Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Disney has a spotty at best track record with their "live action" adaptations of their own animated library. Sure they rake in the money but often they leave me feeling cold. Their retelling of Cinderella lost almost all of the story's magic. Alice and Wonderland was a mess. Jungle Book managed to find a way to tell the story in a new way which resonated with me, but more often than not, I find myself longing for the superior animated films. Perhaps the lesson is just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

So along comes the "live action" Beauty and The Beast, a film which is almost as animated (like Jungle Book) as the film is it aping. As I first began watching it, I found myself getting excited as certain images appeared, certain melodies played, the film evoked emotions tied to the other film. You see Disney's 1991 Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite films of all time. I've enjoyed other adaptations of this story but there is something (a lot of somethings) about that film which fill my heart. I can watch it over and over, tirelessly. I know it inside out. I think it it truly one of the best films ever made.

So the question becomes why remake it? I know, I know, the cash. I get it. Disney has never shied away from being all about the cash. But for audiences, fans? I've never bought the argument that "new audiences" need to discover something and therefore a new version is needed. New audiences can discover something old. I wasn't alive when The Wizard of Oz was made, neither was my mother, yet I discovered that and loved it. A remake of Casablanca isn't necessary for me to realize how amazing it is. We've all shown our children Disney's Beauty and the Beast and they can love it without seeing it "updated." So what is the point?

Well I imagine it would be to offer something new. So what does this new version offer? Spectacular visuals? Okay. Then in the age of War of the Planet of the Apes and Kong Skull Island why can't they make a Beast which doesn't look like video game animation? I felt his realization was horrible. Disney's approach to the enchanted objects is right out of a Michael Bay Transformers movie; they make they so over-the-top intricate they don't feel like real objects anyway. So for me the visuals weren't what was going to make this trip to the cinema necessary.

Perhaps new music. Here's a challenge. The work of Ashman and Menkin is among the best music cinema has ever produced. In fact it is in the moments of songs like Bell and Be Our Guest and Gaston are being performed that the film came the most to life for me. This is the first of Disney's "live action" remakes which embraces the fact that it's a musical and does the full on Hollywood musical treatment. I loved that! But the new music brings the film to a crashing halt. It's not terrible for sure but juxtaposed with the amazing original music they new songs feel so pedestrian, so un-singable. It brought the failings of this film into stark contrast with the magic of the original film. 

What I truly can't understand is why they went there when they already had more music to use. The Broadway musical version's additional songs are also not as amazing as the original film's melodies, but they are still better than what was produced for this. Why not use Human Again or If I Can't Love Her? They are far more memorable than the dreary How Does a Moment Last Forever and Evermore.

So what else can this new film offer? Perhaps a more fleshed out story? I'm not sure a more fleshed out story is needed or desirable but why not? Again, it is the moments where the film tries to fill in the holes where I felt it lost steam. Belle's mother's story really isn't needed, never resolved in a satisfying way, and bogs down the plot. Back stories for the objects really don't add anything either although I at least found them less distracting. Adding the enchantress to the story adds nothing either. None of the so called "plot holes" of the original film are problematic enough (if at all really) to need "fixing" so the attempt to do so actually feels more clumsy. 

But the secret to a good telling of Beauty and the Beast is the love story. Pulling that off, which is hard based on the realities of telling a story like this, is the true trick. And I felt all the rest of what this film was doing took away from that. I never got the chemistry between Belle and Prince Adam or his relationship with his staff which felt so real in the animated film. Like Cinderella, it feels like much of what is magical about the story gets lost in the attempts to make the film real.

Then there were the parts that I actively disliked. There is much hullabaloo about the film makers making LeFou gay. They spend a lot of time on this subplot but the vast majority of it is about making jokes about this. The most obviously gay scenes comic relief moments. There is a truly offensive scene where 3 men are attacked by a living wardrobe and are made to wear women's clothes (a similar scene is in the animated film but done completely differently). Two men run screaming but one revels in his realization that he loves wearing the dress, make up, and wig. And the audience burst out laughing. In 2017 are we not passed this? How would it make anyone feel to be in that audience if they could relate to that character's situation and be surround by people laughing at them? I don't care that the film is made by a gay film maker, that doesn't make this okay. And LeFou's character is so poorly handled. His love of Gaston is presented as his weakness. In the original film he's an idiot, a sycophant, clamoring after the town leader like the rest of the simple townsfolk. Here he's different, his same sex attraction corrupts him. And once he is freed from that, once he defects, there is a scene where he gets to dance with a man, and once again it is played for laughs. Ugh.

But there were parts which swept me up in the imagination. Director Condon is a wonderful director of musicals and seeing the original numbers play out like an old fashioned Hollywood musical were amazing. But then again that was true in the original film too... so why did I need it again?

For me Beauty and the Beast wasn't terrible it just proves that there is no reason for it. It wasn't terrible like Cinderella but it wasn't a reinvention like Jungle Book. I won't return to this time and time again. I won't pass it along to the next generation. It is just what it is. A copy. A facsimile of something better. Like remakes of Let The Right One In and Oldboy, this Beauty and the Beast just made me wish I was watching the original.

Beauty and the Beast
Starring: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Ewan McGregor, Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci, Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Director: Bill Condon
Writers: Stephen Chbosky, Evan Spiliotopoulos