Adam VS. Beauty and the Beast

Charming, baffling, frustrating. Adam breaks down Disney’s latest live-action offering

It wasn’t until the second day of trying that I realised how bizarrely fiddly trying to review Beauty and the Beast (BATB) was going to be. It’s a charming film, but one that’s ultimately waaaay too bogged down in its own unnecessary and undeveloped changes to really satisfy. For all the film gets right, there are a ton of issues – some small, some fundamental – that really just let the air right out of its proverbial balloon. BATB’ fiddliness comes in trying to fairly account for the film’s right and wrong whilst communicating exactly why the film ultimately doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s because I’m relatively new to this whole blog/film review/analysis malarkey but BATB was proving far too frustrating. So consider this a fairly lengthy breakdown of exactly what works and what does not work in Disney’s latest live-action adaptation.

Firstly, for the three of you that haven’t seen the original or don’t know the story of BATB, I’m flagging a SPOILER warning now. I can’t believe I have to put a spoiler warning for BATFB (that’s not a typo) but at least now I’ve covered that particular base. If you haven’t seen the original, I strongly recommend you watch that version first. Despite what BATB 2.0 is trying to achieve, the original is still the definitive edition of the story and I actually think that this new version wouldn’t work nearly as well if you’re unfamiliar with the animated version.

So, the plot of BATB 2.0 is effectively the same as the original. It covers all the same basic story beats and has all the songs present in the original version (plus some new ones). The biggest reason you’re coming to see 2.0 is for the live-action makeover its getting and, you know what, that’s fair enough. I moaned quite a bit before the film came out about the pointlessness of live-action remakes of Disney films, only to find myself really enjoying both 2015’s Cinderella and 2016’s The Jungle Book. What makes a live-action adaptation successful is a topic worthy of an essay in itself and I honestly haven’t really got a proper answer pinned down right now. Given the differences between the adaptions of Cinderella and The Jungle Book, there doesn’t look to be one right way of doing it. But we’re getting slightly off-topic. As I was saying, the most obvious reason to see 2.0 is to see what BATB looks like in live-action. So, how is it?

By all means the more obvious factors of a live-action adaption (I’m thinking cast and visuals here) are really pretty good. Emma Watson as Belle has pretty much the whole film resting on her shoulders and she does a great job of keeping it upright. It can be surprisingly easy to forget that if Belle doesn’t work, the film as a whole sinks. That Emma Watson never comes close to letting that happen is worthy of a lot of praise. Dan Stevens, buried under CG as the Beast, is probably the film’s sneakiest scene-stealer. The design of the Beast is such that it allows enough of the nuances of his performance to shine through and it really saves the Beast from being what could have been a fairly garish CG presence. Instead, the CG is never particularly distracting and Stevens is able to gift him an appreciated level of pathos. Honestly the cast in this film is absolutely stellar and everyone in it does a really good job. However, it’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up Luke Evans turn as Gaston who does easily the best job of translating the character to live-action. Gaston in the original is dangerous and toxic but is presented in such a way so that his cartoonish level of douchebaggery and villainy is particularly well-suited to animation. Luke Evans does an absolutely staggering job of keeping the key components of Gaston intact whilst remaining grounded within the live-action landscape of the film. I really can’t effuse about him enough.

On the visual side, BATB rests somewhere between the refined look of Cinderella and the darker, more fantastical feel of Maleficent. It’s an appropriate choice and whilst, for me, it can’t match the striking nature of the original, it is still a good-looking film.

These above elements are really the film’s biggest selling point. That and the fact that this is still BATB – a live-action update of the first animated film ever to be nominated for best picture and what some argue to be the greatest film of the Disney renaissance period. It doesn’t totally dismantle the original’s plot and characters to the extent that they are beyond recognition and so that same charm is still on display (in some cases, such as Gaston, you could argue they are actually improved). And yet, despite all of this, BATB does not reach the heights of Cinderella or The Jungle Book. It cannot claim to be the definitive version of the story that it quite clearly wants to be and this all comes to down to handful of utterly baffling decisions that stop the movie from being more than the sum of its parts. You might call what I’m about to discuss ‘nitpicking’, but I would strongly argue against you. In fact, ‘nitpicking’ is what it feels like the filmmakers did to the original in order to come up with ways to change it.

See, the original BATB is the kind of film that manages to escape falling prey to its own issues. On the one hand we get the issues that you might find in CinemaSins crap, such as: ‘Where is Belle’s Mum?’ ‘Why does nobody know about this castle and the prince?’ ‘Why was the prince a douchebag?’. But there are also some more valid issues, such as when the film takes occasionally bizarre logical leaps in regards to character (I tend to feel that the clarity of Belle’s motivations and romantic feelings get somewhat obscured when we hit the ‘Something There’ montage). But the film as a whole rises above that. So why the fuck does the new movie instead aim right for covering up those CinemaSins-esque problems at the expense of these decisions having much point to the narrative whatsoever?

For instance, the film decides to gift both Belle and the Beast with backstories regarding their parentage. Belle’s revolves around discovering why her Mum isn’t around and the Beast gets a Dad who was super mean and made him into a shithead. Belle’s backstory is the most detrimental to the plot because it forces the whole movie to take a giant detour in order to accommodate it, after which nothing much really comes from the development. It almost has the ring of a deleted scene and you could pretty easily skip right over it and not have your understanding of Belle’s motivations or arc disrupted in a particularly meaningful way. The Beast’s is less obtrusive but still cumbersome. Through the Beast’s backstory we get an extra song which you’ll forget pretty quickly but I suppose it has the added benefit of extending Belle and the Beast’s ‘getting to know you’ stretch of the film beyond just the ‘Something There’ montage. Really, though, this suffers a similar problem as Belle’s backstory in that it’s largely unnecessary. I don’t think there’s many people that needed to know why the Beast is a dick in order to go with the story and so it just lands with a bit of a thud here.

Elsewhere we have a minor backstory to Gaston which never really lands. They keep mentioning how he was in a war but it’s another addition to the plot which comes across as kind of perfunctory.

The movie piles up these little changes to the plot and the cumulative effect is a feeling of narrative sagginess. The graceful and economical storytelling of the original is lost and so whilst the movie doesn’t grind to a halt, it does begin to feel a bit too saggy as it goes on, to the point of losing some of its joy. This really comes to a head in the Beast’s new solo number ‘Evermore’ which just goes right in one ear and out the other. There’s little dimensionality added to his character from having the song in there and, honestly, it was much more effective when they just simply had him roar in aguish in the original version. Instead ‘Evermore’ just saps the momentum and power out of the moment.

Whilst I’m on the subject, I have a bone to pick with the songs. Aside from the fact that every new song is sadly forgettable, the film makes these strange attempts to embellish and extend the songs from the original movie at completely the worst fucking moments. There’s a strange bit in ‘Gaston’ (otherwise the musical highlight of the film) where the song kind of pauses after he belts “I use antlers in all of my decorating!” which ends up awkwardly emphasising the line when it really doesn’t need to be. But perhaps the worst example is ‘Be Our Guest’ which adds a bizzare musical interlude after Mrs. Potts sings “…I’ll be bubbling, I’ll be brewing…” right in the middle of the verse! I know this sounds like über-nitpicking but aside from grinding the songs to a halt (which if you’re like me and are familiar with the original versions will annoy the shit out of you) but the strange and unnecessary emphases the music ends up making gives the whole proceedings a particularly awkward feeling.

All of this that I have mentioned then gets compounded by editing, which surely ranks as the film’s most consistently badgering issue. Through keeping the same structure as the original, BATB is able to largely escape having bad scene-to-scene editing but its moment to moment editing is just bewildering and not in a good way. Shots are placed seemingly without regard for why they’ve been placed there, angles swap around awkwardly and moments of choreography – be they musical numbers or fight scenes – tend to have messy geography or are just borderline incoherent. That this is a musical really accentuates the problem and so whilst BATB is no Suicide Squad or BVS, it still comes across as messy.

So, BATB is a well-intentioned and well-cast version of the original film that suffers from a bevy of questionable changes that are compounded by bad editing. I think the biggest problem with talking about BATB is that, asides from its editing, its difficult to talk about its other issues in quite such broad terms. It’s better to zero in on the problem in question (e.g. backstory elements or musical changes) to explain the issue and that can lead to the fiddliness I mentioned way back at the beginning of this review. It’s a film that will be much easier to analyse once it’s released on Blu-Ray, Digital or whatever and it can be combed through for the specific points of reference. Ultimately BATB is not a disaster and I really want to make it clear how much I recognise what the film does well. It’s just frustratingly close to being better than the sum of its parts.

Oh, if there’s another thing I like in this film, it’s Ian Mckellen’s human-Cogsworth makeup. His moustache makes him look like a bit like an old-timey villain and I fucking love it. Honestly, Lumiere and Cogsworth don’t seem as well developed in this new version as the original but I would happily watch a whole film of them in human form bickering about the castle. There’s something about seeing Ewan McGregor and Ian Mckellen together in that costuming that was really entertaining to watch.

#BeautyandtheBeast