Sometimes, I go looking for a movie to watch and I find something completely by accident. The other night, I was looking for something relatively short, and while looking through AMC+’s catalog, I spotted something that made me do a double take. The thumbnail for the movie showed John C. Reilly and Salma Hayek as what looked like a king and queen. What the hell was this Tale of Tales? Apparently, it’s an adaptation of some stories from an Italian fairy tale collection that helped inspire the Brothers Grimm to do what they did a couple centuries later. The included trailer showed a lot of weird stuff, and I do like weird stuff.
Like, Reilly and Hayek playing a married couple was good enough for me, quite frankly.
Tale of Tales is an interlocked anthology telling three different fairy tale stories over it’s two hour and fifteen minute run time. In brief, they are a king (Reilly) going off to slay a sea dragon so his wife (Hayek) can have a child; a horndog king of a neighboring kingdom (Vincent Cassel) hearing a lovely peasant’s voice and going to woo the singer without realizing she’s one of a pair of elderly sisters; and finally a third king (Toby Jones), raises a flea as a pet and that somehow this starts a chain of events that leads to his daughter’s (Bebe Cave) marriage to an ogre (Guillaume Delaunay).
Yeah, the ogre thing makes sense in context.
As these are essentially fairy tales, they have simple plots with a lot of whimsy, but they also can be dark in places because, well, the old fairy tales often were as well. The flea grows to giant size (for a flea) and makes for a very cute creature while the two elderly sisters go to extreme lengths to either hide their age or somehow reverse it. But there’s nothing cute about the ogre, and for all that I was a bit amused by Reilly’s presence as a reason to tune in in the first place, his character doesn’t last very long, dying within the first fifteen minutes of the movie and with barely any dialogue.
But man, this was actually a lot of fun. It’s not a kids movie by any stretch of the imagination, and it does get into some heavy territory. Those two elderly sisters, for example, may just be getting themselves hooked on the medieval equivalent to plastic surgery without even realizing it. Toby Jones’s king looks like he is very much smitten with his pet flea while being a negligent father to his growing daughter, but Hayek’s queen isn’t a much better mother to her own son either in many respects. This is a film with a lot of underlying themes involving generational gaps and how parents and children relate, and it all generally works.
That’s made more interesting by the visual style of the movie. It’s colorful and bright with creatures that don’t look quite real, magic that seems magical, and some rather gorgeous sets. I don’t know why I found this movie since it was just a lot of dumb luck, but I am pretty glad I did.
Grade: A-
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