Disney

Disney

Disney

Disney

Disney

You know the story: girl meets boy, girl gets imprisoned by boy, girl and boy slowly grow closer with the help of his enchanted atlas. Okay, so you know most of the story.

Beauty and the Beast is the latest of the live-action Disney re-imaginings that are so unnecessary to the company's bottom line they can't be viewed merely as cash grabs. They're more like test tracks for a nostalgia engine. And Beauty and the Beast is determined to put a new spin on that tale as old as time, whether it needs it or not.

These kinds of retellings have the potential for something genuinely new. Maleficent gave us a shift in cultural sympathies toward antiheroes, and the unorthodox result both worked as a story on its own and refreshed our perspective on the classic Disney princess movie. But the 2015 Cinderella was merely a stylish, vacuous playground. Still, it raised some questions. What sort of realism does a Disney narrative require now? How much reinvention dare you risk in design? How should Disney reflect social changes when revisiting older works? And can you manufacture nostalgia without weighing down a franchise?

Those are the big questions for Beauty and the Beast. Disney's animated version from 1991 is recent enough that its core audience is now making reservations six months in advance to eat at Be Our Guest Restaurant in the Magic Kingdom. Though we know the new live-action version is likely too big to fail, the original still has something to lose: Disney's taking a genuine risk meddling with a former Best Picture nominee. But that hasn't stopped Disney and director Bill Condon (Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Dreamgirls) from trying. Almost inevitably, Beauty and the Beast ends up as an experiment in piecemeal nostalgia—the modular storage unit of the Disney legacy.

From cartoon to live-action

Condon takes advantage of the live-action production design, which frequently evokes Jean Cocteau's classic 1946 version, but VFX demands mean that, once we reach the castle, we get a lot of opulence by rote. Emma Watson gives Belle her mostly sufficient all; Dan Stevens struggles valiantly behind suffocating CGI. That same problem hounds the enchanted servants, who are all pieces of furniture and household items come to life. As Madame Garderobe, a talking wardrobe, Audra McDonald pitches gamely to the cheap seats. Others suffer: Ewan McGregor as an anthropomorphic candlestick palpably expects to be replaced any moment.

Among the supporting cast, Luke Evans has the most fun—his Gaston is a perfect downshift from cartoonish boor to all-too-recognizable egomaniac. But Kevin Kline's a close second, lending Belle's father, Maurice, a depth you didn't realize was so badly missing from the animated version. In fact, the movie banks heavily on the idea it's providing things that were missing from the original. It's largely incorrect. But at nearly an hour longer than the animated version, there's certainly plenty to choose from: additional songs reminiscent of the movie's blockbuster stage musical, lush production design in the vein of that new Cinderella, and up-to-the-minute social commentary. (Belle's an education-reform threat to small-town patriarchy now! Take that, quiet village!)

The flip side is that Beauty and the Beast doesn't know where to stop—and it feels uncertain about how to treat its origins. This gets us some oddly generic costumes for our leading lady (Belle's famous dress is so blatantly designed to be merchandised you can practically hear the Disney stores starting their engines), character beats for absolutely everyone (if you ever questioned the town professor's position on Killing the Beast, wonder no longer), and the occasional side trip through the space-time continuum with the Enchantress' magic book (because if there was one thing missing from the classic, it was an ensorcelled atlas).

Does any of it work? Well, all this modernized polish certainly demonstrates the effective leanness of the original. Nothing highlights the emotional heart of a movie more than surrounding it with so much filler you can barely find what you came for. But with so little substance at its center, the rest of the movie defaults to a self-conscious scorecard just hoping for a net gain by the time the credits roll. Here's the score: Kline's worth ten points, and the grimly gleeful Evans is good for at least fifty, but Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Plumette the dancing feather duster is wasted, and those credits roll before Dan Stevens has shed his CGI for a five-dollar Handsome Prince wig—so subtract at least sixteen.

Near misses

Beauty and the Beast's sheer excess masks the individual weakness of many of these additions, but there are a lot of missteps. We probably didn't need more music. On the bright side, after "Be Our Guest" stretches into its fifth minute, you'll be yearning to hear something—anything—new.

What's most frustrating about Beauty and the Beast are the near-misses that suggest a potentially interesting perspective on old material. We get a fascinating setup with the prince in all his empty glory before the Enchantress appears, but we only get a glimpse before it's gone. Same for Gaston's witch-hunt tactics, which feel like a fantastic counter-arc to a movie that isn't here. Giving the Beast more romantic screen time without doing much about his violent early behavior remains a hard sell. Gaston's sidekick LeFou looks more like congratulatory back-patting in a cravat than a character, and Josh Gad does nothing to compel us otherwise. And draped over everything is a veil of self-consciousness that's hard to shake. It's two hours of a movie quietly apologizing for existing even as it launches into another group number.

Given all this superfluity, perhaps Beauty's biggest achievement is that it comes off as well-meaning as it does. That invisible scorecard will entertain you when the movie doesn't; the effects are robust fodder for debates about the limits of CGI; the new material constantly offers something new to consider or decry. But despite its attempts to heighten the sparkle, earn its extra hour, and jump-start some new nostalgia, there's just no disguising that this movie was better the first time.

Listing image by Disney