Beauty and the Beast

While a generation of kids gape at overwhelming CGI landscapes and a talking teacup, the generation before them wonder where all the magic went. An ostensibly live-action remake of the 1991 Disney animated classic, Beauty and the Beast hits all the notes of the original film slowly and without distinction. The new components of this version are great, but they’re jammed into an older model, one we’ve seen before, which can’t really use them to the best of their abilities. In other words, this 2017 Beauty and the Beast is a lumbering, sometimes charming fairy tale overburdened by expectation. The basic story of a small town girl finding and taming a mystically transformed prince holds up well, but all the bells and whistles added to this latest iteration detract as often as they enhance.

I don’t want to bury the lede, so let me be clear: Beauty and the Beast buries its leads—not just their relatively boring characters beneath a cavalcade of charming living furniture, but sometimes literally within the music. Belle (Emma Watson) and Beast (Dan Stevens) perform their roles well, but the song mixes are so spotty, so hit and miss, that if dialogue doesn’t happen to be the opening lines of a song, it’s unintelligible, swallowed by the film’s overwhelming melodic noise. Who knows whether it was truly John Casali’s sound mixing work or if director Bill Condon demanded busier and busier edits, but the film’s music is often as muddy as it is beautiful. This wouldn’t be a major problem, except that these songs are most of the film’s draw—children in the audience should be singing along, feeling the magic in every narrative-driving lyric. Instead, the assumption that audiences know the lyrics already damns half the songs to garbled (if catchy) cacophony.

The other half, however, is pure bliss. Introductory number “Belle (Little Town)” perfectly contrasts the sweeping introduction from Disney’s castle by looking and sounding like it came from a well-choreographed TV musical special. And yes, here that’s a plus. Cramming the screen with gesticulating townsfolk vying for their moment in the French sun makes a strong case for the song’s premise of a town both too small and too full. Then the plot picks up: Belle’s father and the town tinkerer, Maurice (Kevin Kline), is going to the market and will be back with a rose.

Maurice serves as our protagonist for almost the first half hour of the movie, accidentally wandering into Beast’s castle, discovering its magic and anthropomorphic accoutrements, failing to escape, coping with his daughter’s sacrifice—offering herself as prisoner in place of her dad—and eventually running back to town. He wrings every drop of acting juice from his part, giving us an overprotective, loving, encouraging father whose helplessness against a town that doesn’t believe his story is genuinely moving.

The Beast he speaks of is hard to look at. Despite this, Stevens gives an engaging performance, manipulating his elastic face and wild eyes into winks, smirks and terribly cold glowering gazes that, when the Beast is the only character on screen, work as well as some of the best CGI creature animation we’ve enjoyed on screen lately. It’s when he’s juxtaposed in medium shots with human characters that the uncanny valley’s creepiness rears its bison-horned head. Having the immediate touchstone of a human face in the same frame only makes us realize how inhuman and unreal the Beast is. We can see every single hair, we just refuse to believe that it’s hair. He’s too rubbery, too bright—he never seems dirty or imperfect enough to be tangible, even when compared to Belle’s eventual airbrushed hyper-perfection after she dons her yellow princess dress for the iconic ballroom dance.

Watson nails the role: smirking at times, lovelorn at others. She’s the kind of adorably naive, romantic dreamer that can still sell a little uppityness (“little town filled with little people”? Belle, this is why the townsfolk dislike you) that makes for a good coming-of-age heroine. As the film progresses you can understand the Beast’s appeal and their burgeoning relationship: Stevens emotes a gruff shyness to which Watson’s eyes light up in response—it’s exactly what she needs after putting up with would-be wooer Gaston’s (Luke Evans) narcissistic buffoonery for so long.