The truth is that pretty much everyone who watches the Beauty and the beast remake leaves getting exactly what they expected coming in… if you were determined to like it you will like it, if you were determined to hate it you will hate it. Because of this it is bound to not hold up over time and will ultimately fail.
I think part of the reason people either want to love or hate it is because most of us loved the original. They feel that this one will either trample on their nostalgia ala pretty much every Michael Bay movie, or they think it will be everything they hoped it could’ve been when it came out in 1990.
However I wasn’t particularly big on the original – probably because my baby sister played the VHS tape over and over to the point where I wanted to vomit every time I heard Angela Lansbury’s voice. However I did go back over the old film and what stuck out at me this time was all of the problems with it… things like the prince only being 10 years old when he was cursed, that the only potentially redeemable character was Gaston, or the fact that the Beast was cursed for being superficial yet broke the spell by falling in love with a beautiful girl.
So I was hoping this film would fix those well-known problems and possibly update some of the things in it that would seem dated or inappropriate these days.
Well, let me walk you through the film so you can see it as I saw it…
The film opens similar to the original with that beautifully haunting piano melody and voice-over narration. However they interrupt the narration mid-way through to introduce a new musical selection in which the spoiled prince dances with his wealthy friends. Now one could argue that this was good story-telling, and that it was setting up the fact that this is both similar to what we remember of the original and yet different, so if that was the thinking I have to give them credit. What I didn’t like is that the song itself didn’t fit in very well and quite frankly wasn’t that good, so it could also be argued that they were setting up that everything new in the movie is going to be terrible.
The prologue finishes off pretty much as we remember with two exceptions:
- They state that everyone in the kingdom has forgotten about the castle
- They took the whole age thing out of it, and instead he just has to find love before the rose dies
Just like the original movie, we then go to the little town where Belle lives as an outcast because she likes to read. It was pretty much exactly the same, until she got to the library and the librarian was a black man… now this to me stuck out like a sore thumb and seemed like Disney trying to stick their politically correctness in our face. In the time when this movie takes place in France, slavery was still an issue, so it makes it difficult to believe that a black man was not only free, but was educated. To me this is not progressive, it is spitting in the face of history as well as all of the trials and tribulations of black people of the time.
Belle then arrives home to meet her father, who is less of a kook – which plays well for certain parts – but his very first scene is one where it doesn’t. We meet him as he is singing a (new) melancholy song about how lonely he is, and then when Belle annouces her anger about being an outcast he gives his line “My daughter, crazy?” – which falls completely flat seeing as he was deliberately made to be less crazy. It was actually embarrassing how dead silent the theater was after that “joke”.
Instead of being a crazy inventor Maurice seems to be established as an artist and trinket-maker, which seemed okay at first, until the moment he leaves, when suddenly Belle begins making use of all of these weird inventions he supposedly made, and suddenly I wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be.
Gaston and his chum LeFou make their entrance somewhere around here, and even though I’m not a huge Luke Evans fan, I really liked him in this role, and I thought his singing voice was the best we had up to this point. I’m not sure if it’s that he is a good singer or the rest are weak, but either way I enjoyed him. LeFou was not quite as over-the-top or blatantly stupid as the original, he was more pathetic than anything else, which actually worked pretty well. What did rub me the wrong way was that Belle immediately belittles and rejects Gaston in such a way that it made her seem worse than him.
Belle then gets chastised by a local man for having the nerve to teach his daughter how to read. I think I actually groaned at this point. Partly because this is Disney sticking feministic “girl power” in our faces but also because it simultaneously suggests that Belle is too stupid to know that she would be reprimanded for doing this. In a fit of rage she runs off and sings ala-The Sound of Music about how much she wants to leave this small town and see the world… clearly foreshadowing what she will do by the end of the movie right?
Maurice gets captured by the beast en-route to the market very similar top the original after a lightning bolt knocks a tree into his path. Now at this point in the movie I was really feeling like everything was rushed, like they were trying to get through all of the obligatory plot points as quickly as possible. I thought it would’ve been a great opportunity for Maurice to get off of the horse and try to move the tree out of the way so he didn’t seem quite as stupid. But instead he goes down a different path, gets chased by wolves over to the castle where it always snows – even in June – and is ultimately captured by the beast.
So just like the first movie Belle must rescue her father, only this time she does so by tricking both her father and the Beast by pushing Maurice out of the cell and locking herself inside. This seems to have been done to make Belle seem like a strong-willed character, but I found it just made the Beast seem stupid. He could’ve easily switched them back since he seemed so determined to keep Maurice instead of Belle. But since the plot requires her to be there she stays in her father’s place.
Speaking of the Beast – he seemed to look good when he was in the shadows or seen briefly, but when he was in prolonged sequences the facial animation looked really rubbery and fake. This is another area where the film will age itself pretty quickly. However the film does benefit over the cartoon in that we are able to see more human emotion through Beasts eyes.
Lumière and Cogsworth who basically repeat the original movie line-for-line except without the chemistry or charisma take Belle to her room, teaching children the valuable lesson that kidnap victims are treated better if they are beautiful young women and not old men.
The movie begins to show its changes following this – this is what it was rushing us towards!
Once in her room Belle meets the wardrobe who attempts to dress Belle, in a moment that is supposed to play for laughs, where the wardrobe is apparently so out of touch with reality that it puts her in a completely ridiculous outfit. However, Belle cleverly uses these rags to make herself a long rope she plans to escape with until Mrs. Potts stops her. Having only seen the film once, I can’t remember if this was the moment, but Belle asked Mrs. Potts why she and the other servants were cursed – a very interesting question actually. Why should other people be punished for one person’s crime? The answer she gave was that they did not do as much as they could have to prevent the prince from becoming evil like his father. It is an interesting idea except for the glaring problem that they’ve had several years in the castle with which they could’ve attempted to make up for these sins but chose not to.
“Be our Guest”… if you saw the cartoon you pretty much saw this one. Disney has used this iconic song to promote Disney World so it was bound to appear here, but this is one place in the film that would’ve been nice to see something unique, something different. But instead they played it safe and essentially killed any magic that might have been there.
Gaston is loathing about his misfortunes with Belle in the pub (as manly men do) only to be cheered up by Lefou in the classic song that is very similar to the original only it takes out the verse about him being covered in hair and having biceps to spare – as if to protect the actor. I actually found it annoying as it was hands down my favorite part as a kid.
Crazy Maurice barges in, and (in a change I liked) Gaston agrees to help him look for Belle. Now this was a change I quite liked – it made Gaston seem more human as he was trying to appeal to the man he wanted as a father-in-law… unfortunately they screwed it up a few scenes later. While searching for Belle, Gaston is whining and complaining about it and then they come upon the tree that had previously fallen down, but was now miraculously repaired. This lack of explaination not only bothered me, but it made Gaston seem all the more justified to think Maurice is losing his mind. But once again the filmmakers drop the ball when Gaston says they should stop the hunt because he is worried about getting FROST BITE! One of the primary reasons everyone thinks Maurice is crazy is his suggestion that there was snow in June, and even though they haven’t yet gotten to the snowy area of the enchanted forest Gaston is complaining about getting frost bite?
Maurice and Gaston argue, and Maurice ends it by saying he will never let Belle marry Gaston, so Gaston hits him unconscious, ties him to a tree and leaves him for dead. Here’s my problem with this…
1. Maurice has no reason to be this cruel to Gaston. All we know about him is that he is cocky. Furthermore, this man is the only one helping to find Belle.
2. By saying he would never let Belle marry Gaston he is essentially taking power away from Belle while also making himself a controlling father – thus contradicting everything they tried to establish up to this point!
Now leaving Maurice for dead was the first deplorable thing Gaston did, and also the point where his character begins to fall apart in this movie. At this point his character starts doing random things for random reasons – and absurdity follows him everywhere.
The Belle and Beast story is similar to the original with Belle attempting to escape, getting attacked by wolves and then saved by the Beast. I’m not sure if it was because of movie length or ratings, but the scene with him fighting wolves seemed really short to me. Too short to justify him being unconscious for days. But I did like that she asked him to stand up in order to help her get him onto the horse. Yet I also remember feeling that I wished there was some sort of hint to this before. We hadn’t really seen anything in Belle’s character to suggest she would have pity on the beast in this moment.
For some reason, while Belle is nursing Beast back to health, we get a backstory about his father; a scene in which as a child the prince is mourning his mother and his father comes and cruelly yanks the boy away. This is possibly one of the worst additions to the movie because his father’s behavior is so over-the-top and unbelievable that it takes away any sympathy we might have had for him, plus there isn’t any pay-off. It is told during a boring new song that feels more like filler than anything else.
The courtship between Belle and Beast begins but once again the filmmakers let us down. Because they tried so hard to make this film more realistic, the moment that the growly and angry Beast breaks out into song sounding like a British opera singer it is completely ridiculous.
We next learn of a magical book that can teleport you to anywhere in the world, so Belle decides to do the obvious thing and teleport to the place where she was born – which has apparently been uninhabited for the last 20 years or so. Beast finds a clue here that suggests her mother had the plague and that was the cause of her death. We then see baby Belle witnessing her mother’s death and her father reluctantly taking her away in flashback form – which kind of makes no sense.
Maurice meanwhile has been nursed back to health by a local medicine woman who I immediately figured out was meant to be the old witch from the beginning. He then goes back to town to accuse Gaston of trying to kill him, and the bar patrons look at Gaston accusingly. But stupid Gaston outsmarts everyone in the bar by insulting the magic woman (who for some reason doesn’t punish him for this), based on the unconvincing testimony of LeFou. Suddenly now Maurice is deemed crazy and locked up in a carriage that never moves an inch.
The ball scene – the grand moment in which Belle and Beast dance and seem to be on the verge of falling in love. Bell is dressed in a lovely gown fashioned by the wardrobe – who now for reasons unexplained suddenly has a fashion sense. Meanwhile Beast is groomed by his minions who apparently don’t have one, yet somehow comes out looking fine.
The dance itself was okay, filmed similarly to the original, but just as I didn’t care for Lansbury singing the love song in the original, I wasn’t really fond of Emma Thompson’s singing either, which is kind of a big deal in such a huge moment.
Belle uses the mirror to see her father is in peril and Beast lets her go – on a horse… a horse that Maurice would have ridden back to town! This would’ve been a great way to pay off that magic book, but once again the film sold itself short. As Belle rides away we get another new song, which was slow and boring. But it could’ve been enjoyable if it was played out over top of seeing Maurice and Belle riding away, but instead we see Beast singing on staircases. It brought the pace of the film to a complete halt at the worst possible time.
Once Belle arrives to rescue her father, and tries to prove his sanity by showing them the Beast, Gaston’s lack of intelligent character writing comes out again. He demands the towns people follow him to kill the beast – not because he is in a jealous rage (which they established him to be capable of), not because he is a hunter (which they kind of hinted at) but just… because.
So off the townsfolk go to wage war on the castle while Belle and her father are locked up. Belle reveals to her father that she now knows why he took her away in a scene that is clearly supposed to be a heart warming moment between them, but it also falls flat because his keeping the truth a secret makes absolutely no sense. And of course once they escape, her father, being the loving man he is, sends his daughter off alone to fight the horde as he stays behind to chum it up with the guard.
The war in the castle goes down with action that somehow feels less interesting and dynamic than the hand-drawn one. It had a gag with a guy getting dressed in drag and liking it, which could have been funny but somehow felt forced and ill-timed. Gaston abandons LeFour and hunts the Beast, which is pretty similar to the original, with Gaston mortally wounding the beast and then falling to his death. Obviously they can’t have the anyone kill Gaston, but here it felt way too convenient, and even unnecessary. Why not let him live and have him be cursed or something?
So in the predictable reveal, the old woman appears and brings Beast and his friends back to live the moment Belle announces her love for him. By this point you are probably expecting some criticism from me, but to give you a twist more surprising than anything in this film I will actually say that two of the things I liked most were in the last few minutes.
The first was that when Belle sees the prince in human form she inspects him and we get a closeup of his eyes. This was a great visual way to let us know that she recognizes him as the same person.
The other moment I liked was as everyone is dancing at the end Belle asks the prince to grow a beard. Not only is it somewhat relevant with how trendy beards are, it’s also a cute joke given how hairy he was before. It would’ve been funnier if Gaston was a self-proclaimed hairy man, whom Belle found to be attractive but I digress.
So there you have it. From an objective point of view, there is a lot of misfires in this film. A film that had the opportunity to learn from the past and make something special but instead became the film equivalent of a polished turd. The original had it’s flaws, but it still managed to get past them simply by being charming and fun, where this one didn’t seem to know what it was trying to be.
Still I think that people will know whether or not they will like it before even entering the theater.
Keith Dumbuck 