REMAKE OF DISNEY CLASSIC MISSING MAGIC
Beauty And The Beast (PG) Verdict: Not a patch on the cartoon Get Out (15A) Verdict: Captivating and original
DISNEY’S 1991 cartoon Beauty And The Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. So this starry, eagerly awaited live-action remake, also by Disney, has much to live up to.
But for all its energy, and the conspicuous effort to replicate the cartoon version, the magic of the original is somehow missing.
Too often, it whimpers where it should roar, phuts where it should fizz.
Part of the problem lies in the casting of Emma Watson as Belle.
Now, Miss Watson seems like an admirable young woman, but the reality is that she is not a particularly good actress.
In common with her Harry Potter costar Daniel Radcliffe, her star wattage greatly exceeds her talent.
The curse, as if I need to tell you, has been visited upon a badly behaved prince by a sorceress, and cannot be lifted until he is ready to love and be loved.
So he has been turned into a hideous beast, living unhappily in his castle where his former minions have metamorphosed into household objects.
Belle starts off as his prisoner, nobly swapping places with her father (Kevin Kline), but gradually comes to recognise her captor’s inner beauty.
Her swaggering suitor Gaston (Luke Evans), conversely, is heroic and handsome on the outside, but beastly within.
Of course, the songs are still great, and Howard Ashman’s lyrics (with additions by Tim Rice) will always sparkle.
Moreover, the song-and-dance routines are rousingly done, and a marvellous supporting cast delivers further lustre.
It includes Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor and Gugu Mbatha-Raw all giving voice to the cursed household knickknacks, with Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens as the prince.
Evans looks the part and is a modest hoot as Gaston, but he’s not nearly as funny as his cartoon counterpart.
I truly wish I had liked the film more. I wanted to be enchanted by it, as I was by Kenneth Branagh’s recent live-action Cinderella.
THAT had big boots to fill, too, or at any rate a delicate glass slipper. But this Beauty And The Beast is no match for the animated classic. And Miss Watson is a Belle who fails to chime.
Get Out is the captivatingly original debut feature as writer and director from American comedian Jordan Peele and it has made quite an impact already.
It is part-horror film, part-thriller, partpsychological drama, part-comedy, and there’s even some gory sci-fi stuff in there as well.
But, above all, it packs a potent satirical message about race relations in the United States.
The film has done terrific business at the US box office and has caused a flurry of interest here, too, after Samuel L. Jackson ungraciously criticised the casting of British actor Daniel Kaluuya in the lead role, as an African-American with a white girlfriend.
He evidently reckoned that a Brit couldn’t be sensitive to all the nuances of a mixed-race relationship in modern America.
Well, old Sam Jackson got it wrong. Kaluuya is pitch-perfect as Chris Washington, a photographer who has been dating
lovely Rose Armitage (Allison Will iams) for five months and is preparing to meet her family for the first time.
Chris wants to know whether Rose has mentioned his skin colour to her folks, but she assures him it’s irrelevant.
True, she has never dated a black guy before, but it won’t cause any consternation; her parents are irreproachably liberal.
‘My dad would’ve voted for Obama a third time if he could’ve,’ she declares
So off they set, by car, to her lakes side family home.
But a collision with a deer unsettles them, especially when a police officer arrives and takes their details with just a hint of racist undertones.
This is affluent, middle-class, country club and, above all, white America.
The only African-Americans to be seen are hired hands. Chris is well aware of this, and faintly troubled to find a black maid and gardener at the Armitages handsome home, but is soon put at ease
Rose’s parents, Dean (Bradley Whit ford), a chatty neurosurgeon, and Missy (Catherine Keener), a matronly psychiatrist
seem warm and welcoming. They embrace him enthusiastically.
‘We’re huggers,’ says Dean, on the doorstep. Pretty soon he is taking Chris on a friendly tour of the grounds and praising Obama as, hands down, the best president of his lifetime.
By now, though, we know that this is the sort of film in which neither the main protagonist, nor we the audience, should ever really feel at ease.
THERE are distinct echoes of other meet-the-parents films, not least Meet The Parents (2000), and Stanley Kramer’s 1967 classic Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?
But Peele has a further agenda, and wants to move us in more ways than one.
Indeed, I practically leapt out of my skin even before the opening credits, and had to apologise to the person next to me in the screening-room.
The creeps, chills and jumps are brilliantly orchestrated.
Gradually, of course, Chris realises that Rose’s parents are not quite as benevolent as they seem.
Missy hypnotises him, ostensibly to stop him smoking.
But first, almost cruelly, finds his most vulnerable emotional pressure-point: the death of his mother in a hit-and-run accident when he was 11.
Moreover, Rose has an aggressively garrulous brother, Jeremy (a relatively small part for the ever-watchable Caleb Landry Jones) who seems a little too interested in the physiological differences between blacks and whites.
And there is something distinctly odd about the unnervingly smiley maid, Georgina, and gardener, Walter.
At least Chris is able to share his concerns with Rose, and over the phone with his friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who is back home looking after his dog, and is the outlet for most of the comedy.
Towards the end, it gets a little overwrought. But what a clever, provocative and entertaining film this is, as it prods at the emotive issue of race relations while mixing up so many genres.