BEAUTY AND THE BEAST – Review

With this beloved  music and with the best visuals money can buy, you’d think it would be hard for Disney to screw up their live-action remake of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, yet they only get it about half right. I’ll skip the plot recap and get straight to my gripes. All three leads are wrong, the worst offender being Emma Watson as Belle. Ms Watson is pretty but c’mon, she’s not Belle pretty! At 27 she’s too old for the part and her face has a natural frown (some call it ‘Resting Bitch Face’, but I would never dream of using such a sexist term). Her singing voice is passable, but I found her hard to fall in love with and harder to buy into the budding romance between Belle and Beast. She’s all wrong, and so is Luke Evans as Gaston. Evans has the correct smug attitude and facial expressions, but his singing voice lacks proper bombast and he’s simply too short. The actor may be 6 foot but Gaston needs to tower over the cast like a brawny Lil’ Abner. Here he’s on the same plane as everyone else, barely taller than LeFou (Gosh Gad), so he doesn’t seem like too formidable or imposing a foe for Beast. Was there no big strapping actor (on Broadway perhaps) who can belt out a tune they could have cast in this role (if Hugh Jackman were 20 years younger!)? My problem with Dan Stevens as Beast isn’t really his fault. He performs through digitally rendered CGI overkill that seems fake and unnecessary. I wish they had just slapped some make-up on the guy and let him act (also unnecessary: those goat-like horns).

But nobody cares what I think. Little girls and big girls are going to love BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. They’ll see it again and again and they’ll smile and they’ll cry and they’ll own the Blu-ray. It’s going to make a billion dollars this weekend alone. You’re going to see it. And you should. There’s plenty to like. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s mighty music and songs are all here, some with added lyrics, and they still enchant (as for the three new tunes, I’d have to listen to them a couple of more times before I judge their worthiness, but I know I wasn’t humming them on the drive home). Though it follows the 1991 film closely, the remake is 45 minutes longer. An unfortunate flashback showing Belle’s mother dying of plague was just weird and may upset younger viewers. Some of the anthropomorphics are given more screen time, most notably The Wardrobe (voiced originally by Joanne Worley and now by singer Audra McDonald). Kevin Kline sparkles as Belle’s father Maurice and Gosh Gad is terrific, letting his gay man-crush on Gaston define LeFou, which leads to a charming pay-off. The animated BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is the WIZARD OF OZ for a generation or two, so this live-action version should be held to a higher standard than CINDERELLA or JUNGLE BOOK. Disney had a duty to do this right and only partially succeeds.

2 1/2 of 5 Stars