‘Disenchanted’ Makes One Huge Mistake With Its Ending

Disenchanted is out on Disney+ today.

The long-awaited sequel to 2007’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece, Enchanted, is not faring well with critics with a rotten 47% Rotten Tomatoes critic score compared to the original film’s 93%.

In my review, I note that while I enjoyed watching the film with my kids (especially because, like Morgan in the film, my daughter is now a teenager) ultimately:

Disenchanted is rarely funny in the genuinely clever way the original was, and it lacks the focus, wit and charm of its predecessor. There’s probably a really good story about about motherhood and family buried inside the film, but it’s too scattered to get to the point or explore the notion of what ‘happily ever after’ truly means in the modern world, in a particularly compelling way.

That’s a spoiler-free review (beyond a little premise-setting which you get in the trailers) but in this post I wanted to discuss the ending. Spoilers follow.

The central conflict of the film—a rather rushed and forced conflict but one that still resonates—is between Giselle (Amy Adams) and Morgan (Gabriella Baldacchino). Unhappy with their life in the city after having a baby, Giselle convinces Robert (Jack Dempsey) to move the family to the suburbs to the town of Monroeville. Things have not been going well with Morgan, though they don’t explore this very much, and Giselle foolishly believes that moving a teenager to a brand new town and brand new high school is a good idea.

Things do not go according to plan. Morgan isn’t happy about having to move (obviously!) and tensions between her and Giselle flare up. Previously, Morgan has referred to Giselle as ‘mom’ but now she angrily calls her ‘stepmother’ and that this is all she’ll ever be to her.

So Giselle uses a magic wishing wand and wishes for a ‘fairy tale life’ which also doesn’t go according to plan. Fairy tales have their own set of unique problems, one of which is the unfortunate side-effect of transforming Giselle into a Wicked Stepmother.

Various calamities and shenanigans ensue but in the end, just as the clock is about to strike midnight and the spell becomes permanent, Giselle gives Morgan the wand and tells her she has to make the wish. Her own power is now almost entirely drained from her as all of Andalasia and its beings are slowly sapped of their magic.

Morgan isn’t sure what to wish for but finally realizes what she wants: “I wish I was at home with my mom,” she says.

This is the right wish and it undoes the first one, returning the town of Monroeville to its former state and stripping its inhabitants of their silly costumes. Everything goes back to the way it was, and only Giselle and Morgan remember what happened. Morgan wakes up in her bed in the rundown pink ‘castle’ the family moved into when they left the city. Later that day they’re all happily sitting around at the park, and the cute—utterly superfluous—boy Morgan ran into the day before even waves her over to hang out with him and his friends. It looks like everything will be okay, after all! How sweet.

And how preposterous. For one thing, none of the problems that Giselle and Morgan were experiencing outside their relationship with one another have gone away. You don’t just suddenly get the guy and fit in at the new school, just because. You don’t wash away the post-partum depression or fix the marriage with the wave of a wand. Or, well, two waves of a wand.

Besides, it doesn’t make any sense. Morgan’s wish wouldn’t put her back in the suburbs of Monroeville. She should have woken up in their flat on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, returning her to the life she never wanted to leave in the first place—the life that her father and Giselle rather selfishly took from her in some ludicrous attempt to ‘fix’ their family and marriage. The entire move to Monroeville was a mistake, clearly, and the only sensible ending for this film was to have the whole thing wished back to the way things were before the move: Not perfect, but not some goofy ‘fix everything by moving to the suburbs’ nonsense, either.

Maybe this isn’t a big deal to other people, but it rang rather hollow for me. As someone who was moved around a lot as a kid, I know firsthand that if I’d been given a magic wand and wished my way “home” it would not be to the house in the new town I just moved into. Not to the place where I had no friends and where I dreaded going to school. My own experiences getting moved around a lot were difficult enough that I swore I’d never to the same thing with my kids. I can’t imagine uprooting them from their schools (Middle School and High School respectively) or friends just to ‘fix’ some nebulous feeling that life would be better in a ‘fairy tale’ suburb.

I suppose this all soured me to the film right from the get-go, and to both Robert and Giselle who I think came off as incredibly selfish. I understand having to move because you got a new job or lost your old one or can’t afford to live somewhere anymore, but moving ‘just because’ and forcing your teenage daughter to go to a new school is monstrous. Teenage girls have it hard enough already. I wouldn’t wish teenage girlhood on my worst enemy.

In any case, at least that ending would have given Morgan some agency and made it very clear to Giselle that her own wishes were ultimately selfish and uncaring, driven by her own desires rather than the needs of her loved ones. Which isn’t very loving. All the ‘memory magic’ and sweetness in the film between these two conflicted characters falls a little flat when the fundamental issues at the heart of their relationship are ultimately never truly resolved in a satisfying or realistic way.

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