Happily never after
Due to unforeseen circumstances, I wound up watching The School for Good and Evil in two sections: the first hour and fifteen minutes in one go, the remaining hour and ten minutes a while later. After section one, I thought the negative critical reception seemed unfair. Sure, the CGI wolf heads attached to the guard characters were appalling digital blobs, and occasionally actors had delayed reactions to CG elements that had supposedly been in-scene with them for a while—but the magical effects were colorful and varied, the costumes had panache, and the actors seemed to be enjoying themselves. The schools for Good and Evil themselves looked exciting, one with glittering towers and elegant interiors, the other with a shroud of ominous mist and dungeon-like details. People are asking too much! I thought to myself, disgruntled. Let loose a bit! Have some fun! Then I watched the second half.
The School for Good and Evil tells the story of two girls: Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie). The former is a beautiful dreamer and lover of fairytales who’s unappreciated at home; the latter is abrasive, unstylish, and loathed by everyone in their small town of Gavaldon. They’ve also been unlikely best friends most of their lives. One day they hear a story about a girl who was snatched from Gavaldon twenty years ago and whisked away to the mysterious School for Good and Evil, where fairytale characters are trained to be one or the other: purely good or purely evil. Sophie, who’s always wanted to run away from Gavaldon, writes a letter wishing to be taken. Agatha only wants to stay with Sophie in town forever, but gets swept up in Sophie’s wish, seemingly by accident.
Soon enough the two are being flown by a gigantic skeletal bird past the confines of town, over dark forests, to the School for Good and Evil. But there, Sophie is dropped into the School for Evil, while the bird drops Agatha into the School for Good. At first, neither seems to fit. Sophie is shunned by her Evil peers as a weak, prissy princess type, while Agatha’s appearance immediately offends every well-groomed member of the Good school. The two girls form a plan to get Sophie recategorized (Agatha, for her part, still just wants to go home). But there are already hints that beautiful Sophie may actually have vicious, selfish instincts, while empathetic Agatha may have always been misunderstood.
Also, there’s a frame narrative wrapped around all this about two brothers, the embodiment of Good and Evil themselves, whose epic battle threw the world out of alignment. (Both are played by Kit Young, fighting his own mighty battle against his accent.) The centuries-long aftermath must, obviously, collide with the destinies of Sophie and Agatha.
So much for the setup. The above takes 45 minutes, but in the whirlwind of introductions to new characters and locations, it doesn’t drag too badly. Charlize Theron and Kerry Washington camp up their roles as, respectively, Lady Lesso (head of the School for Evil) and Professor Dovey (head of the School for Good). Other characters include Michelle Yeoh, wasted as a bit-part beauty professor, Cate Blanchett as the Storian, well-cast as a tuneful storybook narrator, and Laurence Fishburne, who exudes all the charisma of a plain bagel as the School Master. Fishburne does more work in a two-minute scene of Hannibal than in this movie.
There’s also the requisite love interest, Tedros (the appropriately named Jamie Flatters), son of King Arthur, whom Sophie immediately taps as her true love and whom Agatha immediately insults. Flatters really flounders to form his character into a whole person, but there’s not much he can do with “I am good at fighting, and also, wow, Agatha, you’re sure not like other girls.”
Tedros aside, there’s a lot to like in the first half. The girls are well-drawn characters with an appealing friendship, and their setup is chock-full of solid coming-of-age themes: “Two normal people are forced into a world where a rigid binary refuses to accommodate their complexities; meanwhile, they discover what parts of the stories they’ve always been told about themselves back home are true and false.” Throw some magic in there, and some genre self-awareness, and you’ve got a winning concept. The darker scenes are fun, especially a scene where Sophie must fight off a demon that crawls out of a classmate’s tattoo. And the contrasts between the snooty members of the Good school and the sneering denizens of the Evil school are reflected by nearly every aspect of the expensive-looking production (it really is a shame about the wolves, and about one gnome character whose staff looks weirdly 3D-printed [just grab a giant gnarled stick from the woods somewhere, dammit!]).
Unfortunately, once we get past anything that could be described as “setup,” we enter a truly wretched middlegame. The passage of time is impossible to parse here. One of the professors declares that an event called the Evers’ Ball (inevitably, the climax), is supposed to take place in, I think, two weeks? Without that placed in dialogue, I couldn’t have described the length of the story if you’d held me at gunpoint. My guess would be “anywhere from four days to a month.” We see each individual class roughly once, and there are a few nighttime scenes, but how in God’s name does it hang together? Part of the pacing problem is that the movie fails to establish the sense of the everyday that’s so important for speculative worlds: what are people doing when nothing interesting is happening? How do they pass their time?
The other student characters suffer immensely from this. They’re introduced in effective enough ways, but soon lose all shape both as individuals and as two distinct school cultures. Having read the charming source novel by Soman Chainani, I found myself missing subplots where Sophie climbs the class ranks at the School for Evil, and where both schools compete in an event called a Trial by Tale—repurposed in the film as something that focuses only on Sophie and Tedros. Having class ranks and group challenges to prepare for would have added some much-needed organization and purpose to the school setting. As it stands, the universe seems to exist only as a playground for Sophie’s and Agatha’s plot points, rather than being a whole world that preexisted them by centuries.
Without the sparkle of new stuff getting thrown at us, there remains little to grasp onto. The rare attempts at comedy are better off ignored, which is downright shocking from director Paul Feig, whom I would follow anywhere after Bridesmaids, A Simple Favor, Spy, AND The Heat. Four! Four comedies I love, and now, in this movie, we have to settle for "jokes" like “A character asks for a door to be opened, and it takes a few tries”? Why have you forsaken me, Paul?
Without comedy, we might look to the action to keep us on the edge of our seats, but the movie's action sequences are rough and ready at best. The choppy fight scenes tend to obscure one of the combatants, making it difficult to track who is trying to hit what and when; these fights also often pit underdeveloped side characters against each other. And, as with most fantasy-adjacent movies these days, there’s more and more action as the movie goes along, which grows more and more destructive. The thing about blasting away your wonderful production design with murky-looking fantasy explosions is that it exposes what’s underneath the trappings. In this case, what’s underneath is the slender but charming story of two girls learning about themselves and each other, which makes the surrounding universe feel bloated and blustery, with its frame narrative and its grand overtures toward Destiny and Destruction. One begins to think there might have been an excellent 120-minute movie in here—something slighter and more playful, less an epic and more a fairytale.
Rioghnach Robinson lives in Chicago, where she spends 70% of her waking hours dissecting the mindsets of fictional characters; the remaining 30% go toward rubbing her palms together in doomed attempts to generate heat. She writes books under the pen name Riley Redgate, most recently Alone Out Here (Disney Hyperion/2022), and she has also written for The Onion, America's finest news source. You can find her on Instagram, Tumblr, Letterboxd, or her website.
The School for Good and Evil tells the story of two girls: Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie). The former is a beautiful dreamer and lover of fairytales who’s unappreciated at home; the latter is abrasive, unstylish, and loathed by everyone in their small town of Gavaldon. They’ve also been unlikely best friends most of their lives. One day they hear a story about a girl who was snatched from Gavaldon twenty years ago and whisked away to the mysterious School for Good and Evil, where fairytale characters are trained to be one or the other: purely good or purely evil. Sophie, who’s always wanted to run away from Gavaldon, writes a letter wishing to be taken. Agatha only wants to stay with Sophie in town forever, but gets swept up in Sophie’s wish, seemingly by accident.
Soon enough the two are being flown by a gigantic skeletal bird past the confines of town, over dark forests, to the School for Good and Evil. But there, Sophie is dropped into the School for Evil, while the bird drops Agatha into the School for Good. At first, neither seems to fit. Sophie is shunned by her Evil peers as a weak, prissy princess type, while Agatha’s appearance immediately offends every well-groomed member of the Good school. The two girls form a plan to get Sophie recategorized (Agatha, for her part, still just wants to go home). But there are already hints that beautiful Sophie may actually have vicious, selfish instincts, while empathetic Agatha may have always been misunderstood.
Also, there’s a frame narrative wrapped around all this about two brothers, the embodiment of Good and Evil themselves, whose epic battle threw the world out of alignment. (Both are played by Kit Young, fighting his own mighty battle against his accent.) The centuries-long aftermath must, obviously, collide with the destinies of Sophie and Agatha.
So much for the setup. The above takes 45 minutes, but in the whirlwind of introductions to new characters and locations, it doesn’t drag too badly. Charlize Theron and Kerry Washington camp up their roles as, respectively, Lady Lesso (head of the School for Evil) and Professor Dovey (head of the School for Good). Other characters include Michelle Yeoh, wasted as a bit-part beauty professor, Cate Blanchett as the Storian, well-cast as a tuneful storybook narrator, and Laurence Fishburne, who exudes all the charisma of a plain bagel as the School Master. Fishburne does more work in a two-minute scene of Hannibal than in this movie.
There’s also the requisite love interest, Tedros (the appropriately named Jamie Flatters), son of King Arthur, whom Sophie immediately taps as her true love and whom Agatha immediately insults. Flatters really flounders to form his character into a whole person, but there’s not much he can do with “I am good at fighting, and also, wow, Agatha, you’re sure not like other girls.”
Tedros aside, there’s a lot to like in the first half. The girls are well-drawn characters with an appealing friendship, and their setup is chock-full of solid coming-of-age themes: “Two normal people are forced into a world where a rigid binary refuses to accommodate their complexities; meanwhile, they discover what parts of the stories they’ve always been told about themselves back home are true and false.” Throw some magic in there, and some genre self-awareness, and you’ve got a winning concept. The darker scenes are fun, especially a scene where Sophie must fight off a demon that crawls out of a classmate’s tattoo. And the contrasts between the snooty members of the Good school and the sneering denizens of the Evil school are reflected by nearly every aspect of the expensive-looking production (it really is a shame about the wolves, and about one gnome character whose staff looks weirdly 3D-printed [just grab a giant gnarled stick from the woods somewhere, dammit!]).
Unfortunately, once we get past anything that could be described as “setup,” we enter a truly wretched middlegame. The passage of time is impossible to parse here. One of the professors declares that an event called the Evers’ Ball (inevitably, the climax), is supposed to take place in, I think, two weeks? Without that placed in dialogue, I couldn’t have described the length of the story if you’d held me at gunpoint. My guess would be “anywhere from four days to a month.” We see each individual class roughly once, and there are a few nighttime scenes, but how in God’s name does it hang together? Part of the pacing problem is that the movie fails to establish the sense of the everyday that’s so important for speculative worlds: what are people doing when nothing interesting is happening? How do they pass their time?
The other student characters suffer immensely from this. They’re introduced in effective enough ways, but soon lose all shape both as individuals and as two distinct school cultures. Having read the charming source novel by Soman Chainani, I found myself missing subplots where Sophie climbs the class ranks at the School for Evil, and where both schools compete in an event called a Trial by Tale—repurposed in the film as something that focuses only on Sophie and Tedros. Having class ranks and group challenges to prepare for would have added some much-needed organization and purpose to the school setting. As it stands, the universe seems to exist only as a playground for Sophie’s and Agatha’s plot points, rather than being a whole world that preexisted them by centuries.
Without the sparkle of new stuff getting thrown at us, there remains little to grasp onto. The rare attempts at comedy are better off ignored, which is downright shocking from director Paul Feig, whom I would follow anywhere after Bridesmaids, A Simple Favor, Spy, AND The Heat. Four! Four comedies I love, and now, in this movie, we have to settle for "jokes" like “A character asks for a door to be opened, and it takes a few tries”? Why have you forsaken me, Paul?
Without comedy, we might look to the action to keep us on the edge of our seats, but the movie's action sequences are rough and ready at best. The choppy fight scenes tend to obscure one of the combatants, making it difficult to track who is trying to hit what and when; these fights also often pit underdeveloped side characters against each other. And, as with most fantasy-adjacent movies these days, there’s more and more action as the movie goes along, which grows more and more destructive. The thing about blasting away your wonderful production design with murky-looking fantasy explosions is that it exposes what’s underneath the trappings. In this case, what’s underneath is the slender but charming story of two girls learning about themselves and each other, which makes the surrounding universe feel bloated and blustery, with its frame narrative and its grand overtures toward Destiny and Destruction. One begins to think there might have been an excellent 120-minute movie in here—something slighter and more playful, less an epic and more a fairytale.
Rioghnach Robinson lives in Chicago, where she spends 70% of her waking hours dissecting the mindsets of fictional characters; the remaining 30% go toward rubbing her palms together in doomed attempts to generate heat. She writes books under the pen name Riley Redgate, most recently Alone Out Here (Disney Hyperion/2022), and she has also written for The Onion, America's finest news source. You can find her on Instagram, Tumblr, Letterboxd, or her website.
Categories: adventure, fantasy, teen movies
