It’s confession time: I have never seen Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast.
I’m not completely ignorant of it, of course. As a human being who absorbs pop culture like a ShamWow, I know most of the words to “Be Our Guest” and the title song, and I am aware of who Gaston, Lumiere, Cogsworth, and Mrs. Potts are. The original film just came out at the wrong time, when I was a teen who disdained “chick flicks,” Oscar nominees, and Disney cartoons. Though of course I dutifully ooh’d and ah’d at the then-groundbreaking CGI chandelier in that one ballroom clip, like all the rest of you who were alive then did.
So I come into the live-action remake with arguably fresher eyes than many, and I wonder: am I supposed to be rooting for Gaston?
I’m serious: in hiring Luke Evans, a guy who’s normally about as charismatic to me as a Ken doll, as the primary villain, I can only assume Disney wanted me to boo him. Yet Dishwater Dracula/Boring Bard comes alive in this; apparently musical comedy was his real strength all along, and nobody bothered to cast him appropriately. For at least half the movie, I was wondering why, apart from ironclad story demands, bored country girl Belle (Emma Watson) wouldn’t pick this guy over the furry, computer-generated bully.
Because here’s the problem with Beast (Dan Stevens, a.k.a. Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey): an over-narrated prologue emphasizes how horrible he is, living in a tower full of gold furniture, taxing the poor excessively, and being thoroughly inhospitable to wandering strangers (sound familiar?). He even paints his face like a peacock to prove how decadent he is, and then gets quite rightly cursed (along with his semi-innocent servants) by a CGI fairy who’s nowhere near as divinely beautiful as the narrator would have us believe (mainly because she looks fake). How can we buy the Beast as tragic figure if we’re explicitly told what a grade-A jerk he is? Halfway through the movie, there’s a reference to his father becoming abusive after his mother died, but that should be a red flag too: the abused often become abusers, as Beast clearly has, and it takes a lot of therapy – not some magic kiss – to cure them of that.
So, okay then: the whole plot hinges on Beast’s passive accomplices, now enchanted furniture, trying to trick a girl into falling in love with their asshole boss so their curse can be broken. Not to get all social justice-y up in here, but does that not strike anybody else watching as all kinds of wrong?
Then again, maybe you’re supposed to automatically know the Beast is trustworthy because he literally lives in the Disneyland castle, albeit a run-down version. Fittingly, it’s like a theme-park ride inside, most notably the Haunted Mansion with its moving furniture and levitating musical instruments. Though the ballroom briefly adopts the floating lights of Hogwarts, presumably because somebody told the Beast that’s how you woo Hermione.
I’m sorry: maybe it’s that I only recently saw Christophe Gans’ take on this tale, but after watching Lea Seydoux as Belle, I find Emma Watson is not as engaging. She dutifully plays the part, but never really turns the character into anything; the obligatory Sound of Music homage is undercut both by her underwhelming vocals and the obviously fake hilltop from which she delivers it. The score tells us we should feel triumphant; our eyes take in a totally different story. Kevin Kline, as her father, is playing Gepetto, which strikes me as less his fault than Disney’s for having only so many single dad templates.
As for the Beast, Stevens’ deep baritone is pitch-perfect, but he’s oddly let down by the onscreen rendition of himself. You know how they say eyes are the hardest thing to get right in humanoid “synthespians”? Disney somehow gets the expressive eyes just right, and then drops the ball on every other body part. While the scene where a shirtless beast lies in bed is likely to inspire a ton of fan fiction, it won’t make anybody think that’s actual fur which will linger on the sheets.
And this is a problem endemic to the whole movie. Look, as a fan of The Jungle Book, I can’t say that Disney should never remake their cartoons, but there ought to be a compelling reason: Christopher Walken as King Louie, for example, or an Indian lead actor who’s better than the animated version ever was. The only reason to redo Beauty and the Beast, as best I can tell, is to throw non-stop CG in the viewer’s face, and yet never keep the camera still enough to let the viewer appreciate it all. I did like the over-the-top “Be Our Guest” sequence, which marries director Bill Condon’s love of horror to his love of musicals – seriously, the peacock-shaped feather duster voiced by Gugu Mbatha-Raw is terrifying – but the rest of the time it’s all visual fury signifying nothing…and the idea of the harpsichord having keys for teeth and then using them as missiles is some serious body horror that’s casually laughed away at the end.
Also, about that “openly gay character” – Josh Gad’s LeFou is to Gaston what Waylon Smithers is to Mr. Burns, but it’s never explicit…he dances with a woman at the end, though a colleague insisted that he saw him switch out for a man in a brief split-second. That’s not really a pay-off, and it’s certainly less of one than when a potential assailant earlier in the movie is dolled up in drag and suddenly acknowledges he likes it. For social progress, there are several interracial couples shown, but generally this is a musical so straight-passing that even Ian McKellen is given a wife at the end.
If you’re a fan, you’ll want to see this anyway just to see how it’s done. I wouldn’t dissuade you from that. But if you’re a casual viewer, please watch Christophe Gans’ recent French-language version instead – cheesy framing device aside, it’s a far more definitive – and equally lush – take.
