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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DON’T BLAME RACHEL ZEGLER FOR SNOW WHITE  
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Eileen Jones
March 28, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The press is blaming the young and very online actor Rachel Zegler
for Snow White’s dismal box office showing. But Zegler’s
performance as the original Disney princess is the only bright spot in
an otherwise cynical cash grab. _

Rachel Zegler in Snow White., (Walt Disney Studios)

 

There’s no way a project as utterly cynical and misbegotten as the
live-action remake of Walt Disney’s landmark 1937 animated
film _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_ could turn out well.
Particularly one plagued by as many setbacks as this one has had.

It must’ve been obvious that a contemporary remake would be anything
but audience-friendly, and indeed there have been a few failed
attempts
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screenwriters in the early 2000s to address the antiquated aspects of
the story. But, of course, the Disney remake gravy train needed to
keep running.

So it’s no surprise when _Snow White_ turns out to be a
demoralizing mess of a movie. If it weren’t for the sparkling
talents of Rachel Zegler (_West Side Story_) in the title role, it
would be totally unwatchable. Somehow, even while wearing a hideous,
cheap-looking knockoff of the iconic Snow White outfit, she looks
adorable with her doll-like face, huge brown eyes, and sweet black
bob. A gifted singer, she makes endurable some seriously bad new songs
written for the film by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who also wrote the
songs for Disney’s 2019 live-action remake of its 1992 animated
film _Aladdin_. Apparently through sheer charisma and willpower,
Zegler radiates enough conviction to pull the viewer through vast
amounts of eye-searingly ugly CGI and a production design featuring
every clashing color combination this side of hell.

And to think the first of many controversies stirred up over _Snow
White_ involved the usual online racists objecting to the casting of
Zegler because she’s an American of Colombian descent, and
therefore, it was argued, not white enough to have “skin as white as
snow.” Disney executives who had regarded a Latina princess
character as a win because of their ongoing attempts to gain some sort
of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) credibility ironically wound
up with the film premiering well _after_ both the private sector and
the incoming Trump government went to war with all things DEI.

It’s a nice ironic triumph that Zegler turns out to be the whole
show.

And Zegler went right on being the source of a lot of other
controversy, generally in ways that rate a glowing 100-percent-correct
emoji. She wrote “And always remember, free Palestine” on
Twitter/X, which can’t have endeared her to costar Gal Gadot, a
former Israel Defense Force soldier. Unsubstantiated rumors of a feud
between the two stars dogged the _Snow White_ production as just one
part of a steady drumbeat of bad press.

Zegler also (correctly) noted in interviews that indeed, the new
version of _Snow White_ would have to be modernized in some ways
because the fairy tale’s emphasis on racial purity as well as the
typical old-time character of the young maiden doing nothing but
waiting around singing “Some Day My Prince Will Come”: “People
are making these jokes about ours being the PC Snow White_,” _she
said in 2022. “Yeah, it is — because it needed that.”

So in spite of raging controversy surrounding the film that included
scattershot death threats, modernizing changes were indeed made.
It’s not Zegler’s fault that the ways screenwriter Erin Cressida
Wilson (_The Girl on the Train)_ found to update the material, even
when broadly sensible, tended to turn out to be as awkward as ass. For
example, instead of Prince Charming — so dull and generic a
character that even the animators on the 1937 version reportedly hated
to be assigned to Prince animating duties — there’s a Robin
Hood–like figure named Jonathan (Andrew Burnap).

Borrowing from another 1930s hit, _The Adventures of Robin
Hood_ (1938), in order to give the prince some welcome rakish
insolence might have worked except that he’s been assigned seven
fellow bandits. They’re a motley crew judging by their casting and
costumes, but unfortunately, they don’t have anything to do — they
hardly have any lines. They just stand around behind Jonathan while he
talks. Or pretend to interact among themselves while someone sings in
the foreground.

There’s no reason to have seven bandits, other than a pointless
symmetry with the seven dwarfs. Instead of seven undifferentiated
bandits with an average of one line each, how about two specifically
characterized bandits with a reasonable number of lines each? Maybe
comic relief bandits? I know I could’ve used some comic relief.

The new take on Snow White herself, that she’s a downtrodden
scullery maid in the Evil Queen’s castle who will have to learn to
fight back in order to reclaim her queendom could have worked pretty
well. But in the execution, it flounders badly. A big part of the
problem is Gadot, who looks well-cast in the plum role of the Evil
Queen. But she’s such a dimwitted nonactor she can’t get any
aspect of it right.

She reads her lines in an uncomprehending way, as if she learned them
phonetically. “Arr YOO agenst meh TOOOO?” she demands of the poor
Huntsman played by Ansu Kabia. Kabia’s no doubt a gifted actor,
because somehow director Marc Webb (_The Amazing Spider-Man, (500)
Days of Summer_) got takes from him in his scenes with Gadot in which
he didn’t burst out laughing.

Then there are the seven dwarfs, notably left out of the title of the
film. But there they are in _Snow White_, capering and wearing pointy
caps and heigh-hoing notwithstanding.

As actor Peter Dinklage put it
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Marc Maron’s _WTF _podcast:

There’s a lot of hypocrisy going on. . . . Literally no offense to
anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to
cast a Latina actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the
story of Snow White and “the seven dwarfs”. . . . You’re
progressive in one way but then you’re still making that f–king
backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together.

And the dwarfs are so grotesquely rendered in godawful CGI, so
frozen-eyed and weirdly lifeless, they make you want to look away, as
from a tragic accident. Plus, the characterizations are atrocious —
you literally can’t tell who most of them are by looking at them.
Several of the dwarfs have to be introduced repeatedly, often by Doc
— he’s the one in the glasses, which makes him easy to identify.
There’s even a song joking about how to tell them apart.

If you recall, in the animated _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_, you
can always tell, every second, which dwarf is Bashful, which dwarf is
Happy, which dwarf is Sneezy, and so on. That’s because the
animators hardly slept for months on end — they were working so hard
to get every aspect of that all-important film to a peak of animated
perfection. And detailed characterization was a huge priority.

Walt Disney put all the studio assets on the line, and then mortgaged
his house, in order to make that film. It was called “Disney’s
folly” and confidently expected to fail because the common wisdom
held that nobody wanted to sit through a feature-length cartoon. The
reason we have animated features as a reliably popular genre today is
because _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_ was considered an
aesthetic triumph and became a phenomenal popular success.

I don’t have a lot of love for Walt Disney, who was a union-busting
bastard who treated the vast majority of his workers terribly and
pioneered some of the most disgusting capitalist practices known to
the entertainment industry. But there ought to be a certain respect
for his important pioneering work in animation, sound, and color in
film.

The people who run the filmmaking branch of his company today have no
respect, however. They’ve been shamelessly cannibalizing Disney’s
corpse — or should I say, corpus — for decades. The bold
inventiveness he prized was always shredding the nerves of his brother
Roy, who was in charge of finances. The huge profits from _Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs,_ for example, got plowed back into further
experimental features like the aesthetically
ambitious _Pinocchio_ (1940) and the wildly innovative but
bankroll-busting _Fantasia_ (1940).

And when Disney ran out of film innovations he wanted to pursue, he
gambled on blazing a trail in early television and then entirely
reconceiving how theme parks worked. But that kind of imaginative
audacity hasn’t been part of the company plan for ages. Too risky.
Gotta keep the shareholders happy.

It’s one of the many wearying aspects of _Snow White_ that you can
tell exactly the scene that’s going to be further monetized as the
basis for an updated theme park ride — if the film does well enough.
It’s the gratuitous roller coaster tram ride through the mines where
the dwarfs work pointlessly mining jewels that they never sell or use.

And though the film had a box-office opening
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was “more sleepy than happy” as one headline put it, there’s not
much doubt it’ll make a profit eventually.  People have children,
and children want to go to movies with their parents in tow, and there
the Mouse stands with a long-held monopoly on children’s
entertainment. It’s been a long while since there was any serious
attempt to call that whole Disney-fixated tradition into question —
after all, hey, they have superheroes now! But in the year of our lord
2025, maybe it’s time we give it another try.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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