directed by Bill Condon
written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos
The tale as old as time gets a new treatment as Walt Disney Pictures releases yet another live-action update of one of its animated classics, arguably one of its most beloved in Beauty and the Beast.
This story is virtually identical to that of the 1991 animated film, which in turn was based loosely on the fairy tale by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont. A selfish prince (Dan Stevens) is cursed by an enchantress (Hattie Morahan), who transforms him into a monstrous beast, and all his servants (who are apparently guilty by association) into magical housewares. He is given a magical rose, and the opportunity to break the curse, if he can love and earn the love of another before the last petal falls. Otherwise, he shall remain a beast forever.
Years later, the old inventor Maurice (Kevin Kline) and his daughter Belle (Emma Watson), move into a quaint village in the French countryside where Belle, a literate and bright young girl, is an anomaly among the simple country folk, who don't think a woman should be reading. Among them is the arrogant Gaston (Luke Evans) perpetually accompanied by his sidekick and number one fan LeFou (Josh Gad) who wants to mary Belle. Maurice goes on a trip, and Belle asks him to bring her back a rose. He gets lost in the woods and finds himself at the door of the cursed prince's enchanted castle. He plucks a rose from the castle's hedges and the prince accosts him and throws him in prison, though his horse escapes. The horse makes his way to Belle, who goes to the castle and takes her father's place as the beast's prisoner. As Belle spends time with the Beast and his staff, she learns of their plight, and of the curse. What she doesn't know is that she could be key to breaking it.
At the very outset, I was struck by how much thought went into writing the script for this remake; while they clearly strove to be as faithful to the animated original as possible, it's clear that the writers took note of all the gaffes in storytelling logic that were littered all throughout the original film, first and foremost being: if he's a prince, then how is it no one even knows he exists? (Answer: the enchantress made everyone forget about him, his servants and their entire history) There were a number of other questions answered along the way, too, like why would the enchantress curse an 11-year-old (answer: he's of the age of majority when cursed here, and it is left open ended as to how long the enchantment has lasted), why the heck does Belle borrow a book from a book STORE (answer: she borrows them from a church), how the heck does Belle lift the stricken Beast off the ground to get him back to his castle after he's been savaged by wolves (answer: she gets him to stand up) and even one involving the film's climax, which I won't spoil even though most people who'll read this review will no doubt have seen the original. I also appreciated how the writers reincorporated the father's act of picking a flower into the story; this was part of the original fairy tale but was left out of the 1991 film. It added an element of whimsy to the film which is, after all, still a fairy tale.
Not all of the rewriting works, though; efforts to make Evans' Gaston (more on him later) less cartoonish just make the dialogue a bit awkward, and backstory about both the prince's and Belle's mothers feels somewhat shoehorned in. It's clear enough, though, that a lot of these little touches were added to make Belle's and the prince's inevitable mutual affection seem less like the product of Stockholm Syndrome. Overall, I appreciated the effort to try and make the movie impervious to an "Honest Trailer."
Of course, writing is but one component of the movie, and a property as beloved as this one will truly rise and fall on the performances of the actors. The good news is that Emma Watson turns in a spirited performance as Belle, one for which she will no doubt be remembered fondly by millions of fans of the original film. She really captures the main qualities of the character: her Belle is capable, courageous and compassionate. The only problem for me was that, well, I don't think Watson sings very well. Stevens does a commendable job as the Beast, even working through all of the computer-generated, motion-captured imagery, and more importantly his chemistry with Watson works wonderfully. For me, he still doesn't quite evoke the spirit of the unnamed prince's tortured soul quite as well as Glen Keane's magnificent animated creation did twenty-six years ago, but he certainly gives it the old college try.
I wasn't a big fan, unfortunately of Luke Evans' take on Gaston. He isn't quite alpha-male macho enough, or funny enough in comparison to his animated predecessor. Gaston was one of the broader characters in Disney's villains catalog, and a well-aimed shot at the rampant sexism that prevailed both in Hollywood and society back in 1991. At a time when the President of the United States is basically every cartoon villain ever put together, Disney missed out on a golden opportunity to make their bad guy a consummate, no-holds-barred boor like Donald Trump. They already had a pretty strong template in the original Gaston, voiced to hilarious perfection by Richard White, and then they went and watered him down. To be honest, I had no problem whatsoever with Josh Gad's LeFou being openly gay; I thought Disney's act of making one of their most entertaining villains shockingly bland was the real sin here.
Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Audra McDonald, Nathan Mack and Stanley Tucci, as the cursed staff, who have been transformed into various household implements do solid work in comparison to the likes of Jerry Orbach, David Odgen Stiers and Angela Lansbury, even if McGregor's take on Be Our Guest doesn't quite measure up to the late Orbach's original rendition, due in equal parts to his vocals and to some rather dodgy computer-generated imagery.
And that brings me to the next problem of the film: after the visual triumph that Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book proved to be, I had hoped that Disney had gotten the art of translating its traditional hand-drawn work into computer-generated imagery down pat, but that was definitely not the case with this film. Considering the money poured into this film, the distinctly cartoony CGI was extremely disappointing, especially considering that they resorted to the tired old trick of shrouding much of the CGI in darkness. To be fair, though, the effort invested in bringing the Beast to life paid off quite well.
As for the music, with Watson being kind of "meh" in the singing department and Evans being king of "meh" overall, the musical numbers, which are a crucial component of this film, were somewhat compromised, especially Belle's opening number as well as Gaston's number in the tavern. Alan Menken and Tim Rice give us a number of new songs, but none of them really made an impression on me, with the exception of the relatively low-key song that they gave to Kevin Kline's Maurice, who didn't have any musical numbers in the animated film. It was the only song on the soundtrack that felt like it lent the film a human element and wasn't just tacked on to sell more soundtrack albums/downloads. Menken expanded quite a bit on the original film's score, especially given the extended running time, and it was nice that he wasn't just content to recycle old themes.
Overall, it's a respectable re-imagining of the animated film, but if I'm honest, given how high Disney set the bar with The Jungle Book, and considering the pedigree of the 1991 classic, the first ever animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, back when they only nominated five movies at a time, they owed us viewers quite a bit more than "respectable."
6.5/10
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