This Beast could have been a beauty, but Emma’s Belle rings a dud note
Beauty And The Beast (PG)
DISNEY’S 1991 cartoon version of Beauty And The Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for best picture in the Academy Awards.
Like everything else that year it was devoured by The Silence Of The Lambs, but it fully deserved the unprecedented honour of the nomination; it had oodles of charm and was funny, exhilarating and romantic.
So this starry, eagerly awaited liveaction remake, also by Disney, has much to live up to. Mostly, alas, it fails to do so. 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, and hats off to her for reportedly declining to wear a figure-altering corset in this film. She said she wanted to look real, and also that she wanted her character to reflect some of her own feisty feminism.
Fair enough. But the reality is that Miss Watson is not a particularly good actress. In common with her Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe, her star wattage greatly exceeds her talent.
So, for example, when she says ‘I want to help you, there must be some way to break the curse’, she sounds about as passionate and committed as someone ordering a skinny cinnamon latte, to go.
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 all 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 his inner beauty.
Her swaggering suitor Gaston (Luke Evans), meanwhile, represents the opposite phenomenon: He is dashing, heroic and handsome on the outside, but beastly within.
Of course, the songs are still great, and Tim Rice’s lyrics will always sparkle. ‘I’m especially good at expectorating,’ as the incorrigible Gaston boasts of his apparently limitless gifts, might be my favourite refrain in any musical, ever. Closely followed by, ‘No one’s slick as Gaston/No one’s quick as Gaston/No one’s neck’s as incredibly thick as Gaston’.
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 knick-knacks, 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, so never quite lives up to great expectorations.
And you can disregard all the fuss about his supposedly gay sidekick LeFou (Josh Gad). There has been a right hullabaloo about this film, directed by the openly gay Bill Condon, featuring Disney’s ‘first LBGT character’.
But in fact LeFou merely seems marginally more camp than everyone else. After all, blousy modern interpretations of this 18th century French fairy tale are camp almost by definition.
Will this version be a hit? Probably, given the mighty Disney marketing machine. But think twice before taking young children. There are a few scenes with snarling wolves that had even the grown woman next to me in the cinema shrinking in her seat.
ON the whole, the computergenerated stuff is nicely done. Cogsworth the clock (McKellen) and Lumiere the candelabra (McGregor) are especially well realised. But crucially, the CGI is surprisingly feeble in the climactic fight between Gaston and the beast on the castle turrets.
I truly wish I had liked the film more. I wanted to be enchanted and entranced by it, as I was by Kenneth Branagh’s live-action version of Cinderella a couple of years ago. That had big boots to fill, too, or at any rate a delicate glass slipper.
But this Beauty And The Beast is no match at all for the animated classic. And Miss Watson is a Belle who fails to chime.