JK Rowling has done a lot in recent years to lower the public’s estimation of her professional achievements, but Netflix’s charmless fantasy The School for Good and Evil teaches the object lesson that conjuring a phenomenon on par with Harry Potter isn’t as simple as scribbling on a cocktail napkin.
Novelist Soman Chainani and writer-director Paul Feig – a man doing his darnedest to erase all memory that he once possessed the power to make us laugh – set out to reproduce that generational smash with another tale of misfit teens spirited away to a magical cliffside academy weirdly attached to its flawed organizational system. And going by the bank ledgers, they did it; Chainani’s hexalogy repeatedly topped best-seller lists, brought him fabulous wealth, and got a green light for the film adaptation that certifies a mere popular book as an official Thing. As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.
With initial studio Universal having lost interest after putting the property on hold for nearly a decade, it’s in the standardless streaming wilds that Chainani’s text is free to be its worst self. His world turns on a revisionist axis, aspiring to a critical take on familiar fairy-tale lore informed more by the violence and capriciousness of Hans Christian Andersen’s storybook than its squeaky-clean Disneyfied bastardizations. The big idea concerns the dichotomy frontloaded in the title and its softball dismantling, our enlightened modern perspective ultimately enabling us to see that witches were actually misunderstood girlbosses and princes can be entitled jerks. At the School for Good and Evil, that Manichean binary takes a stark form that wears its falseness on its ruffled sleeve; in the sunshiny building for princes and princesses, everything’s all flowers and makeup and curtsies, whereas in the permanently fog-coated tower across the way, dark spellcasters and other villains-to-be dine on glop between ugliness classes.
Into this digital eyesore – ironically enough, a movie obsessed with shadow and light has a working command of neither – tumble besties Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie). The former plays the bubbly extrovert to the latter’s goth-lite introvert, which is why they’re stunned when Sophie gets sorted by a giant wicker bird into the Evil school and Agatha is placed with the girly-girls of the Good. With time and a daunting number of montages scored by such Gen Z-approved artists as Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, they’ll come to see through the glaringly phony divide laid out for them, mostly by Sophie learning that you can look good and dress in black. Along the way, a bevy of actors far too good for this stop by to debase themselves, the wonderful Rachel Bloom and Rob Delaney allotted about 15 seconds apiece while Kerry Washington, Michelle Yeoh and Charlize Theron round out the school’s faculty.
Sophie and Agatha’s rocky freshman year amounts to one mixed-up moral inventory, straining for the “nice is different than good” insight that Stephen Sondheim already claimed with Into the Woods, and settling for a watered-down version of Shrek’s irreverent fable mashup. But the deeper purpose here is the straightforward regurgitation of archetypal Potterisms, from the lakeside training sessions to the handsome dining halls to the belief that everyone’s either a friend, rival or crush. Though with demographic-servicing so overt that the writing scans as fan-fiction, a nagging question does pose itself: why is this film under the impression that its leads, an inseparable femme-tomboy pairing who share true love’s kiss right on the mouth in a climactic moment, are mutually platonic galpals? They’re queer-coded so hard that it’s nearly textual, and yet these characters are denied themselves like it’s 1961 and they need their parents to believe they’re roommates.
In the publishing game, this structuring absence did nothing to alienate the fandom and obstruct the source material’s path to franchisehood, so maybe Feig’s within his rights to brazenly set up a sequel with his final shot. But this also suggests a grim reality within the entertainment industry, the question of quality having finally been conquered by a preordained mandate for continuation. Netflix’s opacity about viewer numbers means that they can tell us eleventy kajillion people watched at least two of the 147 total minutes, and we can choose to believe that or not. In either case, it’s hard to imagine a real human being quoting this motion picture, or even talking about it with a second real human being. Its determination to be like other things leaves the impression of nothing at all.
The School for Good and Evil is available on Netflix now
