Movie Review: Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Note: This post contains spoilers for Disney's Beauty and the Beast 

I've mentioned before that I love me some Disney princess movies. Despite the fact that in my real life, I'm pushing 30 and rather cynical about love stories, nothing gets me excited like princesses and fairy tales and singing and love-conquers-all Disney movies. And by far my favorite of those movies is Disney's 1991 Beauty and the Beast. And really, what's not to love? The animation is gorgeous. The songs are classic. The characters are awesome. The story is timeless (eff off, everyone who cries Stockholm Syndrome. That movie is so much more about the transforming power of love). The movie as a whole is tight, well-balanced, well-written, well-acted, and basically perfect (so long as you don't watch the Special Edition with "Human Again" shoehorned into the middle. Save that for the Broadway musical).

​Belle is my princess, and Beauty and the Beast is my jam.

This library still makes me swoon.

That said, I felt rather ambivalent when I heard that the next of Disney's live-action remakes was going to be Beauty and the Beast. Anyone who's heard me on the topic knows at least partially what I think of Disney remakes (I may one day have to rant about the disaster that was Maleficent), and I wasn't sure I wanted the unfortunateness of those remakes touching one of my all-time favorite movies. Still, the teaser trailers were gorgeous, and I like Emma Watson, so I was excited nonetheless. I went with a couple of friends on opening weekend and ended up waiting in an actual line to get in (this in a tiny local theater where usually it's busy if more than a dozen people buy tickets for any one showing). There were lots of kids waiting in that line, and it made me realize that this might actually be some people's first time watching Beauty and the Beast. I crossed my fingers and hoped it would live up to the original.

And...well, I was right to be ambivalent.

First of all, the good things:

• The movie is absolutely gorgeous. The "Be Our Guest" scene is dazzling, and while my first watching of the animated movie happened too long ago for me to remember it, I'm pretty sure the experience was something like how I felt watching "Be Our Guest" that night: overwhelmed by a truly spectacular visual feast. So beautiful.
• The casting was spot-on. Like a lot of people, I wasn't immediately hooked by the design of the Beast--he looked a little bit too Vincent from the 80's romantic-cop-drama for my taste (off topic: I am one of those people who has a cult-following fondness for that show). But when I watched it, well, damn did they make the right choices in the casting! Emma Watson and Dan Stevens kill it as Belle and the Beast, and Luke Evans and Josh Gad make an awesome Gaston and LeFou.

                                                                                                                           Nailed it!

Again, nailed it!

• The small tweaks made to the characters really added a lot. I liked that the Beast cracks a few jokes, Belle has a knack for knowing what tools Maurice is about to ask for, and LeFou* has a character arc.
• The scene where (spoilers!) the last petal falls and all the enchanted objects die is incredible. So well-done, and so powerful. There were tears.
  
• The overall experience was great. I had an awesome time watching the movie, humming along with the songs, and finding the things that were the same AND different from the 1991 animated movie.

Those are the good things, and I'm not going to pretend they don't exist simply for the fact that I'm writing this post mostly to rant. The movie is good. I had a great time watching it, and I think there's a lot of amazingness to it.  The people who made it clearly cared about the source material, and they wanted their movie to reflect that. A lot of the changes they made were smart changes that added something new to the story.

But the 2017 remake had big shoes to fill, and I'm not quite sure it managed to fill them. Here, IMHO, is where it fell short:

• The movie had an unfortunate case of telling rather than showing. The thing that the 1991 movie really managed to do spectacularly was show the Beast's transformation from the spoiled, angry brat that he was to the grown man he becomes. The camera lingers on him long enough after his stupid moments for the audience to see him realizing he made a bad decision and regretting it (I'm thinking particularly of the scene where he yells at Belle to get out). The remake has that scene where the Beast yells at Belle and she runs, but at no point does the movie show the audience the Beast realizing that he shouldn't've done that--the next time we see him, he's fighting off wolves, but for no particular reason, then Belle taking him back to the palace and nursing his wounds because...that's how it's done in the 1991 movie. This, I think, is the biggest problem of the movie, and it makes the 130-minute movie feel rushed and confused in a way that the 84-minute movie never did. You don't see the moments that change the Beast, only the effect of those changes, and it doesn't have the same impact.
• In a similar telling-rather-than-showing vein, the movie tries to do a bit of backstory for the Beast's family and fails utterly at making it mean anything. I can see what they were going for (reasons the Beast grew up spoiled, selfish, and unkind, and the way his servants felt responsible for it), but it happens over the course of a single sentence told to us by the enchanted objects, and I can't help but imagine how much more effective it would've been if that information had been shown rather than told.
• The movie is padded with unnecessary tangents. The trip to Paris is an especially-egregious example of this. I don't need to know what happened to Belle's mother. I've always assumed she died. This cul-de-sac of a scene offers the audience nothing, and the time could've been better spent showing us the Beast's transformation or building more solid symbolism for the roses.
• The roses. So, in the original fairy tale, the Beast welcomes Beauty's father into his castle, allows him to eat and sleep, and then threatens Beauty's father with death for picking one of his roses because after all his generosity, Beauty's father is stealing from him. In the 1991 movie, the Beast imprisons Maurice for trespassing because he's still an awful person. In the 2017 movie, Lumiere invites Maurice into the castle, and then the Beast imprisons Maurice for picking a rose because...? The attempt to combine the original fairy tale and the 1991 movie for this moment makes no sense. The Beast hasn't been generous and then Maurice steals from him, and he doesn't bother Maurice until after Maurice picks a rose. Roses are a central image in the movie, but at no point does the movie give any real significance to them; instead, it spends five minutes on a pointless scene in Paris.
• Chip and Mrs. Potts are creepy-looking.

Please don't eat me...

Overall, it is a good time, but you can save yourself the ticket price and watch the 1991 animated movie without missing much.

​2.5/5

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*A small rant about the LeFou-being-openly-gay thing: I don't feel like I can give Disney full credit for this one. LeFou is not openly gay. Don't misunderstand, he's gay. They don't shy away from that fact. But the openly-gay moment is so quick I actually missed it at first, and I don't think he's "more" gay than any of the other gay Disney characters, like Timone and Pumbaa, or even Lumiere and Cogsworth (which, when I first heard about the first openly gay Disney character making an appearance in this movie, I kind of thought it would be Lumiere and/or Cogsworth). That said, I think the portrayal they give to LeFou, not the least of which includes a few layers and a proper character arc, is awesome. More please!