Suspended Animation

Even when Amy Adams is literally playing a cartoon—as she does in Enchanted—she has a way of coming across as the most genuine person onscreen. Her Oscar-nominated performance as a very pregnant, very impressionable young Southern woman dazzled by her sophisticated new sister-in-law in Junebug was a small marvel. Perfectly pitched, untainted by irony, she made her character’s total innocence seem like a state of grace and a source of strength—Amy Adams’ characters may be naïve, but their naïveté is made of steel!

Adams carries over a lot of her Junebug performance into Enchanted. It’s a silly, fluffball movie, but Adams is so perfectly adorable in it that she elevates a merely serviceable script into one of the year’s few truly enjoyable mainstream comedies. (It’s a transformation similar to the one Reese Witherspoon performed on Legally Blonde, and it should give the same boost to Adams’ career.)

Adams begins the film in animated form as Giselle, one of those simpering Disney storybook heroines who spend their days conversation with forest animals, singing ballads, and waiting for the day when she exchanges “love’s true kiss” with a handsome prince. But when Prince Edward falls in love with her, the evil Queen Narissa—who will lose her throne if Edward marries—shoves Giselle through a magical portal into another dimension... namely, modern-day New York City, where the only creatures Giselle, now occupying flesh and blood form, has to communicate with are rats, pigeons, and cockroaches.

Most of the humour in the film derives from Adams’ wide-eyed, utterly guileless reactions to real-world phenomena like traffic, showers, and divorce. (She’s taken in by an attorney named Robert, played by Patrick Dempsey, who starts to suspect there may be something to Giselle’s wild story when she starts singing and sets off a gigantic production number that eventually engulfs all of Central Park.) The gags, except for a funny sequence where Giselle cleans Robert’s apartment, aren’t terribly inspired, but Adams’ cartoonish mannerisms definitely is—I love the way she even delicately crooks her fingers the way a cartoon princess does.

Nothing else in Enchanted is anywhere near Adams’ level. Timothy Spall’s subplot as Narissa’s bumbling henchman devotes too much time to him wearing wacky disguises and not enough to his pathetic desire to win the queen’s affections. A scene where Giselle is shown reading a book about female heroes like Marie Curie and Rosa Parks never leads to anything interesting. The climactic battle with a dragon is loud, confusing, and poorly staged.

And it’s disappointing to see the way Bill Kelly’s script takes such a fun premise with a lot of satirical potential and uses it to deliver such a pat, familiar message. Compare Enchanted to Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which has a similar plot: Enchanted says there’s no reason fairytales can’t come true even in real life; the message of Allen’s film is that the real world will let you down, but that’s where you have to live.

I certainly didn’t want Enchanted to have some kind of perverse downer ending like Purple Rose, but I hoped it would be a little more sly in its depiction of fantasy bumping up against reality. There’s no equivalent to the moment in Purple Rose where Jeff Daniels says, “You make love without fading out? I can’t wait to see this!”

Then again, Purple Rose didn’t have Amy Adams, who is so delightful she pretty much absolves Enchanted of its flaws. Like Giselle, she’s so perfect that you almost can’t believe she’s real.