Beauty and the Beast 2017, Part III: No One's Wrong Like Condon, Drags Things Long Like Condon...
...Screws up perfectly-paced charming songs like Condon!
Link to Part I
Link to Part II
We’re back. Yay.
A quick aside: this movie was directed by Bill Condon, who is, in my very educated opinion, one of the most confusing directors working in Hollywood. On the one hand, he directed Kinsey, a biopic of the eponymous sex researcher, of which I’m incredibly fond. On the other hand, that seems to have been a one-time fluke. His other contributions to cinema - Chicago, Dreamgirls, the last two installments of Twilight - are all what I would describe as very shiny movies. They’re nice to look at, as long as one doesn’t look too hard, not tremendously memorable, and take exactly zero risks. He seems to be the guy you go to if you want to release something that’s guaranteed to make a ton of money and comes off looking as if it has been focus-grouped to high heaven. I wish he’d make more things like Kinsey.
Anyway, this movie, which will enable him to buy a new fleet of private jets. Sigh.
Back in the village, in a scene I already alluded to and have already explained why I hate, Bellemione is passing the time waiting for the horse to come advance the plot, and the smugfuck moderns have decided that Belle should show how cool and modern and with it she is by inventing a donkey-powered washing machine. This isn’t inherently bad; if the scene ever came up or led to anything or were referred to again, it could even be a nice bit of character development. Instead, because the fundamental arc of the plot already existed without this scene, its only purpose is to show how cool and modern Belle is, and to waste my time.
This is also the scene in which Belle is excoriated by the villagers and gets her clean laundry ruined for the horror of teaching a little girl to read. Moving past how needlessly dickish and inaccurate this scene is, it, like the entire rest of the sequence with the washing machine, is also pointless, because it will never come up again or have any consequence in the course of the film. Y’all, this is not even Storytelling 101 material. This is the kind of shit one-off fan fiction that a teenager writes about the character whose poster is on her bedroom wall is made of. As someone who wrote a great deal of shit one-off fan fiction as both a teenager and an adult (no, you may not see it), I can say with certainty that it does not usually belong on a big screen in a Cineplex. Render unto film what is film’s, and unto the Internet what is the Internet’s.
Bellemione gives Gaston Malfoy and his minion the brush-off again, in the process doing away with a scene from Beauty ’91 that did way more to make Belle look smart and savvy and no-nonsense than any of this shit with the washing machine did. LeFou has been given several lines of snarky asides to indicate that he’s actually on Belle’s side in this one-sided courtship. “You know, there are other girls,” he wheedles at Gaston after she rejects him, or earlier, when he answers “dignity” in response to Gaston’s question about a word for a woman who doesn’t make a fool of herself just to get his attention. Josh Gad, in a nice change from what everyone around him is doing and also a nice change from what Josh Gad usually does when a camera is pointed in his direction, manages to make this charming, casting LeFou in the role of the truth-speaking fool. The problem is that it makes LeFou way more interesting to watch than either Gaston or Belle, and I find myself harrumphing that I’m not watching a movie about him instead.
Emma Watson’s AutoTune works overtime during the “Belle” reprise and she sounds like a very nice robot. The sound editing team, in the background, sheds wistful tears as they watch their chance at an Oscar float away like the dandelion seeds. (Were the dandelion seeds even in this version? I don’t think they were, but I was also, to be honest, not paying attention to the imagery at all during this part because none of it seems worth paying attention to.)
PICTURED: A NICE SCENE
REMAKE: “Kill it!”
The horse shows up Maurice-less and Belle knows something has gone awry. Horse takes her off to enchanted castle. It goes down basically like you remember from Beauty ’91, which is inoffensive except that it reminds you that you should be watching Beauty ’91, but if you didn’t know that at this point, nothing is going to save you. It’s entirely possible that there was a new song in here somewhere, but fuck me if I remember. With some careful hunting, she finds Maurice shivering to death up in the tower, and the Beast jumps in on them, informing her that Maurice is a thief (correct) and that he’s keeping him prisoner for life (an overreaction, but still, he’s correct).
Strap in and pass the painkillers, because it’s time for another in-depth scene study.
Consider how this scene works in Beauty ’91. For something that’s supposed to be a movie for children, this is an extraordinary scene that draws upon very complex, adult emotions. Belle desperately asks to be allowed to take her father’s place as prisoner. The Beast is taken aback by this expression of love and selflessness, but recovers and harshly tells her that she’ll have to agree to stay in the castle forever. Belle then quietly, but forcefully, gives the Beast (who has, up to this point, remained shrouded in a protective cover of darkness) a command: “Come into the light.”
The Beast obeys - mostly to frighten her, but still, he obeys, and his reveal is interspersed with cuts of Belle’s face as she goes from wary to truly frightened. Her fear briefly overcomes her, and she cowers, reaching for her father, who grasps at her weakness in a last-ditch effort to save her from herself. And then - then she steps into the light, face to face with the monstrous creature who towers over her by several feet. Even as his soon-to-be prisoner, she approaches him of her own volition, with all the courage she can muster, physically placing herself as his equal. The scene is roughly three minutes long, and she goes through about ten emotional beats, all of them incredibly strong and pronounced, in the course of it, making the viewer feel the weight of her decision. (This, by the way, is a big part of why anyone who tries to tell me that the Belle of Beauty ’91 doesn’t have any agency or isn’t a strong character can suck diseased goat balls.)
Back in Remakeland, we recreate this almost beat for beat, managing to yet again make all of it just a little bit dumber. Belle does not confront the Beast head on, facing her deepest fears like a grown-ass family woman, but sneakily shoves her father out of the cell after she asks the Beast to let her say goodbye and he agrees (what a perfect goddamn gentleman, am I right?). Watson, whose entire body and spirit seem to have been possessed by the robot who is doing her voice - zzzzzt-ping-this-would-really-be-better-if-you-just-let-me-do-it - shows no fear, no trepidation, and only the thinnest layer of concern and affection for her sick old father. These choices, I would hazard a guess, were made and enforced by the director with substantial help from Watson herself because he wanted to make Belle seem “strong.” In the finest tradition of “strong female characters” from the mid-to-late 1990s, “strong” means “cold and vaguely an asshole to everyone until she falls in luuuurrrrve and learns how to be somewhat less of an asshole.” Bite me, Bellemione, your predecessor was a much better character than you. You continue to be the least interesting thing on the screen.
Which is a feat in and of itself, I might add, because then there’s the Beast. The same-height-as-Belle, even-more-weirdly-understated-than-Maurice, exceedingly unmemorable Beast.
The Beast looks like shit. There ain’t no other way to put it. The Beast is CG shit. He is very plainly and inescapably a dweeb wearing a computer-generated mask. The actor overcompensates for his lack of genuine emoting a little by making flailing ballerina moves at odd times, but everything was stacked against him from the start, because he’s acting through shitty fake fur and no one around him looks any more convinced of the illusion than I felt. And you know what, I’m not going to compare it to Beauty ’91 here, because I have a better comparison: someone already did this in live action and made it not look like ass. I present here the Beast from Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête, made in 1946 with 1946 makeup and effects:
Look at how wild his mane is. How sunken his eyes are. The grotesque fangs that protrude out of his mouth. The terrible contrast with his princely starched collar, which he almost seems to be hiding inside. Look how animalistic he is, and at the same time, how very sad he looks. The shape of a human face is still in there, but it’s been worked over so thoroughly that it’s only a shadow of what it used to be, and you can tell that the character knows it. You understand his self-induced ugliness, his self-loathing. You understand that it’s really those bits of ugliness, not his outward appearance, that have made him a monster. It’s a masterwork of makeup.
This, by contrast, is the absolute best shot of what we get in the new film:
Fuck artistry! We’ve got cool modern computers, dude!
You call that a beast? I call that a cheap photo booth filter. The hair on the characters in the first Toy Story is more convincing as hair. His very human-looking nose and eyebrows give one the impression that he is one of those unfortunate fellows with the genetic mutation we saw on the old Guinness World Records show that makes you grow lots of hair on your face. Speaking of his face, his motion-capture face makes him look like he’s pouting because someone overcooked his steak. He is as threatening as the Labrador who lives across the hall from me. Studios, I am on my knees begging you to stop using these ass-ugly computer graphics when you could get the job done a thousand times better by hiring a good makeup team. And don’t you dare bitch at me about cost, because you’ve already spent the GDP of Uzbekistan on this idiot movie.
After Maurice gets chucked out, Belle is broken out of her cell not by the Beast, who is off practicing his sulk in front of his shattered mirror, but by what used to be the colorful supporting cast. The castle is inhabited by the Beast’s enchanted household staff, played by monstrosities that would send a normal person screaming from the castle before they ever managed to lay eyes on the Beast. Seriously, the Beast is the least-frightening looking thing in this place. They are not, I must stress, all equally horrifying. On the high end of the scale is Lumiere, played by Ewan McGregor, who, while his design does not (sigh) hold a candle to the personality-oozing hand-drawn creation voiced by Jerry Orbach, is at least not charmless, though I keep expecting him to bust out into a rousing chorus of “If I Only Had a Heart.” On the low end, played by Emma Thompson and Nathan Mack, are Mrs. Potts and Chip, whose designs are war crimes.
Here are Mrs. Potts and Chip from Beauty ’91:
Now answer me this: is there, in your opinion, something wrong with this image? With this design? Something sorely in need of a 21st-century update? Do you get the overwhelming sense, or any sense whatsoever, that you would like these two characters better if you could see them in dark, gritty, photorealistic CG? Well, if you do, have I got a treat for you, because here they are rendered as dead-eyes faces trapped forever in a distressingly shiny porcelain prison:
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO IT?
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ITS EYES!?
Another, for your nightmares:
Fuck you, movie.
In fact, let’s make ourselves really sad and just look at all the castle inhabitants, side by side, first from Beauty ’91…
…and now in 2017:
You are fucking dead to me, movie.
Now, if you are like me, the first thing you notice is how dark this image is. And I don’t just mean tonally, though that also applies. Look at the color scheme. It’s brown and white. You can barely make out the characters’ faces. There’s nothing about them that draws me to them, no indications of their personalities, nothing that makes me want to know more about them, nothing that makes them seem like they may have once been human. They look about as ready to get up and dance on the dining room table for your entertainment as do members of the United States Congress. Which, if you were going for horror movie Beauty and the Beast, would be fine, might even be kind of cool, but you’re not, you’re trying to drum up nostalgia for a particularly joyous animated adaptation of a fairy tale, so couldn’t you let the characters retain just a little of their joy and zest and visual personality? No. Because this movie isn’t content to just be bad compared to its predecessor, it has to be aggressively bad.
As for the actors - God bless them, they’re trying very hard. Of course they are: they’re Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Emma Thompson, and a child who leaps deftly over the low bar set for child actors of not being an annoying little shit. Ewan McGregor, that heroic inserter of right and good into the Star Wars prequels, has donned his best (read: not very good) bad French accent, Emma Thompson’s doing her best (read: not very good) Angela Lansbury impression, and Ian McKellen plays Ian McKellen and actually sort of succeeds where the others fail because the director let him be Ian McKellen and didn’t try to make him into David Ogden Stiers. The only times this movie is good are times when it tries to be its own thing and doesn’t try to mimic the original. Unfortunately, those are also the times where it’s at its most…
Belle’s room is decorated in shades of Gold Vomit, Classroom Chalk Pink, and We Hate You That’s Why. Some nauseating camera work is done here, and I do literally mean nauseating: the camera turns skyward and zips around the room, focusing in and out in a perfect masterclass of how to induce seasickness. Never have I been so relieved that I opted to forego an overpriced ticket for 3D. It’s entirely possible that there’s a new song somewhere in here, but fuck me if I remember. Audra McDonald the Wardrobe gets to sing for about ten more seconds, just long enough to make us all long for what could have been, and in the meantime, dresses Belle in a collection of thrown-together fabrics that is ridiculous enough to make me giggle a little. I briefly wonder why I’m not watching a movie about Audra McDonald’s character. Also, Belle gets the idea to escape by tying ribbons and sheets into a rope, a notion she abandons as soon as the castle inhabitants continue to be nice to her.
A quick cut, and we’re back in the village tavern! Gaston is mopey because Belle doesn’t want to get freaky with him! Gaston’s behavior in this scene makes a lot less sense since Belle didn’t really humiliate him in this version as much as she quietly rebuffed his goobery advances, but we gotta hit every nostalgic beat in that tale as old as time, so that means we’re about to jump into that most delightful of all comic villain songs, “Gaston.” Okay, Josh Gad, save this movie:
Nooooo ooooonnnne pouts like Gaston, faffs about like Gaston, is a bland, boring, pretty-boy lout like Gaston…
Eh, close enough, I guess. It’s not awful. It’s probably the…second…best musical performance. The movie still can’t resist fucking with the song in ways that it didn’t need to be fucked with, like: a sluggish dance break! A total lack of comedic timing on the part of Luke Evans! A joke about LeFou being illiterate that falls completely flat because the song was already complete (and funny!) without it being there! And, to make room for all this nonsense, the complete elimination of the best verse in the song! Come on! No one plots like Gaston, takes cheap shots like Gaston, likes to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston! That’s one of the most darkly funny lines in all of Disney villaindom! No? Fine. I’m going to pout just like fucking Gaston now.
Maurice also shows up again to beg for help retrieving Belle from the Beast, and Kevin Kline continues to play him like someone whose biggest problem is that he’s gotten lost on the way to a dinner party. In addition to pacing, the movie also doesn’t understand urgency, or stakes. The movie does make a change that’s actually interesting, in that they make Gaston’s offer to help Maurice look sincere, at least at first, because he thinks getting in good with her pops will help him get under her dress later. It does make him look pretty slimy, which is what I think they were going for, so good job on that front, I guess. It’s a committed choice, despite being a choice I don’t care for.
Aaaaaaand now we’re back in the castle and it’s just about time for “Be Our Guest”! The musical showstopping centerpiece of Act II!
I’m sure you guessed this already, but “Be Our Guest” is fucking embarrassing. This was a song that never asked to be re-rendered into live action and was clearly never meant to be put into live action (and yeah, I know it’s been done on stage, and I stand by what I am saying), because the scene depends on a whirlwind kaleidoscope aesthetic that you simply cannot recreate in photorealism. I don’t care how big your dreams and your budget are, you can’t make live things that are required to operate by the laws of physics and Earth’s gravity do this:
So what are you going to do instead, determined and stubborn as you are to re-create this scene just about shot for shot and beat for beat? The best approach would have been to not make this movie. The second-best approach would have been to stage the scene completely differently in a way that matches the visuals of the rest of your movie. The worst approach was to do what was done.
Ewan MacGregor, normally a fine actor with a fine singing voice, sounds like he showed up to work drunk that day: his lead vocals lack any of the punch and pizzazz of Jerry Orbach. Because things in real life can’t move as quickly and weightlessly as animated things can, the song is periodically interrupted to make room for more leaden dance-party “action.” Mrs. Potts’s “I’ll be bubbling, I’ll be brewing,” instead of jumping straight into the song’s next beat, hangs in the air for an entire empty measure like a long, ill-timed fart. Everyone keeps snatching Belle’s food away from her right before she can eat it. To be fair, you don’t see Belle eat much in Beauty ’91 either, but the fantastical spectacle of the scene makes it easy to suspend your disbelief and assume she got her fill in there somewhere, whereas here it’s made clear that they just keep taking shit from her, and she doesn’t seem pleased by it.
So many of the problems of the movie come to a gross, pus-oozing head in this song. Everything feels weighted down, slow, “leaden” in the well-chosen words of the folks on Pop Culture Happy Hour. Watson, whom I recognize is getting the brunt of my bile here and who maybe does not always deserve that but damn did this film make her an easy target, is not very good at acting against puppets and laser lights that Bill Condon has promised her will be her charming, delightful friends later. She spends the entire number (and most of the movie) looking like she may have wandered onto the wrong set. Emma Thompson sounds like she’s fighting to restrain herself so as not to visibly outshine everyone else there. Oh, and there might have been a new song thrown in there, but fuck me if I remember.
This feels like it has gotten very repetitive, for which I apologize, but much like an aromatic passenger seated next to you on an airplane, there’s nothing much I can do about it except count the seconds until it’s over and exchange horrified looks with the other people along for the ride. We’re probably going to skip around some from here on out to avoid me deciding that I can’t take this anymore and never actually finishing the review.
Next time, we’ll get to the Beast and Belle veeee-e-e-e-e-ry slowly growing to like each other, some more needless additions to the story, and what exactly the hell Maurice is doing during all this. Someday, we might even be done!
Link to Part I
Link to Part II
We’re back. Yay.
A quick aside: this movie was directed by Bill Condon, who is, in my very educated opinion, one of the most confusing directors working in Hollywood. On the one hand, he directed Kinsey, a biopic of the eponymous sex researcher, of which I’m incredibly fond. On the other hand, that seems to have been a one-time fluke. His other contributions to cinema - Chicago, Dreamgirls, the last two installments of Twilight - are all what I would describe as very shiny movies. They’re nice to look at, as long as one doesn’t look too hard, not tremendously memorable, and take exactly zero risks. He seems to be the guy you go to if you want to release something that’s guaranteed to make a ton of money and comes off looking as if it has been focus-grouped to high heaven. I wish he’d make more things like Kinsey.
Anyway, this movie, which will enable him to buy a new fleet of private jets. Sigh.
Back in the village, in a scene I already alluded to and have already explained why I hate, Bellemione is passing the time waiting for the horse to come advance the plot, and the smugfuck moderns have decided that Belle should show how cool and modern and with it she is by inventing a donkey-powered washing machine. This isn’t inherently bad; if the scene ever came up or led to anything or were referred to again, it could even be a nice bit of character development. Instead, because the fundamental arc of the plot already existed without this scene, its only purpose is to show how cool and modern Belle is, and to waste my time.
This is also the scene in which Belle is excoriated by the villagers and gets her clean laundry ruined for the horror of teaching a little girl to read. Moving past how needlessly dickish and inaccurate this scene is, it, like the entire rest of the sequence with the washing machine, is also pointless, because it will never come up again or have any consequence in the course of the film. Y’all, this is not even Storytelling 101 material. This is the kind of shit one-off fan fiction that a teenager writes about the character whose poster is on her bedroom wall is made of. As someone who wrote a great deal of shit one-off fan fiction as both a teenager and an adult (no, you may not see it), I can say with certainty that it does not usually belong on a big screen in a Cineplex. Render unto film what is film’s, and unto the Internet what is the Internet’s.
Bellemione gives Gaston Malfoy and his minion the brush-off again, in the process doing away with a scene from Beauty ’91 that did way more to make Belle look smart and savvy and no-nonsense than any of this shit with the washing machine did. LeFou has been given several lines of snarky asides to indicate that he’s actually on Belle’s side in this one-sided courtship. “You know, there are other girls,” he wheedles at Gaston after she rejects him, or earlier, when he answers “dignity” in response to Gaston’s question about a word for a woman who doesn’t make a fool of herself just to get his attention. Josh Gad, in a nice change from what everyone around him is doing and also a nice change from what Josh Gad usually does when a camera is pointed in his direction, manages to make this charming, casting LeFou in the role of the truth-speaking fool. The problem is that it makes LeFou way more interesting to watch than either Gaston or Belle, and I find myself harrumphing that I’m not watching a movie about him instead.
Emma Watson’s AutoTune works overtime during the “Belle” reprise and she sounds like a very nice robot. The sound editing team, in the background, sheds wistful tears as they watch their chance at an Oscar float away like the dandelion seeds. (Were the dandelion seeds even in this version? I don’t think they were, but I was also, to be honest, not paying attention to the imagery at all during this part because none of it seems worth paying attention to.)
PICTURED: A NICE SCENE
REMAKE: “Kill it!”
The horse shows up Maurice-less and Belle knows something has gone awry. Horse takes her off to enchanted castle. It goes down basically like you remember from Beauty ’91, which is inoffensive except that it reminds you that you should be watching Beauty ’91, but if you didn’t know that at this point, nothing is going to save you. It’s entirely possible that there was a new song in here somewhere, but fuck me if I remember. With some careful hunting, she finds Maurice shivering to death up in the tower, and the Beast jumps in on them, informing her that Maurice is a thief (correct) and that he’s keeping him prisoner for life (an overreaction, but still, he’s correct).
Strap in and pass the painkillers, because it’s time for another in-depth scene study.
Consider how this scene works in Beauty ’91. For something that’s supposed to be a movie for children, this is an extraordinary scene that draws upon very complex, adult emotions. Belle desperately asks to be allowed to take her father’s place as prisoner. The Beast is taken aback by this expression of love and selflessness, but recovers and harshly tells her that she’ll have to agree to stay in the castle forever. Belle then quietly, but forcefully, gives the Beast (who has, up to this point, remained shrouded in a protective cover of darkness) a command: “Come into the light.”
Click to viewThe Beast obeys - mostly to frighten her, but still, he obeys, and his reveal is interspersed with cuts of Belle’s face as she goes from wary to truly frightened. Her fear briefly overcomes her, and she cowers, reaching for her father, who grasps at her weakness in a last-ditch effort to save her from herself. And then - then she steps into the light, face to face with the monstrous creature who towers over her by several feet. Even as his soon-to-be prisoner, she approaches him of her own volition, with all the courage she can muster, physically placing herself as his equal. The scene is roughly three minutes long, and she goes through about ten emotional beats, all of them incredibly strong and pronounced, in the course of it, making the viewer feel the weight of her decision. (This, by the way, is a big part of why anyone who tries to tell me that the Belle of Beauty ’91 doesn’t have any agency or isn’t a strong character can suck diseased goat balls.)
Back in Remakeland, we recreate this almost beat for beat, managing to yet again make all of it just a little bit dumber. Belle does not confront the Beast head on, facing her deepest fears like a grown-ass family woman, but sneakily shoves her father out of the cell after she asks the Beast to let her say goodbye and he agrees (what a perfect goddamn gentleman, am I right?). Watson, whose entire body and spirit seem to have been possessed by the robot who is doing her voice - zzzzzt-ping-this-would-really-be-better-if-you-just-let-me-do-it - shows no fear, no trepidation, and only the thinnest layer of concern and affection for her sick old father. These choices, I would hazard a guess, were made and enforced by the director with substantial help from Watson herself because he wanted to make Belle seem “strong.” In the finest tradition of “strong female characters” from the mid-to-late 1990s, “strong” means “cold and vaguely an asshole to everyone until she falls in luuuurrrrve and learns how to be somewhat less of an asshole.” Bite me, Bellemione, your predecessor was a much better character than you. You continue to be the least interesting thing on the screen.
Which is a feat in and of itself, I might add, because then there’s the Beast. The same-height-as-Belle, even-more-weirdly-understated-than-Maurice, exceedingly unmemorable Beast.
The Beast looks like shit. There ain’t no other way to put it. The Beast is CG shit. He is very plainly and inescapably a dweeb wearing a computer-generated mask. The actor overcompensates for his lack of genuine emoting a little by making flailing ballerina moves at odd times, but everything was stacked against him from the start, because he’s acting through shitty fake fur and no one around him looks any more convinced of the illusion than I felt. And you know what, I’m not going to compare it to Beauty ’91 here, because I have a better comparison: someone already did this in live action and made it not look like ass. I present here the Beast from Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête, made in 1946 with 1946 makeup and effects:
Look at how wild his mane is. How sunken his eyes are. The grotesque fangs that protrude out of his mouth. The terrible contrast with his princely starched collar, which he almost seems to be hiding inside. Look how animalistic he is, and at the same time, how very sad he looks. The shape of a human face is still in there, but it’s been worked over so thoroughly that it’s only a shadow of what it used to be, and you can tell that the character knows it. You understand his self-induced ugliness, his self-loathing. You understand that it’s really those bits of ugliness, not his outward appearance, that have made him a monster. It’s a masterwork of makeup.
This, by contrast, is the absolute best shot of what we get in the new film:
Fuck artistry! We’ve got cool modern computers, dude!
You call that a beast? I call that a cheap photo booth filter. The hair on the characters in the first Toy Story is more convincing as hair. His very human-looking nose and eyebrows give one the impression that he is one of those unfortunate fellows with the genetic mutation we saw on the old Guinness World Records show that makes you grow lots of hair on your face. Speaking of his face, his motion-capture face makes him look like he’s pouting because someone overcooked his steak. He is as threatening as the Labrador who lives across the hall from me. Studios, I am on my knees begging you to stop using these ass-ugly computer graphics when you could get the job done a thousand times better by hiring a good makeup team. And don’t you dare bitch at me about cost, because you’ve already spent the GDP of Uzbekistan on this idiot movie.
After Maurice gets chucked out, Belle is broken out of her cell not by the Beast, who is off practicing his sulk in front of his shattered mirror, but by what used to be the colorful supporting cast. The castle is inhabited by the Beast’s enchanted household staff, played by monstrosities that would send a normal person screaming from the castle before they ever managed to lay eyes on the Beast. Seriously, the Beast is the least-frightening looking thing in this place. They are not, I must stress, all equally horrifying. On the high end of the scale is Lumiere, played by Ewan McGregor, who, while his design does not (sigh) hold a candle to the personality-oozing hand-drawn creation voiced by Jerry Orbach, is at least not charmless, though I keep expecting him to bust out into a rousing chorus of “If I Only Had a Heart.” On the low end, played by Emma Thompson and Nathan Mack, are Mrs. Potts and Chip, whose designs are war crimes.
Here are Mrs. Potts and Chip from Beauty ’91:
Now answer me this: is there, in your opinion, something wrong with this image? With this design? Something sorely in need of a 21st-century update? Do you get the overwhelming sense, or any sense whatsoever, that you would like these two characters better if you could see them in dark, gritty, photorealistic CG? Well, if you do, have I got a treat for you, because here they are rendered as dead-eyes faces trapped forever in a distressingly shiny porcelain prison:
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO IT?
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ITS EYES!?
Another, for your nightmares:
Fuck you, movie.
In fact, let’s make ourselves really sad and just look at all the castle inhabitants, side by side, first from Beauty ’91…
…and now in 2017:
You are fucking dead to me, movie.
Now, if you are like me, the first thing you notice is how dark this image is. And I don’t just mean tonally, though that also applies. Look at the color scheme. It’s brown and white. You can barely make out the characters’ faces. There’s nothing about them that draws me to them, no indications of their personalities, nothing that makes me want to know more about them, nothing that makes them seem like they may have once been human. They look about as ready to get up and dance on the dining room table for your entertainment as do members of the United States Congress. Which, if you were going for horror movie Beauty and the Beast, would be fine, might even be kind of cool, but you’re not, you’re trying to drum up nostalgia for a particularly joyous animated adaptation of a fairy tale, so couldn’t you let the characters retain just a little of their joy and zest and visual personality? No. Because this movie isn’t content to just be bad compared to its predecessor, it has to be aggressively bad.
As for the actors - God bless them, they’re trying very hard. Of course they are: they’re Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Emma Thompson, and a child who leaps deftly over the low bar set for child actors of not being an annoying little shit. Ewan McGregor, that heroic inserter of right and good into the Star Wars prequels, has donned his best (read: not very good) bad French accent, Emma Thompson’s doing her best (read: not very good) Angela Lansbury impression, and Ian McKellen plays Ian McKellen and actually sort of succeeds where the others fail because the director let him be Ian McKellen and didn’t try to make him into David Ogden Stiers. The only times this movie is good are times when it tries to be its own thing and doesn’t try to mimic the original. Unfortunately, those are also the times where it’s at its most…
Belle’s room is decorated in shades of Gold Vomit, Classroom Chalk Pink, and We Hate You That’s Why. Some nauseating camera work is done here, and I do literally mean nauseating: the camera turns skyward and zips around the room, focusing in and out in a perfect masterclass of how to induce seasickness. Never have I been so relieved that I opted to forego an overpriced ticket for 3D. It’s entirely possible that there’s a new song somewhere in here, but fuck me if I remember. Audra McDonald the Wardrobe gets to sing for about ten more seconds, just long enough to make us all long for what could have been, and in the meantime, dresses Belle in a collection of thrown-together fabrics that is ridiculous enough to make me giggle a little. I briefly wonder why I’m not watching a movie about Audra McDonald’s character. Also, Belle gets the idea to escape by tying ribbons and sheets into a rope, a notion she abandons as soon as the castle inhabitants continue to be nice to her.
A quick cut, and we’re back in the village tavern! Gaston is mopey because Belle doesn’t want to get freaky with him! Gaston’s behavior in this scene makes a lot less sense since Belle didn’t really humiliate him in this version as much as she quietly rebuffed his goobery advances, but we gotta hit every nostalgic beat in that tale as old as time, so that means we’re about to jump into that most delightful of all comic villain songs, “Gaston.” Okay, Josh Gad, save this movie:
Nooooo ooooonnnne pouts like Gaston, faffs about like Gaston, is a bland, boring, pretty-boy lout like Gaston…
Eh, close enough, I guess. It’s not awful. It’s probably the…second…best musical performance. The movie still can’t resist fucking with the song in ways that it didn’t need to be fucked with, like: a sluggish dance break! A total lack of comedic timing on the part of Luke Evans! A joke about LeFou being illiterate that falls completely flat because the song was already complete (and funny!) without it being there! And, to make room for all this nonsense, the complete elimination of the best verse in the song! Come on! No one plots like Gaston, takes cheap shots like Gaston, likes to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston! That’s one of the most darkly funny lines in all of Disney villaindom! No? Fine. I’m going to pout just like fucking Gaston now.
Maurice also shows up again to beg for help retrieving Belle from the Beast, and Kevin Kline continues to play him like someone whose biggest problem is that he’s gotten lost on the way to a dinner party. In addition to pacing, the movie also doesn’t understand urgency, or stakes. The movie does make a change that’s actually interesting, in that they make Gaston’s offer to help Maurice look sincere, at least at first, because he thinks getting in good with her pops will help him get under her dress later. It does make him look pretty slimy, which is what I think they were going for, so good job on that front, I guess. It’s a committed choice, despite being a choice I don’t care for.
Aaaaaaand now we’re back in the castle and it’s just about time for “Be Our Guest”! The musical showstopping centerpiece of Act II!
I’m sure you guessed this already, but “Be Our Guest” is fucking embarrassing. This was a song that never asked to be re-rendered into live action and was clearly never meant to be put into live action (and yeah, I know it’s been done on stage, and I stand by what I am saying), because the scene depends on a whirlwind kaleidoscope aesthetic that you simply cannot recreate in photorealism. I don’t care how big your dreams and your budget are, you can’t make live things that are required to operate by the laws of physics and Earth’s gravity do this:
So what are you going to do instead, determined and stubborn as you are to re-create this scene just about shot for shot and beat for beat? The best approach would have been to not make this movie. The second-best approach would have been to stage the scene completely differently in a way that matches the visuals of the rest of your movie. The worst approach was to do what was done.
Ewan MacGregor, normally a fine actor with a fine singing voice, sounds like he showed up to work drunk that day: his lead vocals lack any of the punch and pizzazz of Jerry Orbach. Because things in real life can’t move as quickly and weightlessly as animated things can, the song is periodically interrupted to make room for more leaden dance-party “action.” Mrs. Potts’s “I’ll be bubbling, I’ll be brewing,” instead of jumping straight into the song’s next beat, hangs in the air for an entire empty measure like a long, ill-timed fart. Everyone keeps snatching Belle’s food away from her right before she can eat it. To be fair, you don’t see Belle eat much in Beauty ’91 either, but the fantastical spectacle of the scene makes it easy to suspend your disbelief and assume she got her fill in there somewhere, whereas here it’s made clear that they just keep taking shit from her, and she doesn’t seem pleased by it.
So many of the problems of the movie come to a gross, pus-oozing head in this song. Everything feels weighted down, slow, “leaden” in the well-chosen words of the folks on Pop Culture Happy Hour. Watson, whom I recognize is getting the brunt of my bile here and who maybe does not always deserve that but damn did this film make her an easy target, is not very good at acting against puppets and laser lights that Bill Condon has promised her will be her charming, delightful friends later. She spends the entire number (and most of the movie) looking like she may have wandered onto the wrong set. Emma Thompson sounds like she’s fighting to restrain herself so as not to visibly outshine everyone else there. Oh, and there might have been a new song thrown in there, but fuck me if I remember.
This feels like it has gotten very repetitive, for which I apologize, but much like an aromatic passenger seated next to you on an airplane, there’s nothing much I can do about it except count the seconds until it’s over and exchange horrified looks with the other people along for the ride. We’re probably going to skip around some from here on out to avoid me deciding that I can’t take this anymore and never actually finishing the review.
Next time, we’ll get to the Beast and Belle veeee-e-e-e-e-ry slowly growing to like each other, some more needless additions to the story, and what exactly the hell Maurice is doing during all this. Someday, we might even be done!