Disenchanted (2022)

Disenchanted arrives fifteen years after Enchanted charmed audiences with its fish-out-of-water princess routine, and it mostly serves as a reminder of how long ago 2007 was. Giselle, now a wife and stepmother in the New Jersey suburbs, wishes for a perfect fairy tale and gets one, transforming Monroeville into Monrolasia and herself into something approaching a wicked stepmother. It is a tidy premise. The execution is less tidy.

The picture's social consciousness extends about as far as noting that stepmothers can be loving and that teenage daughters deserve to be heard. Female characters carry the story, and the emotional spine is a mother-daughter reconciliation, but the film never converts this into an argument about anything. Race never enters the conversation. Neither does sexuality, nor the environment, nor class resentment, nor body image, nor neurodivergence, nor any revisionist reading of the past. Nobody lectures. The villains are villains because they are rude at town council meetings. The moral is that family is nice.

Watching it, we search for cultural freight and find only Maya Rudolph enjoying herself in a purple cape. Amy Adams commits fully, as she always does, and the songs by Menken and Schwartz are professionally pleasant. None of it lands with the sparkle of the original, which critics have noted at length. The film is a strange artifact: a Disney sequel released straight to streaming, arriving with no agenda beyond selling nostalgia to people who were in middle school when the first film came out. As a specimen of modern progressive sensibility, it is a blank page. As a movie, it is a shrug.