Sunday 9 April 2017

Beauty & The Beast

It's no secret that there aren't a whole lot of new ideas left in Hollywood anymore. The death of the mid major movie (your $35 million budget film with respectable but not outrageous aspirations) has led to a studio-dominated box office filled with sequels, franchises, reboots and remakes. And none exemplifies this more than Disney, the amoeba of the film world that has systematically subsumed the likes of Marvel and Star Wars to become the big name in blockbuster filmmaking. And while the animated division of Disney continues to flirt with originality (Moana), the live action side of things has taken to cannibalize itself through live action remakes of many of these beloved animated classics. These films have seen success, from Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella and Maleficent, and Disney clearly seems to be enjoying themselves putting more and more of these remakes in the pipeline. But whereas its initial forays into the trend were all classics from 50 or more years ago, 2017 marks their first attempt to update a classic film much of its audience would have had the chance to see in the theater: 1991’s Beauty and the Beast.

Choosing to resurrect the first ever animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards is a tall task, and Disney enlisted Bill Condon to shepherd the project to the screen. Condon has had a fascinating roller coaster of a career, with ups (Dreamgirls) and downs (the final two Twilight movies). But he does have a pretty solid piece of source material to draw from. Writers Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos took the tale and expanded it but the skeleton remains the same. It’s still about Belle, Emma Watson, and she’s still a bookish outcast in her tiny little village, still dodging the romantic advances of muscle-with-legs Gaston, Luke Evans. She comes into contact with The Beast, heavily CGI'd Dan Stevens, after the disappearance of her father, who accidentally stumbled upon his hidden castle in the woods. The Beast was cursed for being an unsympathetic in his younger princely days, with his servants turned into various household objects, and if the now hideous monster could feel true love before the wilting of a magic rose, he would be returned to his former self. With Belle in the castle, having chosen to replace her father as the Beast’s prisoner, his servants go to work to make them fall in love. See? Same old song and dance.

The easiest thing to notice about Beauty and the Beast 2.0 is its choreography. The opening replaces the original’s storybook retelling of the cursing of the prince with a look into one of his opulent parties, with endless patrons dancing through a giant ballroom, the camera swooping and turning, the edits coming fast and loose. It’s chaotic and it’s busy and it’s honestly often incomprehensible, an assault of the senses that threatens to tire you out before it has a chance to get going. The hope would be that the open is so aggressive as to contrast it with the sleepy simple life of Belle’s village, but that hope is soon dashed by Condon’s staging of Belle’s classic opening number, Belle, and the same chaos reigns. It makes for a rather exhausting and deadening first twenty minutes.

When things quiet down (which happens more rarely than you might assume) it settles into something a bit more palatable. Dan Stevens does an admirable job aping Robby Benson’s bellows and growls, while successfully mapping The Beast’s transition from hard-hearted brute to the sort of person Belle could fall in love with. The design of the servants is well-implemented, whether it’s Lumiere, Ewan McGregor, and his sashaying style, or the cowardly and cantankerous Cogsworth, Ian McKellen, their individual personalities shining through the computer generated objects. Perhaps surprisingly, Watson’s Belle isn’t particularly inspiring; she doesn’t quite seem to find the right balance in her characterization and comes off as a bit one note. Luke Evans has Gaston down pat, but Josh Gad’s LeFou seems to vary too much in his personality to get a real beat on him. The characters are about as uneven as the film is. The additions to the story, whether it’s the expansion of the enchantress who initially applied the curse or some additional backstory involving Belle’s mother, all fall flat, as do the film’s new songs. Some things work, but the aspects that don’t work seem to have more staying power, leading to a pretty disappointing experience.

There was a simplicity to the 1991 Beauty and the Beast that Condon simply fails to replicate.

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