The Witches is a new version of the 1983 Roald Dahl children’s book, which was previously adapted by Nicolas Roeg in 1990, but it isn’t exactly an update. Zemeckis can’t channel Hathaway’s energy to any end, because the movie he’s made is so curiously aimless. But there’s no center to her, no character - she’s nothing more than a collection of big line readings and out-of-the-box digital effects. Hathaway’s Grand High Witch is scary, because she’s been given a Venom-wide maw and claw-tipped limbs that lengthen themselves like that Street Fighter character.
Hathaway’s taken a lot of needless, unfair criticism for her theater-kid earnestness in the past, but what she’s doing in this new film from Robert Zemeckis is a performance without ever feeling like acting. But that doesn’t do justice to just how many active choices Hathaway puts into each sentence. The Grand High Witch is alleged to have “hatched on frozen tundras of Norway.” You could argue that this delivery is meant to reflect both that and the existence of a being who’s spent her long, evil life traveling around the world giving orders to various covens hidden in plain sight. She does, after sneering, “Did I stutter?” He arrives, eventually, at an understanding that she is referring to garlic, but has opted to pronounce the word as though it were a whole phrase unto itself.
When her character, the Grand High Witch, informs the hotel manager played by Stanley Tucci that there should be “no gooourrrrrrlick in the soup,” it defies geography entirely. Sometimes she leans zestfully into v sounds for w’s, à la your classic German-ish “ve have vays of making you talk” stereotype. Sometimes she curls her vowels in a way that lands somewhere between an actual Scandinavian accent and that of the Swedish Chef. Sometimes she rolls her r’s with the exaggerated trill of a Spanish teacher doing a demonstration for a class. What you need to know about Anne Hathaway’s accent in The Witches is that it cannot be contained by the borders of any one nation - it has been designed to bounce from region to region, often in the space of a single exchange. I wouldn’t say it’s good, but it’s definitely big.
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