Beauty and the Beast (2017) Review

rating: ***

summary: Belle meets and falls in love with a beast.

review: These Disney live action remakes have been such hit-and-miss affairs, it always depends on how much the director really wants to revisit the material.  Beauty and the Beast is at once a worthwhile and listless effort in the series.

It's a constant struggle to breathe free from its confines, to be the lively kind of movie it wants to be and hopelessly devoted to play-acting the animated film it's based on.  If this had been made, say, fifteen years earlier, it would've fit right alongside the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  At heart that's what it desperately wants to be.  Obviously having to be a musical puts a damper on such ambitions.  Bill Condon, who staged such a brilliant adaptation of Chicago, seems incapable of bridging the divide, staging a series of karaoke scenes instead, the songs lost to the soundtrack as they seem stubbornly unmoored from the screen material.  It begins to feel more like a tribute than anything.

One of the great signifiers of all this is Josh Gad, not because of his overblown gay element, but that he can't compete, in live action, with the voice work did as Olaf in Frozen.  Luke Evans, if he didn't have to sing, might be able to sell his part, too.  If it had been Russell Crowe (how interesting would that have been!), no critic would've thought twice to mention it (although Crowe almost certainly has more credentials than Evans on every score).  Evans is constantly being undercut by the material he chooses; in most other eras besides the ones he keeps popping up in, he'd have been a much bigger deal.

I'd be lying if I said I decided to watch for any other reason, really, than seeing Emma Watson in another big story and a role other than Hermione Granger, but she'd swallowed whole, too, by the intended pomp, and like Evans has no answer to the jukebox playing around her.  Dan Stevens plays well as the Beast, but as the Prince isn't given anything at all to work with, the very embodiment of how hollow all this is.  Ewan McGregor is barely recognizable either in voice or when we finally see him, a wasted opportunity.  Emma Thompson, let's face it, is no Angela Lansbury (although the kid voicing Chip is great, even if he doesn't get much to do, and once transformed back into a human is thoroughly undermined by the production).

The two shining lights are Kevin Kline reimagining the father and Ian McKellen as Cogsworth.  McKellen's career has been one constant string of frustration for anyone expecting any kind of consistent interest from the industry.  For every Gandalf or Magneto or Da Vinci Code, there's really almost total silence, which is a terrible shame, even when he makes it clear he outclasses everyone and thing around him in something like this.  

Stanley Tucci and Gugu Mbatha-Raw show up in undercooked supporting roles, more examples of what might have been.  I guess they can't all be David Lowery's masterful Pete's Dragon.  Well, I suppose, of course not...