Movie retelling is neither a Beauty nor a Beast.
ENCHANTING NEW TAKE ON CLASSIC A PERFECTLY SERVICEABLE RETELLING
There’s no stopping the Disney remake train — get on or get out of the way is my advice. Since 2010, liveaction versions of Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty ( a. k. a. Maleficent), Cinderella and The Jungle Book have each made north of $200-million at the box office, to varying critical acclaim.
Beauty and the Beast is the latest to make the live- action leap, although there’s an odd thread of CGI running between the 1991 original and this one. Back then, a state-of-the-art computer created a digital ballroom in which the hand- drawn characters danced. Twenty- six years later, CGI and motion capture is employed to turn Dan Stevens into the bisontine Beast.
As for the plot, very little has changed. Belle ( Emma Watson) remains an odd, bookish beauty living in a provincial French town, where for unknown reasons almost everyone has a British accent.
I blame Les Misérables for starting the trend and keeping it going since 1985; incidentally, one of the film’s new songs, Evermore, sung by the mopey Beast, has a distinctly Misérables ( and miserable) tone.
After her father ( Kevin Kline) disappears on his travels, Belle finds he’s been captured by a hideous monster with some stunning real estate; the film’s opening shot replaces the usual Disney castle with the Beast’s palatial abode.
Belle offers to take her dad’s place as the Beast’s prisoner. This puts her in contact with her captor’s friendly, bewitched servants, including Cogsworth the clock ( Ian McKellen), Mrs. Potts (perfectly voiced by Emma Thompson), a wardrobe ( Audra McDonald) and a harpsichord ( Stanley Tucci). There’s also a feather duster ( Gugu MbathaRaw) who’s in love with a candelabra named Lumière. ( He sports the film’s most outrageous French accent, despite being voiced by the proudly Scottish Ewan McGregor. That’s globalization for you.)
The remake runs long compared to the original — 129 minutes versus just 84 — but it doesn’t feel bloated. Everyone gets a smidgeon more back- story, so that we learn what happened to Belle’s mother (it wasn’t pretty), and how the Beast’s beastly manners may have been due in part to bad parenting.
And yes, Josh Gad’s character, lackey to the preening Gaston ( Luke Evans), is revealed to be gay, although I’d question whether it’s as “openly” as some are saying. Aside from a quick same- sex spin on a dance floor, he spends most of the movie deep inside a closet labelled “innuendo.”
But this is Belle’s story, and Watson does a fine job of updating the character for a modern world, providing her with steely strength, i ntelligence ( she invents a horse- powered washing machine!) and determination. She may still need the Beast’s help to fight off a pack of wolves, but before he arrives she’s brawling like Liam Neeson.
It helps that the original movie was made as the studio was realizing that female characters could be more than windowdressing damsels. Called the Disney Renaissance, the period also introduced The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas and Mulan; its previous princess had been the narcoleptic Sleeping Beauty from 1959.
Some may gripe that there’s not enough that’s new in this version of the story, although director Bill Condon ( Dreamgirls, Twilight: Breaking Dawn) has said there’s no pleasing everyone when it comes to remakes.
But can you believe there was a point when Disney imagined it might strip out the songs altogether? Sacré bleu! Condon says he’s since gone the other way and included nods to other musicals, although the only one that popped at me was the scene where Watson seems about to break into the theme from The Sound of Music.
And so we have a perfectly serviceable retelling, with modern effects and even an Imax release. It will easily satisfy the Disney faithful, and it will no doubt further encourage the studio to move ahead with live-action versions of Snow White, Mulan, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King and more.
Though I’d argue that a new musical version of 1943’s Victory Through Air Power might be pushing things too far. And I’m still on the fence about whether next month’s Fate of the Furious is in fact just a live-action reboot of Disney/Pixar’s Cars. Time will tell. ∂∂∂