Ever After

This article is about the 1998 film. For other uses, see Ever After (disambiguation).

Ever After: A Cinderella Story
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Andy Tennant
Produced by	Mireille Soria Tracey Trench
Written by	Charles Perrault (Cinderella) Susannah Grant (screenplay) Andy Tennant (screenplay) Rick Parks (screenplay)
Starring	Drew Barrymore Anjelica Huston Dougray Scott Megan Dodds Melanie Lynskey
Music by	George Fenton
Cinematography	Andrew Dunn
Editing by	Roger Bondelli
Studio	Flower Films
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	July 29, 1998
Running time	121 minutes (approx.)
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US$26 million (estimated)
Box office	$98,005,666

Ever After: A Cinderella Story is a 1998 film inspired by the fairy tale Cinderella, directed by Andy Tennant and starring Drew Barrymore, Anjelica Huston and Dougray Scott. The screenplay is written by Tennant, Susannah Grant, and Rick Parks. The original music score is composed by George Fenton. The film's closing theme song "Put Your Arms Around Me" is performed by the rock band Texas.

The usual pantomime and comic/supernatural elements are removed and the story is instead treated as historical fiction, set in Renaissance-era France. It is often seen as a modern, post-feminism interpretation of the Cinderella myth.

Plot

In the early 18th century, the Grande Dame of France, an elderly aristocrat, summons the Grimm Brothers to tell them the real story of the little cinder girl. She claims that Cinderella was a young woman named Danielle de Barbarac, who was her great-grandmother. She reveals a portrait of Danielle and a glass slipper, and proceeds to tell the story.

Danielle is eight years old, living with her widowed father, Auguste, who shares with her a love of books and progressive ideas. He brings home a new wife, the haughty Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, who has two daughters about Danielle's age, Marguerite and Jacqueline. He has a heart attack soon after, and with his dying breath professes his love for Danielle rather than the Baroness, who envies Danielle and treats her like a servant thereafter.

Ten years later, in the manor's orchard, Danielle catches a man stealing her father's horse. She unseats him with a well-aimed apple, but is horrified to learn that he is the Crown Prince of France, trying to escape the reponsibilities of court. He buys her silence with a purse of gold, which she decides she will use to rescue an elderly servant sold to the Crown to pay the household's debts. She dresses as a noblewoman and goes to court to ransom the servant, where she encounters the Prince again. After the jailor refuses to release the servant, she argues against the injustice and quotes Thomas More's Utopia. Prince Henry is so captivated he orders the man released and begs for her name, but she evades his pleas and leaves him instead with the name of her mother, the Comtesse Nicole de Lancret.

When Henry returns the horse to the manor, it is plain that the Baroness intends to match her daughter Marguerite with the Prince, despite the marriage his parents have arranged with Spain. The King strikes a bargain with the recalcitrant Prince, telling Henry to choose his own bride before they give a ball in honor of Leonardo da Vinci, who has come to court, or the King will choose for him. Henry meets Danielle again by the river, where he is arguing with da Vinci about love and fate, but again she runs away. While looking for da Vinci soon after Henry finds Danielle's childhood friend Gustave, who knows the whole story, and tells him that Nicole de Lancret is staying with the Baroness. When he arrives at the manor Danielle agrees to accompany him to the library of a nearby monastery. They are accosted by gypsies en route, and in an uproarious turn of events Danielle rescues Henry. They agree to meet the next day, but she returns home so late that she loses her temper in the morning when she discovers Marguerite intends to take her mother's wedding dress and wear it to the ball. She is beaten by her stepmother and when she meets Henry later Danielle is so disheartened she cannot tell him what has happened and runs away again.

That same day the Queen asks Marguerite and the Baroness if they know the mysterious Comtesse de Lancret, and they realize it must be Danielle. When they return to the manor the Comtesse's wedding dress has disappeared, and the Baroness thinks Danielle plans to go to the ball, so she locks her in the larder. The servants get word to da Vinci through Gustave, and he frees her and makes her a pair of wings to match her mother's wedding dress and her glass slippers, so she can go to the ball.

Danielle arrives at the ball just before the King is to announce Henry's engagement, since Henry has been told the Comtesse has gone to marry someone else. But before she can tell him the truth the Baroness accuses her of plotting to entrap the Prince by masquerading as a courtier, and he is so shocked he believes the Baroness. Danielle flees, losing a slipper along the way. Henry decides to marry the Spanish Princess, but calls it off when he see how distraught she is at the ceremony. He goes to the manor but learns from Jacqueline that Danielle was sold to a weaselly nobleman following the ball. He goes to rescue her but finds that she has rescued herself, and he asks her to forgive him and to marry him, and she says yes.

The Baroness and Marguerite come to court, under a pretext contrived with the help of Jaccqueline, and are charged with lying to the Queen. They find that Danielle is now Prince Henry's wife and she is the only one who steps in to save them from being jailed and sent to the Americas. Danielle asks the court to show them the same courtesy that they showed to her, and the Baroness and Marguerite are sent to the laundries to serve out their lives. Danielle and the Prince, of course, live happily ever after.

Cast

• Danielle de Barbarac/Countess Nicole de Lancret, portrayed by Drew Barrymore. She is kind and genuine, but also fiery and sharp-witted, which attracts Henry to her.
• Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, portrayed by Anjelica Huston. The baroness is cold and cruel, periodically abusing Danielle as well as her own daughter, Jacqueline.
• Prince Henry, portrayed by Dougray Scott. Intelligent yet uninspired, Henry is bored of his life and the confinement it brings.
• Marguerite de Ghent, portrayed by Megan Dodds Beautiful, shrill, and cruel, Marguerite is truly her mother's daughter, and in the end shares her fate.
• Jacqueline de Ghent, portrayed by Melanie Lynskey Jacqueline is different from her mother and sister in that she is secretly kind to Danielle, but she is clumsier, rather naive, and is often dominated by her mother. Finding an ally in Danielle, she fares much better than the baroness and Marguerite.
• Grand Dame Marie Therese Charlotte de France, portrayed by Jeanne Moreau
• Leonardo da Vinci, portrayed by Patrick Godfrey
• Maurice, portrayed by Walter Sparrow
• Louise, portrayed by Matyelok Gibbs
• Paulette, portrayed by Kate Lansbury
• Gustave, portrayed by Lee Ingleby
• King Francis and Queen Marie of France, portrayed by Timothy West and Judy Parfitt respectively
• Pierre Le Pieu, portrayed by Richard O'Brien
• Auguste de Barbarac, portrayed by Jeroen Krabbé

Production

Head of a Young Woman with Tousled Hair

Ever After was filmed in Super 35 mm film format, however both the widescreen and pan-and-scan versions are included on the DVD. This is the only Super 35 mm film directed by Andy Tennant; his films before Ever After were filmed with spherical lenses, the films after were filmed with anamorphic lenses.

The castle shown in the film is the Château de Hautefort. Filming also occurred in Dordogne, France at the Châteaux de Fénélon, de Losse, de Lanquas, de Beynac and the city of Sarlat.

The painting of Danielle seen in the film is based on Leonardo's Female Head (La Scapigliata).

Critical reception

Ever After has received mostly positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 90% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 61 reviews, with an average score of 7.5/10. The critical consensus is: Ever After is a sweet, frothy twist on the ancient fable, led by a solid turn from star [Drew] Barrymore. Among Rotten Tomatoes' Cream of the Crop, which consists of popular and notable critics from the top newspapers, websites, television, and radio programs, the film holds an overall approval rating of 76% based on 17 reviews. Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a favorable score of 66 based on 22 reviews.

Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly gave the film an B-, saying: "Against many odds, Ever After comes up with a good one. This novel variation is still set in the once-upon-a-time 16th century. But it features an active, 1990s-style heroine -- she argues about economic theory and civil rights with her royal suitor -- rather than a passive, exploited hearth sweeper who warbles "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes"." She also praised Anjelica Huston's performance as a cruel stepmother: "Huston does a lot of eye narrowing and eyebrow raising while toddling around in an extraordinary selection of extreme headgear, accompanied by her two less-than-self-actualized daughters -- the snooty, social-climbing, nasty Marguerite, and the dim, lumpy, secretly nice Jacqueline. "Nothing is final until you're dead", Mama instructs her girls at the dinner table, "and even then I'm sure God negotiates"."

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, while praising the film with 3 out of 4 stars, wrote that "The movie [...] is one of surprises, not least that the old tale still has life and passion in it. I went to the screening expecting some sort of soppy children's picture and found myself in a costume romance with some of the same energy and zest as The Mask of Zorro. And I was reminded again that Drew Barrymore can hold the screen and involve us in her characters. [...] Here, as the little cinder girl, she is able to at last put aside her bedraggled losers and flower as a fresh young beauty, and she brings poignancy and fire to the role."

Both Newsweek and Rolling Stone magazine praised the movie's intelligence and wit, although some critics also noted its "confusing switch between humor and seriousness."

DVD release

The film was released on DVD with minimal extras. It is currently unknown if there will be another DVD release with more substantial content. A Blu-ray Disc has also been released.

Musical adaptation

A musical version of the film is currently in the works, with the book and lyrics by Marcy Heisler and music by Zina Goldrich. The musical was scheduled to have its world premiere in April 2009 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco, but the pre-Broadway run has been postponed.

See also

• Ever After, the novel by Wendy Loggia, based on the screenplay by Susannah Grant, Andy Tennant and Rick Parks

External links

• Ever After at the Internet Movie Database
• Ever After at AllRovi
• Ever After at Rotten Tomatoes