Godmothered (2020)

Godmothered arrives as a Disney+ Christmas confection with a thesis stapled to its forehead: the old fairy-tale formula is dated, and true love comes in more shapes than a prince. Sharon Maguire directs Jillian Bell as Eleanor, the youngest and least competent fairy godmother in the Motherland, dispatched to Boston to answer a wish filed by a ten-year-old girl who has since grown into Isla Fisher, a widowed single mother with a failing news station and two daughters. The premise does the heavy lifting. Cinderella gets a rewrite, the glass slipper becomes a watermelon carriage, and nobody waits around for a man to complete them.

The revision of the fairy-tale machinery is the film's most sustained project, and it lands with a soft thud of self-awareness. Mackenzie's happy ending is a job, a family, and a maybe-romance with a divorced coworker, while the godmother's matchmaking is explicitly rebuked as out of date. The cast surrounding the two white leads is notably varied, though the film never once acknowledges the fact, which keeps the racial consciousness at the level of a spreadsheet. Eleanor's closing argument that everyone defines true love differently gestures toward a broader tent without ever placing a non-heterosexual couple inside it. The youngest daughter's social anxiety is treated gently, then solved by a song.

There is a villain, naturally, a station manager who wants to commodify the magic for ratings and fires Mackenzie when she refuses. It is a mild swipe at the entertainment business and nothing more. The moral arrives on schedule and often, though the film has the decency to deliver it with a shrug and a joke instead of a sermon. We are left with a pleasant bauble, competent, warm, and entirely unsurprising, a Christmas movie that knows exactly which boxes to tick and ticks them without breaking a sweat. The magic never quite shows up.