Film Marcus Berkmann
My daughter, aged seventeen, went to see Beauty and the Beast (PG). My word, she’s turning into a hard-nosed little critic. She’s a feminist, a fan of Emma Watson, but she wasn’t too impressed with the performance of the elfin one in this film. ‘It’s just a princess role, isn’t it? She hasn’t much to do other than be beautiful and clever and resourceful, and, at the end, she’ll get the only thing she really wants, the hand of the prince in marriage. We know how it’s going to end.’
Which is something we could say of most films, but she’s right. Beauty And The Beast is all endings, and its protagonists have little to do other than achieve those endings. Watson is Belle, who is far cleverer than anyone else in her strange, computer-generated little village, and you can spot this by the fact that she’s the only one who doesn’t wear a hat. Unfortunately, like her fellows, she is wont to suddenly break into song every few minutes, for this is a musical of the old school.
The village pub isn’t just a pub; it’s an opportunity for actors to dance on tables in precisely choreographed displays of random jollity. The songs aren’t terrible, exactly, but they are almost exquisitely unmemorable. Without them the film could have been at least twenty wonderful minutes shorter.
Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey is the beast, meanwhile, and a miserable old monster he is too, with a swishing tail and horns so enormous it’s just as well all the doors in the castle are so wide. According to the precise terms of his bewitching, he has a deadline: a dark red rose sits in his bedroom under a glass covering, and, unless a fair maiden (not wearing a hat) declares love for him before the last petal falls, he will be a monster for eternity, possibly longer.
His old servants, meanwhile, have been cruelly punished for their loyalty by being turned into walking, talking household implements: a clock, a candelabrum, a huge singing cupboard. These characters provide the ‘comic relief’, which is rather more comic than their awful fate.
Around the castle it snows constantly, even though it’s June. The villagers don’t know the castle is there and won’t believe it when they’re told. Have you noticed how often in American films a village full of essentially nice and sensible people turns into a ravening lynch mob at the drop of a hat (not Emma’s)? This never happens in European films. The legacy of the Salem witch trials lingers long in that strange country.
So the story wends its way, assisted by Kevin Kline as Emma’s crusty old dad, and Luke Evans as Gaston, who starts off as a comic character; then turns into a villain for no reason at all. Emma and Dan do their jobs, and you begin to realise that all the most interesting characters in the film are the servants, all of whom, it turns out, are played by proper star actors. By the end you are utterly rooting for them.
Emma has one moment of brilliance, though, as befits the only heroine of a Disneyfied fable who actually reads books. In the village there are only a dozen or so books, and she has read them all. When she’s in the castle, following the beast around his vast lair, he shows her his library, the size of Wembley Stadium, only filled with books.
The wonder on Emma’s face is genuinely moving. My daughter says she cried, and so did I.