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'Enchanted'

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BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

November 21, 2007

If I were an 8-year-old girl - OK, make that an 8-year-old girl clever enough to make informed connections between 1980s pop and post-millennial Top 40 - I would think "Enchanted" was better than a week of snow days or 10 Justin Timberlake concerts. But I must report that despite its scattered charms and the magnetism of its leads, "Enchanted" is a shimmering pastiche of missed opportunities.

It's a musical fairy tale that seems to have been conceived with the notion of leveling every Snow White cliche and convention of the Disney musical. And through much of its first couple of acts, the Disney-produced "Enchanted" looks as if it means business, especially during a curtain-raising animated sequence stoked literally to a bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed gloss.

In the land of Andalasia, where all the mice are schooled in light operetta and the bunnies have fastidious fashion sense, one finds Giselle (Amy Adams), an ethereally naive beauty who happens to live in the woods with no visible means of support. She just knows her true love is out there somewhere and sings her heart out hoping he hears her.

Before you can say, "zip-ah-dee-doo-dah," handsome Prince Edward (a hilariously thick James Marsden) finds Giselle and they, of course, immediately decide to marry. This displeases Edward's mother, wicked Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), who's got this inexplicit Oedipal prohibition against Edward marrying anybody. Disguised as an old hag, Narissa lures the bride-to-be to the edge of a deep, deep well into which she is shoved and falls, falls, falls to a place where, as Narissa snarls, "there are no happy endings."

And so, through a manhole cover in the middle of Times Square, up pops Giselle, no longer two dimensional, but still very much the wide-eyed, strawberry shortcake vision of a fairy-tale naif. (The winsome Adams, by the way, carries this whole transition off with zesty aplomb.) As with many a disoriented out-of-towner, Giselle searches the brittle streets of New York for directions, perhaps even a helping hand. Improbably, she eventually finds them from a divorce lawyer named Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey) with a young daughter (Rachel Covey.) Robert is himself divorced.

Director Kevin Lima ("Tarzan," "A Goofy Movie") sustains the genre-bending throughout much of what follows. The best set piece has our heroine summoning the vermin of all five New York City boroughs to help her tidy up the Philips' Upper West Side apartment. Prince Edward, meanwhile, sashays and stumbles his way through the city's finest real estate in search of his betrothed, and then Narissa chases after him, neither of them suspecting that Giselle, far from suffering a horrible fate in the Real World, finds she sort of likes it better down here.

Well, who wouldn't? Some of us have to share a single room in Queens to get by, so anyone accidentally finding a good-looking, if jadedly clueless Manhattan lawyer who works in Columbus Circle is as improbable as casting your lot with seven dwarfs.

Such are the ironies you keep hoping "Enchanted" will exploit to greater effect. Yet toward the movie's climax, something bad (though not entirely unexpected) happens: The movie stops being a quasi-metaphysical spoof of a hackneyed Disney musical and transforms itself into a by-the-numbers hackneyed Disney musical. All those 8-year-old girls need to be sent home happy, and the mild feminist spin at the end will make it a little easier for grown-ups to digest - though its residue still sticks to the teeth.

ENCHANTED (PG). Lavish, half-smirking, but ultimately sticky-sweet Disney musical is about a fairy-tale heroine (Amy Adams) condemned to wallow around the Real World by a wicked queen (Susan Sarandon). With Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden and Timothy Spall. Directed by Kevin Lima. Songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. 1:47 (mild innuendo, some scary images). At area theaters.