Warning: Spoilers ahead
The beginning of the new Cinder🤪ella movie is a fairy-tale ending.
We see a couple cooing over their baby daughter, sitting in a sunny meadow, wildflowers abounding. We see young Ella learni💮ng to dance with her dad, her mother watching them; we see her gꦦoing to sleep, her mother singing to her.
And then — to use a phrase singularly appropriate foꦦr Cinderella — the other shoe drops: Ella’s mothe𒁏r dies, after telling her daughter she must “have courage and be kind.”
So begins a downward spiral for Ella’s life: She gains a cruel stepmother, Lady Tremaine, and st♊epsisters, her father dies, and she finds herself the mocked maid.
Then, of course, she gets her twistꦿ of fate: She falls in love with a man (Kit) who, unknown to her, is the kingdom’s prince.
He eventually finds her and they marry. At the end of the movie, Kit and Ella stand on a balcony, radiant, waving to a crowd of supporters in the castle’s c🍸ourtyard.
But if anyone 🎃knows there’s no “happily ever after” guarantee, it’s Ella — and it’s us, who over the course of a movie have seen her paren💎ts’ fairy tale destroyed and Kit watch his own dad die.
And t🥂hat’s why the movie’s most powerful scene isn’t the couple whirling together in a ballroom or reuniting or standing on that balcony. Instead, it’s Ella, trapped in an ༺attic, singing.
She has been banished there after her stepmother realized she was the mysterious, beautiful girl at the ball who captivated Kit — and yet she won’t give in to Tremaine’s proposed exchange: Tremaine gaining a powerf💫ul role in the kingdom for giving Ella the freedom to reveal herself to ღthe prince as the mysterious girl.
So Ella remains impris♔oned. S🐽he tells herself the memories of dancing with the prince are enough.
In the crucial scene when the prince’s guards are looking for the lady whose fooꦯt fits the glass slipper (and being told Ella doesn’t exist), Ella is sitting on one of the attic’s window ledges, singing.
El൩la is an orphaned woman who fully expects she is losing her chance to marry the man she loves because of her wicked stepmother. Yet instead of cursing or sulking or weeping, she sings the song her mother sang to her as she fell asleep, all those years ago.
Some have taken that moment to be Ella’s failure to be a femꦰinist.
In “The baffling anti-feminist politics of Disney’s new Cinderella,🌱” Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff complains, “The overall effect is that Cinderella ends up being someone who suffers beautifully and . . . that’s about it, actually.”
I’m🌼 sympathetic to that view: Initially, I was exasperated with Ella for not trying to make a ladder to climb out of the tower with or using some of that old musty furnitur💛e to break down the door.
But in the ꧙end, these are quibbles. Perhaps🔜 there truly is no way for Ella out of the tower.
It’s hard to suffer beautifully.
Doubt that? Just look at Lady Tremain𝓰e. She overhears her second husband telling Ella how much he misses his first wife — and shortly after, she banishes Ella to the attic.
When she confronts Ella about the glass slipper, Tremaine tells her side of the story: about being stuck with two daughters she knows are hopeless, about marrying once for love and then losing him. Tremaine, too, has had — and lost — a fair🙈y-tale life.
But Tremaine has reacted so differently tha🌊n Ella. Instead of embracing kindness and cultivating courage, Tremaine has allowed herself to become embitter♓ed.
Ultimately, Cinderella upholds the k𓃲nowledge so many of us ha𝓰ve painfully learned: Bad things happen to bad people and to good people and good things happen to good people and to bad people. Both Tremaine and Ella have suffered, and both have had blessings, too.
There are no guarantees for that radiantly happy Ella: T🀅he kingdom may flounder, she may lose one or more of her children and she might lose Kit.
Or perhaps she will live happily ever after, surrounded by a flourishing kingdom, devoted husband and happy children. But whatever Ella’s future, she remains a ꦅfairy tale heroine: one who learned to sing from her mother and who will undoubtedly teach her own children to sing.
Cinderella makes the case that the essence of a fairy tale isn’t the e♋xternals: the castles, the glass slippers, even the Prin🦄ce Charmings.
Instead, we’re awed by Ella’s internal﷽ character, by the idea that a woman, even one who has suffered as much as she has and who doesn’t have reason to believe that suffering will end, can remain good and kind, can dodge being thwarted and warped by suffering, and can even ch🔜oose to embrace what joy is given her, and in imprisonment, sing.
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