Beauty and the Beast, review: Simply the beast

Emma Watson is well cast as Belle and Dan Stevens brings pathos to her hirsute suitor, but Disney’s good-looking remake prefers nostalgia to adventure, says our new film critic Matthew Norman
Matthew Norman21 November 2017

Much has been made of Disney’s “first gay moment”, and less of its claim to giving a groundbreaking debut to interracial romance. But with Beauty and the Beast, the live-action reprise of its classic 1991 animation, has the studio notched a trailblazing hat-trick by dipping into the caustic waters of political satire?

The Beast’s elaborately gothic castle is staffed by a coterie of CGI servants, transformed into household items and musical instruments in vicarious punishment for their master’s arrogance. He is a ranting, paranoid, peculiarly coiffed grotesque. So when one of them locates him in “the west wing”, you wonder how close they came to hiring Alec Baldwin in Dan Stevens’s stead.

Alas (sad!), the chronology refutes satirical intent. Filming ended just before the launch of a certain presidential bid.

Far from being topical allegory, as the title song reminds us, this is a “tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme”. It’s the story of romantic love so pure and blind to appearance that it redeems a lost, tormented soul. A slither of hope, perhaps, for Melania there.

Yet there is a contemporary flavour to the sub-theme about ignorance-fuelled hatred of otherness. We first meet Emma Watson’s Belle ambling distractedly through her 18th-century rural French town, her head buried in a novel. The townsfolk love the poorly educated. They find her bookishness threatening.

Narcissistic suitor Gaston (Luke Evans), is a macho hunter who is fawned on by everyone — especially manservant LeFou (Josh Gad) — except Belle. Her contempt naturally inflames his desire for the one planet in his orbit that doesn’t see him as a star. And when you’re a star, as the philosopher said, you can grab women by any body part other than the heartstrings.

Bright minds: affectionate inventor Maurice (Kevin Kline) has to be rescued from the Beast by his daughter Belle (Emma Watson) (UNIT)

She yearns to escape. “There must be more to life than this provincial life,” she sings, the stifled small-town dreamer’s cri de coeur.

What traps her is sweet filial piety for Maurice, her vague but affectionate inventor father (a restrained Kevin Kline). When the old boy strays into the castle grounds the Beast, who takes a muscular line on undocumented migrants, locks him up for life.

Yet this is no average natural-born hybrid of bison’s head, lion’s face and goatish horns. Once a princely Adonis, he was rendered beastly by an enchantress to whom he was cruel. Only a woman’s love, declared before the last petal falls from a red rose, can break the spell.

With the petal count diminishing, he is morosely resigned to a reclusive existence with no one for company but those retainers — Cogsworth the Louis Quinze clock (Ian McKellen), Cadenza the harpsichord (Stanley Tucci), candelabra Lumière (Ewan McGregor) and Potts the mumsy teapot (Emma Thompson) — who give nominative determinism its biggest boost since Tyson Fury won the heavyweight title.

As for their guv’nor, it is with barely decent haste (more languid peeling of the character onion would have lent depth) that director Bill Condon reveals his bark is worse than his befanged overbite.

After Belle pitches up to replace her ailing dad in the medieval cell he quickly moves her from Disney-Guantanamo to a room worthy of Versailles, and — seriously, you want spoiler alerts with a tale as old as time? — becomes besotted. So, soon enough, does she. Being wary of citing Swedish-based terrorist activity without a verifiable source, we’ll sidestep the obvious Stockholm syndrome issue and accept it as true love.

Romance: Belle dances with the Beast

Every embryonic romance between an exquisite gamine and a monstrous ogre needs the amniotic fluid of a shared interest, and here it is books. In a rare divergence from the animation, in which he is illiterate, this is a bibliophile Beast. The covert pleasure he takes in romantic literature echoes The Remains of the Day scene where the pre-crockery Emma Thompson catches Anthony Hopkins’s tragically repressed butler with a Mills & Boon-ish novel.

This story ends more merrily than that elegy to frustrated longing. After Gaston’s KKK-style lynch mob is routed by the chattels and he comes off worse in a turret brawl, the ever after stretches happily ahead.

At a screening for families the parents seemed barely less engaged than their face-painted nine-year-olds — and small wonder. This is an engaging film, thanks largely to the beauty of Watson’s casting. Beyond her elfin looks and background in filmic sorcery she brings her keen Oxbridge intelligence to a proto-feminist role befitting her new persona as the Andrea Dworkin of the plunging neckline.

Stevens projects the pathos with nifty eye-acting and increasingly gentle, lovelorn vocal tones. If his Beast isn’t remotely hideous enough, Disney didn’t get rich by traumatising pre-teens with creatures modelled on me or Alan Sugar.

You might well ask what possible point there could be to remaking a virtually flawless film. But since the answer can be compressed into one symbol — $ — the appetite for existential angst wants sating elsewhere.

If this version is inferior to its predecessor, albeit not by a massive margin, that was inevitable. The cinematic fairytale paradox is that animation always seems more realistic than live action. Its freedom from physical limitations lets it more precisely mirror the unreality.

There are other flaws. The showcase song-and-dance numbers are too transparently styled after the stage musical to be fresh, and the rigid adherence to the 1991 version betrays a preference for nostalgia over daring. A dash of Belle’s adventurous spirit would have helped.

Yet the film has pace, gusto and aesthetic sumptuousness, and it creates a sufficiently magical world.

As for that earth-shaking gay scene: blink and you’ll miss it. I blinked. Apparently, it was LeFou dancing momentarily with a befrocked guy that scandalised Malaysia and led an Alabama drive-in to ban the movie in deference to Jesus.

Beastly small-town intolerance of otherness... Whether in Disneyfied early Enlightenment France or the redneck South — that really is a tale as old as time, a wrong as old as crime.

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