Filmmakers often try to invoke Capra then serve up nothing but sweetness and light, forgetting that Capra films while yes they had sweetness and light but they also had a flipside of corruption, fascism and violence - which is what made the sweetness and light work (we wouldn't have been able to stand Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington without Edward Arnold, Guy Kibee and company).
Forest Whittaker makes a similar mistake here - he wanted to direct the film as a fairytale, so there are pretty dresses and people and a narrator to reinforce that its about a beautiful princess living in a castle... but there's none of the cruelty, viciousness, poverty or death that forms the basis of all fairytales. Snow White's step mother tried to kill her, Cinderella worked away in poverty, Rapunzel was imprisoned. Katie Holmes here just has some nosy media, a hard ass mother and a boy who lies to her.
Why didn't they just give in and have someone kidnap her? The West Wing did all this stuff better with their Zoe sub plots.
It's also irritating too considering Whittaker (a great actor) is a director that so much of the film feels undercast - uncharismatic male lead, Michael Keaton does not strike one as an ideal president, and Holmes (who is pretty enough and worked on television) cannot carry a film.
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