Tries too hard

Rating: 5/10 (31 March 2017)

Just went to see Disney's latest "Beauty and the Beast", which was recommended by everyone from the conductor at our last orchestra rehearsal to the greengrocer, and was very disappointed :-(
Most of the film ranged from mediocre to downright annoying -- I don't know how I would have reacted if I hadn't been mentally comparing it to the animated version of which this was an adaptation, but in comparison with its predecessor I felt it came off very badly. The opening scene wasn't too bad as a fleshed-out live-action version of something that was heavily stylised in the first place, but as soon as we got to "Bonjour!" my heart sank. The busy town scene that was so full of life in its caricatured version was neither realistic nor convincingly stylised. Emma Watson in her liberated modern costumes looked completely out of place (which was only emphasised by the screenplay's attempts to explain this away by telling us that she was ahead of her time), and I felt that an air of nastiness had crept in to both sides of the equation. Belle doesn't just find her home provincial, she scorns it as oppressive; her neighbours don't just see her as a dreamy odd girl, they see her as a dangerous subversive. The days of fairy-tale are over; this film comes across as trying to sell a message -- pump a brand -- create 'Disney princess' material (with all its post-'Frozen' overlays of girl power and empowerment) -- in a way that the original never did.
I remember that sequence where Belle runs out onto the streaming grass of the hill-top and sings of her longing for "the great wide somewhere" away from the cheerful, well-meaning domestic preoccupations of her neighbours as being the great 'lift-off' moment of the animated version; it spoke to everything that I was and everything I hoped for. Here -- not at all aided by the obvious fake 'reality' of the flowers and scenery -- the presentation of it felt thoroughly manipulative and left me unmoved and resentful; that was the moment at which it first began to dawn on me that I might actually come to dislike this version :-(
Feminist Belle turns out to be... inadvertently annoying. Quite a lot of things about this film were annoying, not least its habit of trying far too hard to patch perceived plot holes and deficiencies in its characters by adding vast amounts of laboured backstory. (All that we really needed to know about Belle's missing mother, for instance, was conveyed in the single silent shot of her father at work beneath the painting of his wife and child.) "Tries far too hard" sums it up, really.
The one plot issue that I did feel needed addressing in the original was the improbable timescale of the idea that the Prince had to break the spell before his twenty-first birthday -- instead of trying to explain this one away, very wisely they silently drop the reference. And the additions I enjoyed were the added characters of the musical wardrobe and piano, plus the idea that the characters are not merely doomed to remain cursed, but will become items of furniture for real if it goes on too long. (Although having a lengthy would-be weepy sequence at the end where not only does the Beast actually die -- before being resurrected by the Dea ex Machina -- but all the other characters effectively perish, as well, was a case of over-egging the pudding, which this film does all too often.)
Cogsworth very much seems to get the thin end of the stick in this version, I felt -- in the original, I remember him as a by-the-book stickler of an English butler figure, but with unsuspected moments of dignity and heroism. Here he's basically the cowardly comic relief who is always on the wrong side of every disagreement, and the ending is soured with yet another laugh at his expense when he is restored to the arms of his unpleasant wife.
And while most people who disliked the film seemed to mention the character of Gaston as its one saving grace, I disliked Gaston as well... and not in the enjoyable way you were meant to dislike him :-( The original is handsome, conceited, talented in his own sphere, genuinely convinced that he is the best thing ever to happen to Belle and quite unable to understand why she can't see it. This version, who deliberately kicks mud over the girls who admire him and often seems to need talking down from a psychotic fit, comes across as rather less blindly self-centred and more coldly narcissistic. The original Gaston genuinely didn't seem to understand this unprecedented failure of his charms; this one is a sadist who actively prefers hunting down reluctant 'prey'. In trying (I think) to give him more psychological depth, they've removed the casual swagger of the original and the necessary charisma that would explain why people follow and adore him; he becomes simply nasty from the start.
I had no particular objection to Disney's live-action remake of their "Cinderella", possibly because I barely even knew the original; I saw the remake and quite liked it. With this one they took on the much more risky task of remaking something that was a hit in its own right to begin with, thus giving themselves a much higher bar to pass. (There's an aphorism that it takes a bad book to make a great movie -- something similar may apply to remakes...) The constant over-the-top urge to provide explanations and reinterpretations for every detail of the original by and large just doesn't work.