★★★
(PG) 129 minutes
A "tale as old as time", Beauty and the Beast already posed dangers for would-be adaptors in 1992, when it became the basis for one of the most successful modern Disney animated features.
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Trailer: Beauty and the Beast (clip)
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"My, what a guy, that Gaston!" Watch a clip from Beauty and the Beast featuring Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gad as LeFou, Disney's first openly gay character.
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Trailer: Beauty and the Beast (clip)
"My, what a guy, that Gaston!" Watch a clip from Beauty and the Beast featuring Luke Evans as Gaston and Josh Gad as LeFou, Disney's first openly gay character.
The screenwriter Linda Woolverton did her best to give the material a feminist spin, making the heroine Belle a non-conformist and a compulsive reader.
But it was never quite convincing. In any incarnation, Beauty and the Beast involves a young woman who is trapped by a powerful male figure, falls for him, and eventually persuades him to mend his ways. If the Beast isn't some kind of monster, what tale is there left to tell?
Judging by the success of Fifty Shades of Grey – which at least did without literal kidnapping – the fantasy is as durable as it is dubious. The new live-action transposition of the Disney cartoon doesn't completely work, but it doesn't completely not work either, if you have the sweet tooth for musicals that I do.
Directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls), the film has an old-fashioned, studio-bound look, despite the reliance on digital effects to portray the Beast himself (Dan Stevens) and his retinue of magical servants such as Lumiere the candelabra and Cogsworth the clock, here voiced by Ewan McGregor and Ian McKellen respectively.
Emma Watson is nobody's idea of a heavyweight dramatic performer, but it's clear why she was cast as Belle. With her dark eyes and teasing smile, she's the picture of a "spirited" romantic heroine, the kind who can be counted on to stand up to the gruff hero.
Certainly, she's more than a match for Dan Stevens, who's nearly as courtly a Beast as Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau's classic 1946 version of the story, though with no comparable sorrowful allure. Once he and Belle start getting to know each other, he's swiftly revealed as a posh, yet sulky, bumbler, as if his dialogue had been tweaked by Richard Curtis.
This is not the most urgent of romances, but then there's a limit to how far Condon – whose resume includes two Twilight films and a biopic of the sexologist Alfred Kinsey – could be expected to explore the underlying power dynamics in the context of family entertainment.
Perhaps a better solution would have been to present the characters purely as archetypes, as Cocteau did, rather than aiming for any degree of psychological realism. This would have helped suppress the thought that Belle might have found it harder to love the Beast if he'd lived in a cave, say, and not in a lavishly appointed castle full of charming pieces of talking bric-a-brac.
Condon's touch is surer when it comes to the preening soldier Gaston (Luke Evans) the other contender for Belle's hand. The character is a comic villain, but compared to his animated prototype, not too obvious a buffoon. The key to Evans' approach is that his cocky grin would do very well for a hero in a different kind of story.
Most of Evans' scenes are played alongside the industrious Josh Gad, as off-putting as ever but undoubtedly well cast as a shameless toady. As Gaston's pal and dogsbody LeFou, he finds every possible laugh in the material, to the point where you'd think he'd been playing the role on stage for years.
Much publicity has been given to the broad hints that LeFou is in the closet and in love with his best friend. While I can't see that this choice marks any great political advance, the pair do have an attractive physical ease with each other: their big joint number, packed with gags, confirms them as the film's most truly connected couple.
Beauty and the Beast opens in cinemas on Thursday.
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