service.

How, then, should fairy tales be adapted? (An adult version of Hansel and Gretel is said to be in the offing.) While the creativity behind Snow White and the Huntsman is to be lauded, that same creativity results in an alteration of the Snow White character to the degree that she’s both unrecognizable—and recognizable as a typical Kristen Stewart heroine, dazed and dependent upon male intervention. Had the film been more faithful to the narrative of its source material, it would have been better; that faithfulness would not have been for its own sake, but rather an acknowledgment that archetypal stories get passed along for a reason.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Running Time 127 minutes

Written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini

Directed by Rupert Sanders

Starring Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron (Getty Images)

Newsweek's current issue features its annual pre-nominations "Oscar roundtable"--and either it'll look dated when nominations are announced tomorrow, or we need to adjust our predictions! The panelists are likely nominees George Clooney and Viola Davis (the working-it pair both recently appeared together on an Entertainment Weekly cover, too), as well as Christopher Plummer, Tilda Swinton, Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron.

How good is Newsweek at choosing panelists who will be Oscar-nominated? Some years are great--last year's panel featured six eventual nominees and both the Best Actor and Best Actress--and others less predictive. In the past ten Oscar panels (discounting the two panels speaking to five directors apiece, of whose number eight ended up nominated), 48 actors have been interviewed about their Oscar hopeful performances, with eight missing the mark. These "losers" include Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Naomi Watts, so their inclusion isn't exactly surprising.

The rate of an Oscar roundtabler getting an Oscar nomination, 40 of 48, is exactly a 5/6 probability--so one of the current panelists (sorry, Charlize! We really loved Young Adult) will probably have talked about the Oscars a bit presumptively.

Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes (Getty Images)

Welcome to New York Observer's Golden Globe coverage of the 2012, where you'll be able to read (and participate!) in real time as Drew Grant and Dan D'Addario take bets on which acclaimed actor will be the first to slap that lopsided grin right off Ricky Gervais' face. Let the fun begin!

Theron.

Another triumphant performance by Charlize Theron informs and enhances the otherwise uneven Young Adult, an edgy and sometimes disappointing drama about contemporary neuroses with comic undertones from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, the team responsible for the surprise 2007 hit Juno. It’s not in the same league as Mr. Reitman’s hugely superior Up in the Air, but Ms. Theron, a true beauty and one of the screen’s most exquisite actors, keeps the film airborne even when it seems dangerously earthbound. She’s a one-woman emergency rescue squad.

Interesting, no? I mean the way great-looking actors will do everything they can to hide their camera-ready perfection. In her ugliest transformation, Ms. Theron disfigured herself to play lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003) and not only saved the movie but won herself an Oscar in the bargain. The success and praise must have rubbed off. In Young Adult, she rarely wears makeup, her hair is an unmade bed, and the wardrobe looks like it came from a Black Friday sale at K-Mart. But she is mesmerizing as Mavis Gary, an obsessive-compulsive ghost writer of the kind of bare-chested “young adult” pulp fiction they display in airport departure lounges, who is so depressed she can barely crawl out of bed in the morning. Somehow Mavis manages to climb into her car and drive from her apartment in Minneapolis to her sad, boring little home town of Mercury, Minn., on a mission: to restake her claim on an old high school boyfriend named Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), who is now married with a new baby. Mercury is one of those dead ends of Midwestern highway ambience well worth escaping—populated by Staples and Home Depots, with a Taco Bell, KFC and Chili’s, all in the same building—get the picture? So it is immediately obvious why Mavis left town, although her ambition seems to have flat-lined immediately. She’s a deplorable flop in life (unhappily divorced, no kids) and work. Even when she brags about her glamorous success as a novelist it’s a sham, since her romance series has been canceled due to lack of interest and she doesn’t know where her next paycheck is coming from. But she’s hell-bent on recapturing whatever appeal she once had to seduce Buddy again, oblivious to the fact that he’s happily settled into the role of hick-town husband and father and scarcely even remembers her. After checking into a sterile room in a characterless Hampton Inn, she finds his phone number and makes a date for old time’s sake. Oddly, she also accidentally runs into—and ends up spending more time in the company of—a fat geek (Patton Oswalt) who has been crippled for life by a high school gay-bashing experience. When she finally meets Buddy, he’s a square who talks about changing diapers and adoring his wife, who plays drums in a female rock band called Nipple Confusion. Nothing Mavis does to distract him from his creepy routine or besotted loyalty works, but that does not deter her from saying all the wrong things, going so far as to tell his wife, “Buddy used to sleep in T-shirts and boxer shorts—I still have some of them.” Treating Buddy to a round of tequila shots in a local bar, she purrs “I think that’s the song that was playing the first time I went down on you.”

As she proved with her controversial script for Juno, Ms. Cody specializes in unusual characters who say unexpected things at their own peril. Even when she tries new nail polishes and hair styles, Mavis looks bewildered in her desperate attempts to impress. She also gorges on junk food, chug-a-lugs Maker’s Mark and feels awful. She’s a lonely, confused, melancholy, 37-year-old mess, clinging to the past to camouflage the fact that her present is lacking and the future looks even bleaker. Her career is a sham, and the damaged Matt, the lost soul she bonds with, paints figurines of action-comics heroes in lieu of no career at all. The movie is about people whose lives have not worked out as hoped, who never lived up to their potential and ended up pathetic adults. The results are not always rooted in logic. Going to bed together out of mutual boredom and misery does not ring true for either Mavis or Matt. Her relentless pursuit of a married man who shows no interest in her whatsoever is equally unimaginable. The screenplay is episodic and fragmented, culminating in a hysterical party sequence where a drunken Mavis goes berserk on Buddy’s lawn in front of her parents, his family and the entire neighborhood—a scene that is awesome and embarrassing, for the audience as well as the neighbors. This is the star’s big rave and the writer’s coup d’etat, in which Mavis screams out the pain she has stifled for 20 years over the abortion of Buddy’s child. I loved the actress, but didn’t believe the character.

Mavis is an emotionally undeveloped child-woman who does not relate to the time when women had obligations as women. Eschewing marriage, motherhood, manners and political correctness, she has no obligations to herself, either. This is the film’s biggest problem. The more she rejects inductive reasoning, organized thinking and common sense, the more she alienates the viewer and the less we care about her or what happens next. In the end, she learns nothing redeemable about how to improve her life, and I, for one, felt cheated. This is not a reason to miss Young Adult. It’s a fatiguing, low-key character study that drags along annoyingly and pleads for patience, but stick with it and you’ll find the engrossing centerpiece performance by Ms. Theron a captivating reward that is well worth the effort.

rreed@observer.com

YOUNG ADULT

Running Time 94 minutes

Written by Diablo Cody

Directed by Jason Reitman

Starring Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson and Patton Oswalt

2/4

If she does nab the statuette, Portman won't be the first actress to stumble in her post-Oscar career. It's a tradition! 

Here, a guide to The Best Actress Oscar Curse. >>

Welcome to the apocalypse. In The Road, the eagerly awaited movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, the end of the world is no longer on its way. It’s already here, bringing misery, desperation, death and no hope for the future. Adapted by Joe Penhall and directed by Australia’s John Hillcoat, it is sad, bleak and unbearably depressing. It is also gripping, shattering and brilliant. Throughout the screening I attended, I heard people murmur “a masterpiece.” I reluctantly agree.

An unnamed cataclysm has destroyed the earth and erased almost every trace of humanity with biblical fury. The cause of this decimation is unspecified—volcanic activity, contagious viruses, nuclear war, a meteorite? But the result is a post-apocalyptic planet of scorched devastation. Across a landscape of ash-covered snow, a father and son called only The Man and The Boy (Viggo Mortensen and young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) are somehow miraculously still alive and pushing a shopping cart on a wrenching journey to the sea. The movie, sparse and bleakly loyal to Mr. McCarthy’s prose, has the same narrative as the book—a grim chronicle of their horror, suffering and determination to survive. There are occasional respites—Robert Duvall as a half-blind old man they befriend in the forest, Guy Pearce as a fellow vagabond on the move, the ecstasy of long-forgotten taste when they discover an abandoned Coca-Cola—but more often they plod along in an existence that is pared to the bone, and it is the author’s poetic vision that must carry us through.

The Man once had a wife (played with terror and passion by Charlize Theron) with whom he debated the question of whether to end it all and save themselves and their son from the rape and cannibalism of wild gangs. In flashbacks, we see The Man cling to one last shred of optimism. “We will get out of this,” he says. But the wife eventually gives up, unable to last one more black, stormy winter of cold and starvation, and The Man is left with his son and only two bullets in his gun—one for each of them. Now, 10 years later, the days are gray as coffins, the crops long gone, cars and machines cracking with rust, farms and fields fallen to dust, the animals dead and the survivors either refugees looking for food and fuel or maniacs feasting on human flesh to stay alive. Dying would seem a luxury. As if their existence isn’t hopeless enough, there is also an earthquake that opens the ground and fells what remains of the barren trees. By the time they reach the sea, as dark and colorless as sewage, The Man is coughing up blood and The Boy is so ravaged with fever that you wonder not only how much more they can take, but how much more you can take.

And still, this is a magnificent picture—as unique and corrosive a view of 21st-century ruin as I have ever seen on the screen. The author has been quoted as saying, “In 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable,” and now, in his vision of the aftermath of cataclysm, he sets out to prove it. The chillingly realistic art direction and the Oscar-worthy cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe are dauntingly faithful to the blighted global catastrophe described so carefully in the book. To configure charred spaces where buildings once stood and the strange beauty of gutted cities, The Road was shot in post–Hurricane Katrina locations in the Louisiana backwash, and barren sections of Pittsburgh in winter, where remnants of the region’s once flourishing steel mills and coal mines lent to the atmosphere of desolation. The movie creates a bleak space that manages to be both anonymous and oppressively intimate at the same time. High-impact technological graphics and computer-generated effects are gratefully missing. The dramatic tension and narrative suspense come from silences that speak louder than words and explosions, and from the raw and powerful performances. There seems to be no end to Viggo Mortensen’s talents. His portrait of a man driven by spirited parental love, whose last act on earth is to prepare his son for the courage to live without his protection, is so touching that … well, all I can say is, prepare to be emotionally hammered. Young Smit-McPhee, who was only 11 at the time of filming, matches Mr. Mortensen scene for scene with a tenderness and a strength I found inspiring. (The fact that he also looks a lot like Charlize Theron makes him doubly believable.) In the end, it is the little boy’s generosity and caring that invest the story with its last sense of humanity.

But that’s stretching it. Make no mistake, as Nixon used to say. The Road is not an uplifting, feel-good night at the movies. It is savagely unpleasant, but you will not forget its impact. Mixed reviews aside, I will not ponder the box office prospects of a film this daring and original. In a year of relentless trash, I can only shower it with praise for its fearless integrity in creating a work of art that is very valuable indeed.

rreed@observer.com

On the third floor of the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas on Monday, Nov. 16, soft-spoken actor (and poet/musician/artist/sex object) Viggo Mortensen admitted to the Transom that he had concerns over his role. “I was scared to death of the emotional toll,” said Mr. Mortensen, a rumored Oscar contender. “But once I got going and just trusted the boy who’s playing the son and we connected, it just took its own natural rhythm and went from there.”

Dapper in a double-breasted black suit and leather boots, Mr. Mortenson wore a heart-shaped charm pinned to his lapel—a prop from another project, he said. “It symbolizes love.” You don’t say!

Mr. Hillcoat, meanwhile, said that the runaway success Ethan and Joel Coen had with Mr. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men in 2007 didn’t faze him. “If we had started thinking about things like Pulitzer Prizes and No Country for Old Men and all that, it would just throw you off,” he said.

Also there were author Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm author) and TV journalist Bryant Gumbel. “I’m on kind of a post-apocalyptic clip lately,” said Mr. Gumbel of his recent reading list, which did not include the McCarthy epic though he carried it around for a week. “I just finished reading The Last Babylon, finished One Second After, ordered Tales from the Wasteland,” he said.

It’s also safe to assume that Mr. Gumbel isn’t up to date with the latest on Bella and Edward Cullen, as he stared back blankly when queried whether he would be going to see the second movie in the Twilight vampire-lust series upon its release later this week. “I’m sorry,” the newsman said. “I liked Underworld; does that help?”

The No-Brainer!

David Cronenberg. Denzel Washington. Robert Ludlum. It doesn't take a genius to see that The Matarese Circle, an action thriller about an American spy who teams up with his archrival Russian counterpart to stop a larger threat, would be the first legitimate box office smash that Mr. Cruise has had since Mission Impossible III. Maybe if Mr. Cronenberg weren't directing and rewriting the script, we'd be a little less sure of The Matarese Circle; after all, Mr. Washington's track record is far from clean when it comes to these types of dual star movies—just look at the trailer for The Taking of Pelham 123, for reference. But with Mr. Cronenberg on board, The Matarese Circle has the chance to be something a little more special than just a regular blockbuster. And let's give Mr. Cruise some credit: He's one big star that doesn't balk at working with talented directors who possess their own distinct voice.

The Romantic Comedy!

The last time audiences got to love Tom Cruise—really love him—was all the way back in Jerry Maguire. That was 1996. Over the last 13 years though, Mr. Cruise been part of one action spectacle after another, pausing only a few times to tear down his well-worn screen visage (Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Tropic Thunder). Well, it's time to give everyone back that loving feeling! Universal is hoping he decides on Lost for Words, a romantic comedy about an actor who finds himself embroiled in a love triangle with the beautiful Chinese director of the film he's working on and her jealous translator. Zoinks! Crouching Tiger's Ziyi Zhang co-stars, and while she might be too young for Mr. Cruise, let's remember that he is still married to Katie Holmes. If you think this sounds like the kind of quaint British romantic comedy that we've seen before (think Notting Hill), you aren't that far off base. Lost for Words was originally set to star Hugh Grant.

The Remake!

Every actor needs a remake on his or her ledger, right? The Tourist, a remake of the 2005 French film Anthony Zimmer, would find Mr. Cruise and Charlize Theron parading through Paris while avoiding the Russian mafia and the authorities thanks to a case of mistaken identity and various double-crosses. Valkryrie writer Christopher McQuarrie is working on the script, which, to us, sounds like a more serious version of Charade. Tom and Charlize on the same poster? Show them the money!

Lindsay Lohan is once again harnessing the power of Myspace to remind fans to vote. [People] 

Justin Long, who previously dated Kirsten Dunst and Drew Barrymore, was spotted making out with, uh, Tila Tequila. [P6]

Charlize Theron settled her $20 million lawsuit with watchmaker Raymond Weil. [NYDN]

The supposedly separated Tea Leoni and David Duchovny held hands as they took their kids trick-or-treating on the Upper East Side Friday night. [P6]

A modest Angelina Jolie claims she is "just a punk kid with tattoos." [US Weekly]