'Beauty And The Beast' Shamelessly Exploits '90s Nostalgia... And Its Moral Still Sucks

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

It’s a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: how the love of a beautiful woman can change a man. Literally! Especially if he takes her as his prisoner.

The classic musical/shrine-to-Stockholm-Syndrome is back, replete with all those incessant, maddening earworms you’ve come to know and love/loathe (and associate with their Simpsons parody ). And it’s back to teach little girls everywhere — or remind those grown women that swallowed the message in their formative years — that you too can end up a princess living in a castle if you’re really, really good-looking.

A live-action remake of a ‘classic’ animated title is SOP for our Disney overlords circa 2017, the conglomerate in the midst of a run of rejiggerings that shows no sign in abating. It hasn’t been all bad: last year, David ‘Ain’t Them Bodies Saints’ Lowery turned Pete’s Dragon from horrid cartoon musical into a gentle, home-spun children’s classic, and the hiring of Alex Ross Perry — author of a string of films about haughty, intellectualist pricks — to pen the upcoming Winnie The Pooh re-do is, still, pleasingly unexpected.

But Beauty And The Beast — a film directed by Twilight steward Bill Condon — marks the most conservative of these do-overs: if only because it barely qualifies as ‘live action’. Sure, we get Emma Watson as its titular Belle, Kevin Kline as her eccentric father, and Luke Evans as the haughty hunter Gaston, the predatory macho made incarnate as the guy last seen — through a kaleidoscope — being slain by an angry harem in Ben Wheatley’s bonkers High-Rise. But, mostly, we just get extras trussed in replicas of outfits once drawn on cartoon characters, and anthropomorphised household utensils rendered in charmless, eyesore CGI (and all voiced as grotesque ethnic caricatures; with Ewan McGregor’s ’Allo ’Allo!-worthy French accent the most galling). When little in front of a frame is real, and the film’s very love interest is summoned by pixel-pushin’ technicians, how ‘live’ can this action really be?

And this is where Beauty And The Beast shows its colours: rather than tracing the story back to the original French fairy-tale, or using the different format to put a spin on things, it’s openly out to recreate the cartoon. There are a few ‘modernisations’ in the fringes: the cast comes with actual people of colour; now-key characters get psychologically explicative back-story tragedy; and there’s even something being clickbaitily hyped as Disney’s first-ever ‘exclusively gay moment’.

That comes with Josh Gad’s lackey LeFou, who’s written as, essentially, a modern person inserted into the fairy-tale world: he the one speaking wholly in contemporary catch-phrasery (“we’re so in a bad place right now”, he says, at one point, of his relationship with Evans), and wondering if all this scheming and imprisonment and attempted murder is maybe a little bit of an overreaction.

The production may be cannily drumming up press coverage with words like ‘feminist’ and ‘gay’, but it’s really just the same old song.

Alongside Gad’s modern (and, thus, sexually fluid) male, we’re told over and over how Watson’s character is “so ahead of her time”, but her desire to follow her heart and to escape small-town tedium seems perennial, and universal. She finds the ‘adventure’ she yearns for in being imprisoned by the man she’ll one day marry. He’s “mean and coarse and unrefined”, but that just means he’s in need of a makeover; any abusive, overbearing man with rage issues just waiting for a beautiful woman to fix them.

The supposed moral of the story — that true love means looking beyond outward appearances — never quite sticks: because we’re told again and again how good-looking Watson is; because the Beast isn’t hideous at all, but regal and beautiful as a wild buffalo; and because, on close, he’s turned back into a regular clean-shaven prince, our romantic central couple a veritable paragon to conventional beauty standards.

Of course, going into Beauty And The Beast, you know this is going to be the case. The production may be cannily drumming up press coverage with words like ‘feminist’ and ‘gay’, but it’s really just the same old song, sung with beloved-IP gusto. Business-wise, it seems set to be a boon return, but the peddled nostalgia, here, can feel like a simple cash-grab. For fans of the old Beauty And The Beast, here’s the same film all over again; a ‘remake’ in the most simplistic sense.

KONG: SKULL ISLAND

Thank God for John C. Reilly. The most beloved sad clown in American cinema doesn’t show up ’til halfway into the awkwardly titled Kong: Skull Island, but when he does, he brings life, charm, humour, and — unexpectedly — real emotion. He plays a desert-island survivor, a WWII pilot who crash-landed on the accursed Pacific atoll of the title, and has spent 30 years learning to survive amidst its primordial horrors. With his trademark charm, Reilly plays the expository sage who explains to the newly arrived — and the audience — how things work around here; but also serves as a walking joke, a Captain America-esque time capsule, his knowledge of the world outside preserved in 1944.

Those fresh-off-the-copter arrivals include Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson, both blonde and blue-eyed and boring, conventionally attractive/fake-tanned enough so that they’re our leads; John Goodman, seeming as if he’s walked in from Jurassic Park; Jing Tian, there for the Chinese market; the kid from Me & Earl & The Dying Girl; and John Ortiz, wearing a great moustache-and-fro combo. And, then, there’s Samuel L. Jackson, whose role finds him going full Ahab as a captain consumed with taking down Kong, and whose snarling turn makes you fully expect he’s going to stop and yell, “I’ve had it with this motherfucking Ape on this motherfucking plain”.

'Kong' delivers its basic popcorn movie requirements: two hours of effective timekillery for those harbouring low expectations.

Kong is set in 1973, which allows director Jordan Vogt-Roberts to cast his movie as part-kaiju, part-Vietnam movie. There’s Baby Boomer rock on the soundtrack, Saigon back-alleys, shirtless GIs, endless shots of dog tags, a troop wading through a swamp, the smell of napalm in the morning, and more references to Apocalypse Now than you can count. Vogt-Roberts is fond of comic smash-cuts (Ortiz sells the classic “there’s no way I’m getting on that helicopter!” trope), many of which play with scale; any King Kong movie about the giant-ness of the ape, the tininess of men.

Whilst there’s a few nods to classic King Kong — Larson wins the ape’s heart, thus showing he has an eternal thing for blondes — Kong: Skull Island is essentially a giant-monster movie. The easy way to make its titular monster into a hero is to have him as protector of the ecosystem, the only thing keeping at bay a host of people-eating lizard creatures whose blank visage is borrowed from No Face in Spirited Away. The finale finds the lizard queen and Kong in a giant CGI showdown; but, given how merrily, and zanily, the film has zipped along to reach that point, there’s little tension, no chance that the day won’t be saved.

Ultimately, Kong delivers its basic popcorn movie requirements: two hours of effective timekillery for those harbouring low expectations. It’s big, dumb fun, but it’d play much better if it used its giant-monster symbols to deliver parable or moral. There’s a half-assed evocation of human hubris — yes, SLJ intones the myth of Icarus — and some concerned sighs about man’s tendency towards war at every turn, but nothing that holds, that gives the film real theme or meaning. Godzilla stands, tall, as cinema’s most enduring manifestation of environmental destruction, but, here, King Kong is effectively an empty vessel; an ape impressive in size, not as symbol.