IN REVIEW
SAINT & SINNER
IN DISNEY’S CRUELLA
I
BY TED GIESE BY TED GIESE
n Disney’s new movie Cruella, Estella/Cruella is an orphan girl with a split personality—one half kind, the other half cruel. While on the run she falls in with a pair of pickpocketing Dickensian grifters, Jasper and Horace, and eventually pursues her lifelong passion for fashion which leads her into a competition with the Baroness Von Hellman, an established fashion mogul. Her entanglement with the Baroness leads to dramatic personal revelations. Perhaps the people working in Disney’s live-action film department should be described as “re-imagineers.” With its focus on Cruella de Vil, director Craig Gillespie’s film works to embellish and justify the chain-smoking, devilish fashionista character of the classic 1961 Disney cartoon One Hundred and One Dalmatians. In Cruella, the audience sees a three ingredient recipe of one-part sympathy for the Devil origin story, one-part derivative Joker (2019) meets The Devil Wears Prada (2006) Canal Street knock-off, and onepart character assassination/revision. Gillespie and his writers Dana Fox and Tony McNamara have taken one of Disney’s least likeable villains and made her 95 percent likeable. Cruella is a clever well-made film which accomplishes what it sets out to do. But is what it sets out to do a good thing? In 1996 Stephen Herek made a live-action version of the 1961 Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians starring Glenn Close as Cruella de Vil. She even reprised her role in 2000’s 102 Dalmatians. In these films Cruella was still a villain through and through, bent on making fur coats out of Dalmatians.
Contrary to the earlier consistent portrayals of the character, in Gillespie’s film Estella/Cruella is an animal lover at heart and would never hurt a dog. She even has her own little dog, Buddy the Terrier, as do her partners in crime. Yes, there are Dalmatians, but they aren’t the lovable Dalmatians of yesteryear. Here they are owned by the Baroness and, as a trio of snarling guard dogs, played a part in Estella becoming an orphan. But don’t worry, the Dalmatians of Cruella get their happy ending too. These details all play into the conceit of the film: Estella/Cruella is misunderstood. If in the original Dodie Smith 1956 children’s novel, Disney cartoons, and subsequent live-action Disney films Cruella was twisted, evil, and only loved dogs for the coats she could make out of them, in this film she must
instead love dogs and have ‘justifiable’ reasons for everything she seeks to accomplish. Sabrina Maddeaux, in her National Post review “Disney killed Cruella de Vil with political correctness,” does an excellent job of detailing the extent to which Gillespie course-corrects this
character. The ploy is to give her a good, kind, nice, and likeable side in Estella and shuffle the mischievous, cunning, and disagreeable side into Cruella. In the end, though she embraces Cruella, allowing Estella to “die,” perhaps some part of Estella remains. The movie begins with a voice-over narration by Emma Stone in character which is revealed to be part of a eulogy over the faux funeral of Estella by her “good” friend Cruella. By the end of the film it is clear that the whole story is the story of Estella’s demise as told by Cruella. There is no body in the casket yet it is clear that Cruella doesn’t expect Estella to make future appearances in her life. There is a Latin theological term used for the tension between the good and the evil in a person: simul iustus et peccator. It means “simultaneously justified and sinner” or, in other words, to be at the same time saint and sinner. For Christians, the imputed righteousness of Christ (the “new Adam”) given by God to an individual makes them a saint in the eyes of God. At the same time, there is an inherent wickedness passed down to all people because of the Old Adam’s fall into sin—a narcissistic evil which is turned in on itself and away from God. This leads to tension in the Christian’s life, as St. Paul explains: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). Christian viewers aware of this theological concept will see themes of the simul iustus et peccator in spades in this movie. Estella/Cruella becomes a kind of personification of this struggle and as Gillespie’s Cruella unfolds, her dominant character traits shift from the more saintly qualities held dear by Estella to the more sinful qualities increasingly seen in Cruella. Viewers of all sorts (Christian or otherwise) will of course desire the good side of the protagonist to win in the end and Gillespie knows this. And yet, as Cruella is in part an origin story, anyone familiar with the earlier movies knows that the goodnatured Estella doesn’t win. Therefore the whole character has to be as likeable
THE CANADIAN LUTHERAN July/August 2021
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