The School for Good and Evil (2022): A Fairy Tale for Dummies
The School for Good and Evil is a pretty idea — pretty dumb. In the first scene, a character challenges another to a “no holds barred” sword fight. This begs a question the film is far too lazy to answer: What holds, exactly, would be barred in a sword fight? It’s not often that you see someone busting out a reverse piledriver during a battle wherein large knives are already allowed. Then again, this is a movie made by and for dummies, where not only clothing is color-coded, but skin too.
Adapted (in theory) from Soman Chainani’s novel, The School for Good and Evil wants badly to be a sly, self-aware fairy tale romp. Instead, it’s a clumsy pastiche of every post-Harry Potter fantasy trope (except I think even Slytherin had the good sense to not openly advertise itself as ‘Hogwarts’ Evil House’), stuffed with bland characters, moralizing nonsense, and bargain-bin CGI. It feels less like a movie and more like a two-hour Pinterest board that was never fact-checked.
Our heroines are Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie). Agatha is supposedly the “ugly” one — a premise the film never sells, given that Wylie is objectively more striking and charismatic than Caruso. The only conceivable reason Agatha’s seen as lesser? She has curly hair, slightly darker skin, and dresses like she shops at Hot Topic. Sophie, by contrast, is pale, blonde, and about as memorable as unbuttered toast — but in this film’s worldview, that’s apparently the height of beauty. Thus, when Sophie and Agatha are ‘accepted’ (more like kidnapped) into the Good School and the Evil School, respectively, everybody — themselves included — thinks there has been a mistake.
Oh, I know there’s a moral here; however, if the scriptwriters had actually studied their ostensible source material (at one point someone asks, “who’s ever heard of Robin Hood?” As the movie progresses, it’s clear that the question is not nearly as rhetorical as it was intended to be), they would know that fairy tales must be deceptively simple (not to say short, a quality that this film is sorely lacking). For example, Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t end with a postscript saying ‘FYI, the Wolf is supposed to be a child rapist.’
There is a point to The School for Good and Evil, but it’s rather blunt. Yes, we are all equal; the problem is that the entire cast are all already pretty much alike. Consider this: there is a “beauty class” in the Good School and an “ugly class” in the Evil School, everyone in both classes looks like a Netflix teen drama extra.
Anyway, Sophie is classified as a “reader,” so low in the totem pole that she’s a second-class citizen even in the Evil School. Why a reader? “Because they only get to read about the amazing adventures that originate here.”
As it turns out, “The School for Good and Evil [is] where the true story behind every great fairy tale begins.” Like, literally. Since it’s never explained how exactly this nonsense works, I can only assume that, say, Cinderella (whose eponymous book Sophie is seen buying a copy of) went to the Good School, while her stepsisters went to the Evil School, and after graduation they all moved together in a very early version of a reality TV show, although seeing as how this film is set in a time and place free of modern technology, the best they could do was write a fable about it. It never crosses anybody’s mind that you don’t need a school for this (let alone two). What you need is a writer’s seminar/retreat (preferably the one featured in Adaptation).
But then, no one here is required to think too hard about the status quo; otherwise, they might start wondering why there should be an Evil School at all — especially one that is a sister school to its Good counterpart.
There is indeed an ulterior motive to the Evil School’s existence; a bait-and-switch that harks back to the film’s opening, and which retrospectively reveals that the movie flagrantly lied to the audience right from the get-go.
Without going into details, a thoroughly unambiguous event is much later shown to have been the opposite of what actually happened. The filmmakers can’t even invoke an unreliable narrator because the narration serves exclusively as a source of clunky exposition.
All things considered, The School for Good and Evil is as hypocritical as it is ignorant. Much is made about a “true love’s kiss,” and how nothing “is truer than the love between friends,” meaning of course Agatha and Sophie — and yet, the movie lacks the balls to have its leads kiss each other. Instead, it hands the moment to a random male love interest. The heroines head home together… but only after the heterosexual order has been restored. For a film so loudly about questioning stereotypes, The School for Good and Evil never questions its own.
Works Cited
The School for Good and Evil. Directed by Paul Feig, performances by Sophia Anne Caruso, Sofia Wylie, and Charlize Theron, Netflix, 2022.
Chainani, Soman. The School for Good and Evil. Harper, 2013.
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