Beauty and the Beast 2017, Part II: Movie Set, Full of Jerkass People
Link to Part I
I went to see this thing during a short work trip to Ithaca with two dear friends, who will be referred to as Friend 1 and Friend 2 to protect the innocent. They went to see the movie because I talked them into it; let their names not be sullied through association. We sat near the very back, knowing we were going to be assholes who talked through the whole thing and not wanting to ruin the movie for normals. Two college-age girls did sit down in front of us, but it was okay, because it turned out they were there for the same reason we were.
Thirty minutes of previews, and here comes the opening narration! Will it be simply but effectively captured through a series of still, yet emotionally resonant, images captured in stained glass, beautifully calling back to the tradition of artistic biblical typology as visual storytelling for the illiterate? Of course it won’t. I’m really sorry; I’m going to be constantly calling back to Beauty ’91, because the remake is constantly demanding that I do so.
The opening narration of Beast ’17 is identical to the opening narration from Beauty ’91, except that it’s delivered by some woman who is not David Ogden Stiers and with considerably less energy and commitment than when it was delivered by David Ogden Stiers. You’ve seen the Stiers version, you know the drill: young prince was spoiled, selfish, and unkind; an old woman visits his castle and asks for shelter in return for a rose; he says no; she takes off her Loathly Lady disguise, goes Wife of Bath on his ass, puts whole castle under spell that you don’t entirely understand but that you shrug your shoulders and go along with (for all the things this movie decided it wanted to “fix,” it did not succeed in making the spell make a whole lot more sense - in fact, it constantly calls your attention to the details of the spell, which makes it even more confusing). There are some additions about the prince’s ruinous tax policies that give me flashbacks to Star Wars Episode I.
The sequence gets interrupted in the middle for a completely pointless glitter bomb of a music number/dance sequence, added for the strong and extremely relevant narrative reason of showing that the prince threw a real rockin’ party, which makes sure to drain any remaining energy from the part of the narration where the prince actually turns into a beast. A repeated theme in this review is going to be the movie’s utter lack of understanding of what “pacing” is.
The first person who sings in the movie, during said musical number, is six-time Tony Award-winning supreme Broadway goddess Audra McDonald, playing the court entertainer who will later be transformed into Madame Garderobe, a talking wardrobe who…falls asleep a lot, for reasons that are never adequately explained. This is a mistake. It is a mistake for a few reasons. The first is that the song she’s singing is so unmemorable that I didn’t remember a word or a note of it seconds after it was done. The second is that Audra McDonald is one of the greatest musical theater performers of all time, and we’re going to spend the rest of the movie wondering why we’re not listening to her singing instead of…what we’re about to get. I guess I can’t put this off forever.
Once the lackluster narration draws to a close, we immediately launch into the iconic opening number yanked straight out of Beauty ’91. Seriously, the shot of Belle leaving her house is identical. Belle is played by Hermione Granger, and she looks perfectly fine for the part. But as soon as she -
What’s that? Oh, you think I’m mixed up. You think I meant to say that she’s played by Emma Watson, who also played Hermione Granger. Nope. Belle is played by Hermione Granger, or rather, by Emma Watson doing the same damn thing she did when she played Hermione Granger. We’ll discuss in a little bit why that is so wrong for this character, but for the time being, let’s talk about what happens when Emma Watson starts singing. What happens is this:
Friend 2, also cringing, takes my hand reassuringly.
Hoo boy.
This is going to be a long night.
Emma Watson is, to put it gently, not a singer. It’s not quite Gerard Butler in 2004’s Phantom of the Opera, but it’s approaching Russell Crowe in Les Miserables. She can’t hold a note. She can’t form a musical phrase. She hits the notes, most of the time, but that’s about the long and short of it. Also, they AutoTuned her, which means that at her best, cleanest moments, she sounds more machine than human. Friend 1, Friend 2, and I are all better singers than Emma Watson.
Now, I’ve seen a few critics say that Watson’s voice is good, or at least fine or passable or something non-committal. I don’t know what movie those in the first group were watching, but okay, fine, we have different standards. That she’s not a singer on the level of Audra McDonald - very few of us are - shouldn’t immediately disqualify her from holding the lead in a musical. But if she’s going to sing poorly in a musical, it has to make sense for the role.
One great example of someone who can’t really sing being fantastic in a musical is Rick Moranis in Little Shop of Horrors:
Okay, he’s not bad like the drunk middle-aged businessmen doing “Mack the Knife” at karaoke bars are bad. He’s not unpleasant to listen to. He’s not tone-deaf. He mostly hits the notes. But he doesn’t do a whole lot more than that. You would not pay to see Rick Moranis in concert. He looks especially pathetic next to his co-stars: Ellen Greene, whose belt could flatten a small forest; and Levi Stubbs, a Motown star who gobbles the scenery like a starving man at a banquet in every scene he’s in. But the thing is, it works: Moranis’s character, Seymour, is a spineless little putz, and Moranis plays Seymour as a spineless little putz with a pathetic whimper of a singing voice to match, who pitifully talk-sings his way through his early woe-is-me songs, saving the vocal strength he can muster for the moments when he really needs it, like when he’s finally confessing his feelings to Greene’s character, Audrey:
By contrast, the entire conceit of Audrey is that underneath her timid, ditzy, makeup-smeared, abuse-broken exterior is a strong, beautiful, unique woman, and she needs to be able to really let it go with her voice when the score calls for it. So even though Greene’s performance is very technically good and Moranis’s is not, they’re actually both very good performances because they are character performances. You wouldn’t cast an operatic tenor as Seymour any more than you’d cast a coloratura soprano as Madame Thenardier in Les Miserables. It might be technically stellar, but it would sound silly and inappropriate.
Now let’s discuss Belle, and what kind of singing voice might be appropriate for her in a musical that has her as a main character. She has a couple of driving personality traits: she’s very compassionate, kind of nerdy, self-confident, a bit lonely, and, most important, insatiably curious. Paige O’Hara’s lyrical, melodious mezzo voice was perfect for this task. Go listen to her performance in the solo lines she sings of “Belle.” When she’s surveying her town, she keeps it in her head voice, subdued and a little wistful. Once she’s got a hold of her favorite book, she makes it resonate a little more, adds a little more vibrato, drops the lower notes into her chest, getting across how excited Belle is just to have something good to read, and how much she’d love to share it with anyone (even the sheep who come to eat the pages). In the reprise, when she sings about wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere, she fills it with emotional yearning, then pulling back to her head in a private, introspective moment in which she admits that she’d also really like a friend.
Susan Egan, on the other hand, who originated Belle on Broadway and has a more dramatic voice than O’Hara, plays up Belle’s strength of personality, sense of adventure, and curiosity, and emphasizes her persistent loneliness just a little bit less - a perfectly reasonable choice, especially when your voice needs to be heard by a live audience, though I prefer O’Hara’s take on the role.
In both cases, their performances let you know everything you need to know about Belle for the time being in the space of a few minutes, which is the point of an introductory song - to introduce the setting and characters.
You know what is not an appropriate choice to characterize Belle? A bored robot.
Remember all that curiosity and longing and quirkiness and loneliness that we were talking about just a second ago? Emma Watson’s performance gets none of this across, because she doesn’t have any control over what her voice does. She’s not even allowed to own her poor singing the way Rick Moranis did in Little Shop because of the damned machine correcting her every note. Her voice is buried way the hell down in the sound mix like the engineers were trying unsuccessfully to keep it out of the final product. She sounds bored. And I don’t mean she makes Belle sound bored; I mean that Emma Watson sounds bored. When she’s describing the plot of the book she just finished to the town baker, he remarks that it “sounds boring,” and I completely agree. This Belle doesn’t sound like she takes pleasure in much of anything; she sounds like an aloof teenager who can’t wait to get home and text her college friends about how lame her hometown is. This does not improve. (Disney: If you were that desperate to have Watson’s star power for your Belle, why not just dub her singing? We used to do this all the time, often to very good actors who just weren’t as strong singers as they were actors.)
Beyond Watson’s singing, the rest of the number does not fare much better. A few random bits of pointless dialogue have been added for the strong narrative reason of throwing the song’s rhythm and the scene’s pacing in the toilet. The cinematography is jarring and features a lot of medium-wide shots of people walking in front of large walls. The energy is non-existent. Lyrics meant to be conversational have been switched around so that characters now sound like they’re talking to themselves. No one sounds like they’re having any fun. They don’t even sound like they’re having fun at Belle’s expense. They sound like they’re singing notes and doing clunky, unnatural choreography, and that’s literally all they’re doing.
While the song is going on, Belle wanders through this “provincial” town that is so extraordinarily busy and bustling that one might be forgiven for mistaking it for a small metropolis. This town, which is visually placed sometime in the eighteenth century, is apparently so ahead of its time in terms of race relations that it’s completely fine with interracial marriage and a black priest running the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Little Free Library, but so backwards in terms of sexual politics that it considers a literate woman like Belle to be sinister bordering on witchery. I am not suggesting for a second that Disney should not cast black people in its crowd scenes (though it’d be nicer to see them, oh, I dunno, make new movies with new stories featuring lead roles for black people), but they shoot themselves in the foot by at the same time taking the village’s suspicion of Belle up to eleven. People are downright dickish to her, and everyone seems to buy entirely into Gaston’s line from Beauty ’91 that “it’s not right for a woman to read,” despite the fact that nearly half the women in France were literate by the end of the 1700s. Yeah, I see how proud of yourselves you are for your scene in which the black priest and the lady nerd pooh-pooh at each other over how unenlightened the rest of the town is, almost as proud as you are over your First Ever Openly Gay Disney Character OMG You Guys (more on that later). Smugfuck moderns, the lot of you.
Anyway. The entire relationship between Belle and the town is way more antagonistic in this film, and it’s kind of a turn-off in that it makes both entities less likeable. In Beauty ’91, the townies consider Belle and her eccentric father curious oddities and have an unseemly amount of fun gossiping about them, but she’s the town dork, not the town pariah. In this one, everyone fluctuates jarringly between that disposition and one of outright hostility - there’s a needlessly cruel scene in which a group of villagers punish Belle for showing her books to a little girl by dumping her clean laundry on the ground. This entire combination means that I am never, not for one second, convinced that this village is a real village and not a movie set with a Hollywood diversity coordinator standing just off camera, populated by the aforementioned smugfuck moderns who think they invented enlightenment and want far too many pats on the back for how forward-thinking and progressive they are.
Speaking of smugfucks, during this song, we also meet Gaston (someone named Luke Evans whom I’ve never encountered before now), and his accomplice/sycophant/hero-worshipper/secret admirer LeFou (Josh Gad). Josh Gad’s performance is probably the one I enjoy the most in this entire movie: he can actually sing and his voice fits the part, he puts a different-but-not-entirely-distasteful spin on the role that is clearly his own thing but still recognizable as the character LeFou, and he plays his part with some actual energy. Maybe he felt some pressure to give it his all when he learned he would be the First Ever Openly Gay Disney Character OMG You Guys (henceforth the FEOGDCOMGYG…okay, no, that’s the ugliest acronym ever, he’s just FEOG for short), or maybe that’s just what he does. In any case, he’s good in the role and he’s enjoyable, if without some of Jesse Corti's incorrigible goofiness, during his interactions with Gaston. They are, at least, amusing enough to get a few chuckles out of me.
Gaston, on the other hand, was horribly miscast. It’s not that Evans is a bad performer; I’d like to see him in other stuff. It’s more that he gives off the distinct impression of being a pretty normal, good-looking guy, and while he gets Gaston’s comical arrogance, he’s missing most of what made Gaston feel really menacing, a lot of which was the sheer size and strength and over-the-topness of everything about him - his presence, his gestrures, his voice, his unseemly desires. Also, Evans’s vocal range is low tenor, a Raoul-from-Phantom voice, and while it’s perfectly serviceable, it simply does not dovetail into the part like Richard White’s blustery operatic baritone. White made Gaston sound like a man who could and would knock an entire room cold if it accidentally scuffed one of his boots. Evans makes Gaston sound petulant and childish, like he’s mad because his favorite clothing store discontinued their line of doublets in Clifford the Big Dog Red, but never actually threatening.
If you put a gun to my head and made me cast a real person as Gaston, I’d probably try to go back in time and make Leon Greene young again, but I really do think Gaston is a character who needs to exist as animation, or at least be done onstage, where exaggerated movements and thundering vocals are encouraged. He is too hammy, too overcharged in every way, to be done in realistic live-action. Animated, he can be what he needs and wants to be:
“I am a goober until you make me angry, at which point I may seriously hurt you.”
“I do say, Miss Granger, these prices have grown simply outrageous.”
Belle rebuffs Gaston’s advances and he is petulant about it. He brags in song that he’s “going to make Belle [his] wife” and I don’t believe that he means it or even intends to pursue it much further. After she has secured a book that she claims, in bored, noncommittal tones, is her favorite, she heads home to dear old Dad, Maurice, played by Kevin Kline.
The scene in which she arrives home and sees him at his workbench, singing a song of vague wistfulness that I don’t remember, is one of the better scenes in the film. Neither of them says anything, they just exchange some looks of quiet tenderness - a poignant exchange between two people who feel great affection and concern towards each other. The camera lingers on each of them for a time as their expressions change slightly, letting the moment feel natural and unscripted. It’s a lovely moment. Lightning does not strike twice.
I’ve heard even people who don’t like the movie say they liked Kevin Kline as Maurice, saying that he added some nuance to the part that was absent from the original movie. I…don’t…not really. I normally love Kevin Kline, but I don’t like this take on Maurice, and I don’t think Kline got good direction for how to play it. No, Maurice in Beauty ’91 was not the best-realized character in the movie: this one has gone for a more (sensing another theme here) realistic take on him, making him an eccentric tinkerer instead of a scatterbrained, wildly ambitious kook. He seems like a nice old man fellow you might meet at a craft fair. Which makes it feel completely, utterly bizarre when the townspeople turn on him and try to throw him in the asylum de loons later. Kline also gives Maurice a world-weariness that makes some of his later actions feel nonsensical. He comes across less as sweetly, dangerously naïve and more as maddeningly obtuse. Plus, compared to some of the characters who show up in “Belle,” like a farmer with apparent short-term memory loss, Maurice seems downright normal.
“I do not at all understand why the town thinks of me as a kooky weirdo.”
“Uh, seriously, though…why does the town think of me as a kooky weirdo?”
There’s a running gag that I guess is charming in which Maurice will start to ask Belle to hand him a gadget, and she will already know which one he wants. It is incorporated for the strong narrative reason of showing that Belle is bright and that these two have lived together with only each other for way too long, things we’d already figured out. They have a brief conversation in which he refuses to tell her anything about her dead mother. I had always just assumed Belle’s mother died young of some generic dying-young cause, and am curious to know if this will go anywhere.
Before long, Maurice is off to the town market to sell some music boxes he made, and asks Belle if she’d like anything; she asks for a rose, which she apparently asks for every time he does this. For someone who “wants much more than this provincial life” and looks down on your town for being “every morning just the same as the morning that we came,” Belle, you certainly are a girl of simple, routine desires.
In Beauty ’91, Maurice leaves because he has finally gotten one of his insane inventions to work properly, and he’s ready to enter it in a contest at the fair. You get the impression that while he may have done this a couple times before, it’s not something he does on the regular, and it makes sense when his lack of directional ability gets himself and his horse Phillipe lost on the way out. Here, our understanding is that selling his stuff is how he makes his regular living and he goes to the craft fair all the time, so how the hell does he end up in the enchanted forest surrounding the Beast’s castle? Whatever, he does, and it’s snowing in the middle of the summer, so he figures out pretty quick that something’s not quite right. Before long, he is set upon by a ravenous pack of (enchanted?) wolves.
Maurice’s reactions are peculiarly understated in this sequence. The constant close-up shots on his face don’t help: he looks much more like a man who just witnessed an impressive magic trick than a man running for his life from a freak blizzard and hungry wolves. He runs, or nonchalantly trots, his horse, over to a big ol’ honkin’ castle that he had no idea was there.
The castle is fine. It’s not any better than it was when it was hand-drawn, but it’s fine. It’s supposed to be dark, and darkness is well-served by CGI. The color scheme is appropriate, and the architecture is interesting.
Speaking of things that are appropriate, or not, we now head into one of the most inexplicable sequences in the entire film, the sequence in which Maurice heads into the castle for the first time. Let’s run through how this sequence used to work: in Beauty ’91 (which, I feel, dear reader, I must remind you, this film, as a remake fueled entirely by nostalgia, wants to be compared to), Maurice wanders in pretty much by accident, because he’s freezing and the wolves are waiting for him right outside the gate. He knocks at the door. He enters when it opens, and calls out to anyone who might be there. The enchanted servants, who have not seen a visitor in almost a decade, are divided in their reactions between compassion for the old man, delight at his presence, and fear at the reaction of “the Master” if he discovers a trespasser. The compassion and delight win out over the frenzied objections of the clock-butler Cogsworth, and the servants settle Maurice into a chair by the fire and offer him tea. It turns out, however, that Cogsworth’s fears were rational, because the Beast absolutely loses his mind when he discovers that Maurice has stumbled upon his shameful secret. Maurice is thrown in a cell in the tower for no crime worse than being lost and scared, powerfully showing how animalistic, how territorial and savage, the Beast’s despair and isolation have made him. Here, let’s watch it, because goodness knows I want to now:
In this fuckup of a movie, on the other hand, Maurice just strides on into the house with no welcome whatsoever and starts helping himself to the Beast’s shit. He parks his horse at a water trough and the horse starts gulping away. He plops his cloak on the rack and settles himself in front of the fire without having had any indication that the property owners will be okay with this. He goes in the fucking dining room and eats part of a dinner that’s been set out just assuming it’s for him, the unexpected guest. Jesus Christ, Maurice, is this how you normally treat your neighbors? No wonder they think you're nutty and keep your kid at a safe distance.
The Beast watches all this from on high in the shadows, getting progressively (and completely understandably) more pissed off, but he doesn’t actually go after Maurice until the latter is getting ready to leave. Having slopped his wet clothes all over the Beast’s furniture and helped himself to the Beast’s food, he suddenly remembers his promise to Belle, and decides that he is also entitled to pick the Beast’s goddamn flowers off the Beast’s goddamn bushes - at which point the Beast finally decides he has had enough of this asshole’s petty theft. I glanced over at Friend 1 right about now, and her jaw was pretty much in her lap; I think mine was too.
I’ve heard some defenses of this scene - or, more specifically, the Beast being set off by Maurice picking the rose - that claim it’s justified, or even an improvement over Beauty ’91, because it was present in the original fairy tale. I disagree. Present in the original or not, the way the whole sequence is done here is stupid in that it makes Maurice seem like a disrespectful intruder and makes the Beast’s anger feel warranted, if overly harsh, and yet we’re being told as an audience that we should be on Maurice’s side because the Beast is mean. It was way easier to be on Maurice’s side and feel sympathy and fear for him when his sin was being overly trusting and the Beast’s behavior was truly beastly. When things are stupid in your source material, changing them so that they aren’t stupid is good. If another adaptation has fixed the stupid thing, don’t make it stupid again. No need to de-invent the wheel.
So Maurice is now in the pokey and Belle will eventually get a sign that she needs to go rescue his thieving ass. We’re going to pause here, but let us briefly reflect on what the remake has managed to do so far: it has introduced all the major human-appearing characters and managed to make everything about them a little bit dumber: less likeable, less entertaining, less fun, less present on screen, and less possessing of sensible motivations. And Watson’s “feminist” Belle somehow manages to be the least interesting of the bunch. Next time we’ll tackle the 1991 movie’s real stars, the castle inhabitants, and see if they fare any better. (Spoilers: no.)
PS: Dear Disney, will you please quit casting Kevin Kline in musicals if you aren’t going to let him really sing?
I went to see this thing during a short work trip to Ithaca with two dear friends, who will be referred to as Friend 1 and Friend 2 to protect the innocent. They went to see the movie because I talked them into it; let their names not be sullied through association. We sat near the very back, knowing we were going to be assholes who talked through the whole thing and not wanting to ruin the movie for normals. Two college-age girls did sit down in front of us, but it was okay, because it turned out they were there for the same reason we were.
Thirty minutes of previews, and here comes the opening narration! Will it be simply but effectively captured through a series of still, yet emotionally resonant, images captured in stained glass, beautifully calling back to the tradition of artistic biblical typology as visual storytelling for the illiterate? Of course it won’t. I’m really sorry; I’m going to be constantly calling back to Beauty ’91, because the remake is constantly demanding that I do so.
The opening narration of Beast ’17 is identical to the opening narration from Beauty ’91, except that it’s delivered by some woman who is not David Ogden Stiers and with considerably less energy and commitment than when it was delivered by David Ogden Stiers. You’ve seen the Stiers version, you know the drill: young prince was spoiled, selfish, and unkind; an old woman visits his castle and asks for shelter in return for a rose; he says no; she takes off her Loathly Lady disguise, goes Wife of Bath on his ass, puts whole castle under spell that you don’t entirely understand but that you shrug your shoulders and go along with (for all the things this movie decided it wanted to “fix,” it did not succeed in making the spell make a whole lot more sense - in fact, it constantly calls your attention to the details of the spell, which makes it even more confusing). There are some additions about the prince’s ruinous tax policies that give me flashbacks to Star Wars Episode I.
The sequence gets interrupted in the middle for a completely pointless glitter bomb of a music number/dance sequence, added for the strong and extremely relevant narrative reason of showing that the prince threw a real rockin’ party, which makes sure to drain any remaining energy from the part of the narration where the prince actually turns into a beast. A repeated theme in this review is going to be the movie’s utter lack of understanding of what “pacing” is.
The first person who sings in the movie, during said musical number, is six-time Tony Award-winning supreme Broadway goddess Audra McDonald, playing the court entertainer who will later be transformed into Madame Garderobe, a talking wardrobe who…falls asleep a lot, for reasons that are never adequately explained. This is a mistake. It is a mistake for a few reasons. The first is that the song she’s singing is so unmemorable that I didn’t remember a word or a note of it seconds after it was done. The second is that Audra McDonald is one of the greatest musical theater performers of all time, and we’re going to spend the rest of the movie wondering why we’re not listening to her singing instead of…what we’re about to get. I guess I can’t put this off forever.
Once the lackluster narration draws to a close, we immediately launch into the iconic opening number yanked straight out of Beauty ’91. Seriously, the shot of Belle leaving her house is identical. Belle is played by Hermione Granger, and she looks perfectly fine for the part. But as soon as she -
What’s that? Oh, you think I’m mixed up. You think I meant to say that she’s played by Emma Watson, who also played Hermione Granger. Nope. Belle is played by Hermione Granger, or rather, by Emma Watson doing the same damn thing she did when she played Hermione Granger. We’ll discuss in a little bit why that is so wrong for this character, but for the time being, let’s talk about what happens when Emma Watson starts singing. What happens is this:
Friend 2, also cringing, takes my hand reassuringly.
Hoo boy.
This is going to be a long night.
Emma Watson is, to put it gently, not a singer. It’s not quite Gerard Butler in 2004’s Phantom of the Opera, but it’s approaching Russell Crowe in Les Miserables. She can’t hold a note. She can’t form a musical phrase. She hits the notes, most of the time, but that’s about the long and short of it. Also, they AutoTuned her, which means that at her best, cleanest moments, she sounds more machine than human. Friend 1, Friend 2, and I are all better singers than Emma Watson.
Now, I’ve seen a few critics say that Watson’s voice is good, or at least fine or passable or something non-committal. I don’t know what movie those in the first group were watching, but okay, fine, we have different standards. That she’s not a singer on the level of Audra McDonald - very few of us are - shouldn’t immediately disqualify her from holding the lead in a musical. But if she’s going to sing poorly in a musical, it has to make sense for the role.
One great example of someone who can’t really sing being fantastic in a musical is Rick Moranis in Little Shop of Horrors:
Click to viewOkay, he’s not bad like the drunk middle-aged businessmen doing “Mack the Knife” at karaoke bars are bad. He’s not unpleasant to listen to. He’s not tone-deaf. He mostly hits the notes. But he doesn’t do a whole lot more than that. You would not pay to see Rick Moranis in concert. He looks especially pathetic next to his co-stars: Ellen Greene, whose belt could flatten a small forest; and Levi Stubbs, a Motown star who gobbles the scenery like a starving man at a banquet in every scene he’s in. But the thing is, it works: Moranis’s character, Seymour, is a spineless little putz, and Moranis plays Seymour as a spineless little putz with a pathetic whimper of a singing voice to match, who pitifully talk-sings his way through his early woe-is-me songs, saving the vocal strength he can muster for the moments when he really needs it, like when he’s finally confessing his feelings to Greene’s character, Audrey:
By contrast, the entire conceit of Audrey is that underneath her timid, ditzy, makeup-smeared, abuse-broken exterior is a strong, beautiful, unique woman, and she needs to be able to really let it go with her voice when the score calls for it. So even though Greene’s performance is very technically good and Moranis’s is not, they’re actually both very good performances because they are character performances. You wouldn’t cast an operatic tenor as Seymour any more than you’d cast a coloratura soprano as Madame Thenardier in Les Miserables. It might be technically stellar, but it would sound silly and inappropriate.
Now let’s discuss Belle, and what kind of singing voice might be appropriate for her in a musical that has her as a main character. She has a couple of driving personality traits: she’s very compassionate, kind of nerdy, self-confident, a bit lonely, and, most important, insatiably curious. Paige O’Hara’s lyrical, melodious mezzo voice was perfect for this task. Go listen to her performance in the solo lines she sings of “Belle.” When she’s surveying her town, she keeps it in her head voice, subdued and a little wistful. Once she’s got a hold of her favorite book, she makes it resonate a little more, adds a little more vibrato, drops the lower notes into her chest, getting across how excited Belle is just to have something good to read, and how much she’d love to share it with anyone (even the sheep who come to eat the pages). In the reprise, when she sings about wanting adventure in the great wide somewhere, she fills it with emotional yearning, then pulling back to her head in a private, introspective moment in which she admits that she’d also really like a friend.
Susan Egan, on the other hand, who originated Belle on Broadway and has a more dramatic voice than O’Hara, plays up Belle’s strength of personality, sense of adventure, and curiosity, and emphasizes her persistent loneliness just a little bit less - a perfectly reasonable choice, especially when your voice needs to be heard by a live audience, though I prefer O’Hara’s take on the role.
In both cases, their performances let you know everything you need to know about Belle for the time being in the space of a few minutes, which is the point of an introductory song - to introduce the setting and characters.
You know what is not an appropriate choice to characterize Belle? A bored robot.
Remember all that curiosity and longing and quirkiness and loneliness that we were talking about just a second ago? Emma Watson’s performance gets none of this across, because she doesn’t have any control over what her voice does. She’s not even allowed to own her poor singing the way Rick Moranis did in Little Shop because of the damned machine correcting her every note. Her voice is buried way the hell down in the sound mix like the engineers were trying unsuccessfully to keep it out of the final product. She sounds bored. And I don’t mean she makes Belle sound bored; I mean that Emma Watson sounds bored. When she’s describing the plot of the book she just finished to the town baker, he remarks that it “sounds boring,” and I completely agree. This Belle doesn’t sound like she takes pleasure in much of anything; she sounds like an aloof teenager who can’t wait to get home and text her college friends about how lame her hometown is. This does not improve. (Disney: If you were that desperate to have Watson’s star power for your Belle, why not just dub her singing? We used to do this all the time, often to very good actors who just weren’t as strong singers as they were actors.)
Beyond Watson’s singing, the rest of the number does not fare much better. A few random bits of pointless dialogue have been added for the strong narrative reason of throwing the song’s rhythm and the scene’s pacing in the toilet. The cinematography is jarring and features a lot of medium-wide shots of people walking in front of large walls. The energy is non-existent. Lyrics meant to be conversational have been switched around so that characters now sound like they’re talking to themselves. No one sounds like they’re having any fun. They don’t even sound like they’re having fun at Belle’s expense. They sound like they’re singing notes and doing clunky, unnatural choreography, and that’s literally all they’re doing.
While the song is going on, Belle wanders through this “provincial” town that is so extraordinarily busy and bustling that one might be forgiven for mistaking it for a small metropolis. This town, which is visually placed sometime in the eighteenth century, is apparently so ahead of its time in terms of race relations that it’s completely fine with interracial marriage and a black priest running the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Little Free Library, but so backwards in terms of sexual politics that it considers a literate woman like Belle to be sinister bordering on witchery. I am not suggesting for a second that Disney should not cast black people in its crowd scenes (though it’d be nicer to see them, oh, I dunno, make new movies with new stories featuring lead roles for black people), but they shoot themselves in the foot by at the same time taking the village’s suspicion of Belle up to eleven. People are downright dickish to her, and everyone seems to buy entirely into Gaston’s line from Beauty ’91 that “it’s not right for a woman to read,” despite the fact that nearly half the women in France were literate by the end of the 1700s. Yeah, I see how proud of yourselves you are for your scene in which the black priest and the lady nerd pooh-pooh at each other over how unenlightened the rest of the town is, almost as proud as you are over your First Ever Openly Gay Disney Character OMG You Guys (more on that later). Smugfuck moderns, the lot of you.
Anyway. The entire relationship between Belle and the town is way more antagonistic in this film, and it’s kind of a turn-off in that it makes both entities less likeable. In Beauty ’91, the townies consider Belle and her eccentric father curious oddities and have an unseemly amount of fun gossiping about them, but she’s the town dork, not the town pariah. In this one, everyone fluctuates jarringly between that disposition and one of outright hostility - there’s a needlessly cruel scene in which a group of villagers punish Belle for showing her books to a little girl by dumping her clean laundry on the ground. This entire combination means that I am never, not for one second, convinced that this village is a real village and not a movie set with a Hollywood diversity coordinator standing just off camera, populated by the aforementioned smugfuck moderns who think they invented enlightenment and want far too many pats on the back for how forward-thinking and progressive they are.
Speaking of smugfucks, during this song, we also meet Gaston (someone named Luke Evans whom I’ve never encountered before now), and his accomplice/sycophant/hero-worshipper/secret admirer LeFou (Josh Gad). Josh Gad’s performance is probably the one I enjoy the most in this entire movie: he can actually sing and his voice fits the part, he puts a different-but-not-entirely-distasteful spin on the role that is clearly his own thing but still recognizable as the character LeFou, and he plays his part with some actual energy. Maybe he felt some pressure to give it his all when he learned he would be the First Ever Openly Gay Disney Character OMG You Guys (henceforth the FEOGDCOMGYG…okay, no, that’s the ugliest acronym ever, he’s just FEOG for short), or maybe that’s just what he does. In any case, he’s good in the role and he’s enjoyable, if without some of Jesse Corti's incorrigible goofiness, during his interactions with Gaston. They are, at least, amusing enough to get a few chuckles out of me.
Gaston, on the other hand, was horribly miscast. It’s not that Evans is a bad performer; I’d like to see him in other stuff. It’s more that he gives off the distinct impression of being a pretty normal, good-looking guy, and while he gets Gaston’s comical arrogance, he’s missing most of what made Gaston feel really menacing, a lot of which was the sheer size and strength and over-the-topness of everything about him - his presence, his gestrures, his voice, his unseemly desires. Also, Evans’s vocal range is low tenor, a Raoul-from-Phantom voice, and while it’s perfectly serviceable, it simply does not dovetail into the part like Richard White’s blustery operatic baritone. White made Gaston sound like a man who could and would knock an entire room cold if it accidentally scuffed one of his boots. Evans makes Gaston sound petulant and childish, like he’s mad because his favorite clothing store discontinued their line of doublets in Clifford the Big Dog Red, but never actually threatening.
If you put a gun to my head and made me cast a real person as Gaston, I’d probably try to go back in time and make Leon Greene young again, but I really do think Gaston is a character who needs to exist as animation, or at least be done onstage, where exaggerated movements and thundering vocals are encouraged. He is too hammy, too overcharged in every way, to be done in realistic live-action. Animated, he can be what he needs and wants to be:
“I am a goober until you make me angry, at which point I may seriously hurt you.”
“I do say, Miss Granger, these prices have grown simply outrageous.”
Belle rebuffs Gaston’s advances and he is petulant about it. He brags in song that he’s “going to make Belle [his] wife” and I don’t believe that he means it or even intends to pursue it much further. After she has secured a book that she claims, in bored, noncommittal tones, is her favorite, she heads home to dear old Dad, Maurice, played by Kevin Kline.
The scene in which she arrives home and sees him at his workbench, singing a song of vague wistfulness that I don’t remember, is one of the better scenes in the film. Neither of them says anything, they just exchange some looks of quiet tenderness - a poignant exchange between two people who feel great affection and concern towards each other. The camera lingers on each of them for a time as their expressions change slightly, letting the moment feel natural and unscripted. It’s a lovely moment. Lightning does not strike twice.
I’ve heard even people who don’t like the movie say they liked Kevin Kline as Maurice, saying that he added some nuance to the part that was absent from the original movie. I…don’t…not really. I normally love Kevin Kline, but I don’t like this take on Maurice, and I don’t think Kline got good direction for how to play it. No, Maurice in Beauty ’91 was not the best-realized character in the movie: this one has gone for a more (sensing another theme here) realistic take on him, making him an eccentric tinkerer instead of a scatterbrained, wildly ambitious kook. He seems like a nice old man fellow you might meet at a craft fair. Which makes it feel completely, utterly bizarre when the townspeople turn on him and try to throw him in the asylum de loons later. Kline also gives Maurice a world-weariness that makes some of his later actions feel nonsensical. He comes across less as sweetly, dangerously naïve and more as maddeningly obtuse. Plus, compared to some of the characters who show up in “Belle,” like a farmer with apparent short-term memory loss, Maurice seems downright normal.
“I do not at all understand why the town thinks of me as a kooky weirdo.”
“Uh, seriously, though…why does the town think of me as a kooky weirdo?”
There’s a running gag that I guess is charming in which Maurice will start to ask Belle to hand him a gadget, and she will already know which one he wants. It is incorporated for the strong narrative reason of showing that Belle is bright and that these two have lived together with only each other for way too long, things we’d already figured out. They have a brief conversation in which he refuses to tell her anything about her dead mother. I had always just assumed Belle’s mother died young of some generic dying-young cause, and am curious to know if this will go anywhere.
Before long, Maurice is off to the town market to sell some music boxes he made, and asks Belle if she’d like anything; she asks for a rose, which she apparently asks for every time he does this. For someone who “wants much more than this provincial life” and looks down on your town for being “every morning just the same as the morning that we came,” Belle, you certainly are a girl of simple, routine desires.
In Beauty ’91, Maurice leaves because he has finally gotten one of his insane inventions to work properly, and he’s ready to enter it in a contest at the fair. You get the impression that while he may have done this a couple times before, it’s not something he does on the regular, and it makes sense when his lack of directional ability gets himself and his horse Phillipe lost on the way out. Here, our understanding is that selling his stuff is how he makes his regular living and he goes to the craft fair all the time, so how the hell does he end up in the enchanted forest surrounding the Beast’s castle? Whatever, he does, and it’s snowing in the middle of the summer, so he figures out pretty quick that something’s not quite right. Before long, he is set upon by a ravenous pack of (enchanted?) wolves.
Maurice’s reactions are peculiarly understated in this sequence. The constant close-up shots on his face don’t help: he looks much more like a man who just witnessed an impressive magic trick than a man running for his life from a freak blizzard and hungry wolves. He runs, or nonchalantly trots, his horse, over to a big ol’ honkin’ castle that he had no idea was there.
The castle is fine. It’s not any better than it was when it was hand-drawn, but it’s fine. It’s supposed to be dark, and darkness is well-served by CGI. The color scheme is appropriate, and the architecture is interesting.
Speaking of things that are appropriate, or not, we now head into one of the most inexplicable sequences in the entire film, the sequence in which Maurice heads into the castle for the first time. Let’s run through how this sequence used to work: in Beauty ’91 (which, I feel, dear reader, I must remind you, this film, as a remake fueled entirely by nostalgia, wants to be compared to), Maurice wanders in pretty much by accident, because he’s freezing and the wolves are waiting for him right outside the gate. He knocks at the door. He enters when it opens, and calls out to anyone who might be there. The enchanted servants, who have not seen a visitor in almost a decade, are divided in their reactions between compassion for the old man, delight at his presence, and fear at the reaction of “the Master” if he discovers a trespasser. The compassion and delight win out over the frenzied objections of the clock-butler Cogsworth, and the servants settle Maurice into a chair by the fire and offer him tea. It turns out, however, that Cogsworth’s fears were rational, because the Beast absolutely loses his mind when he discovers that Maurice has stumbled upon his shameful secret. Maurice is thrown in a cell in the tower for no crime worse than being lost and scared, powerfully showing how animalistic, how territorial and savage, the Beast’s despair and isolation have made him. Here, let’s watch it, because goodness knows I want to now:
In this fuckup of a movie, on the other hand, Maurice just strides on into the house with no welcome whatsoever and starts helping himself to the Beast’s shit. He parks his horse at a water trough and the horse starts gulping away. He plops his cloak on the rack and settles himself in front of the fire without having had any indication that the property owners will be okay with this. He goes in the fucking dining room and eats part of a dinner that’s been set out just assuming it’s for him, the unexpected guest. Jesus Christ, Maurice, is this how you normally treat your neighbors? No wonder they think you're nutty and keep your kid at a safe distance.
The Beast watches all this from on high in the shadows, getting progressively (and completely understandably) more pissed off, but he doesn’t actually go after Maurice until the latter is getting ready to leave. Having slopped his wet clothes all over the Beast’s furniture and helped himself to the Beast’s food, he suddenly remembers his promise to Belle, and decides that he is also entitled to pick the Beast’s goddamn flowers off the Beast’s goddamn bushes - at which point the Beast finally decides he has had enough of this asshole’s petty theft. I glanced over at Friend 1 right about now, and her jaw was pretty much in her lap; I think mine was too.
I’ve heard some defenses of this scene - or, more specifically, the Beast being set off by Maurice picking the rose - that claim it’s justified, or even an improvement over Beauty ’91, because it was present in the original fairy tale. I disagree. Present in the original or not, the way the whole sequence is done here is stupid in that it makes Maurice seem like a disrespectful intruder and makes the Beast’s anger feel warranted, if overly harsh, and yet we’re being told as an audience that we should be on Maurice’s side because the Beast is mean. It was way easier to be on Maurice’s side and feel sympathy and fear for him when his sin was being overly trusting and the Beast’s behavior was truly beastly. When things are stupid in your source material, changing them so that they aren’t stupid is good. If another adaptation has fixed the stupid thing, don’t make it stupid again. No need to de-invent the wheel.
So Maurice is now in the pokey and Belle will eventually get a sign that she needs to go rescue his thieving ass. We’re going to pause here, but let us briefly reflect on what the remake has managed to do so far: it has introduced all the major human-appearing characters and managed to make everything about them a little bit dumber: less likeable, less entertaining, less fun, less present on screen, and less possessing of sensible motivations. And Watson’s “feminist” Belle somehow manages to be the least interesting of the bunch. Next time we’ll tackle the 1991 movie’s real stars, the castle inhabitants, and see if they fare any better. (Spoilers: no.)
PS: Dear Disney, will you please quit casting Kevin Kline in musicals if you aren’t going to let him really sing?