Beauty and the Beast (2017)

It’s a tale as old as time, and it’s certainly one we’ve seen before. But for the first time in Disney’s ongoing project of remaking its animated classics into live-action big budget fairy tales (with or without a healthy dose of revisionism), Beauty and the Beast both makes the case for another retelling of the story and manages to be a compelling and potent riff on the original.

If you’re like me, you probably have vast swathes of the 1991 animated film committed to (or seared into) memory, and you’ll likely be singing along in your head to the musical numbers, which get a few bonus verses here and there but are otherwise largely unchanged. So too is the plot translated fairly directly to live-action: bookish villager Belle (Emma Watson) finds herself imprisoned in the castle of the Beast (Dan Stevens), a prince turned monstrous by a curse, in order to save her doddering father Maurice (Kevin Kline). While local ape-man Gaston (Luke Evans) pines for her, to the consternation of his compatriot LeFou (Josh Gad), the castle’s lusty candlestick Lumiere (Ewan McGregor), fussy clock Cogsworth (Ian McKellen), and maternal teapot Mrs. Potts (Emma Thompson) conspire to bring beauty and the beast together to lift the spell.

In the case of Disney’s continued remake renaissance, I wouldn’t say there’s been a complete win. Maleficent was at once too distant from its source material while simultaneously pulling its punches on that difference. Meanwhile, Cinderella and The Jungle Book were visually stunning but ultimately more of the same as far as the originals were concerned. With Beauty and the Beast, however, I recall thinking several times during the film, “Oh, so that’s why they remade this!” Between its new characters and its patched-up plot holes, elucidated backstories and added lyrics, this Beauty and the Beast is a lot like a new brand of your favorite flavor of ice cream. There’s a lot that’s recognizable and reminds you what you love about it, but there are added nuances that gives this incarnation a life all its own. (It’s like the time I discovered they made cookie dough ice cream out of monster cookies and M&Ms.)

Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is its cast, which is positively bang-on from the word “go.” Watson and Stevens are well cast as the star-crossed lovers, in a romantic plotline that doesn’t feel obligatory and includes a few very well-crafted turns of character that give believability to the courtship plot. (That one such moment revolves around a library is perhaps preaching to this bibliophile’s choir, but I’d fall in love with a beast too if he had a library of his own to make Alexandria blush.) That McGregor, McKellen, and Thompson are note-perfect is right up there with “Water Wet” in terms of headlines, nor should one be surprised by the frankly stunning special effects work. What’s genuinely surprising is that Evans and Gad create something really quite special in Gaston and LeFou. Though it’s by no means sympathy for the devil, the script gives Gaston a refreshing amount of psychological depth, and Gad plays LeFou with an understated tenderness that gives LeFou a few legitimate reasons to hang around a specimen as deplorable as Gaston.

Indeed, what Beauty and the Beast does quite well is clarify a few of the nagging details and polish up the bits that work in order to present a fresh version of the story to an audience who is a little older, a little wiser, and a bit more sophisticated. This is hardly an “adult” version of the story, but it does feel a bit more grown-up, more willing to go to places the original didn’t – the question of Belle’s mother, for one, and the aforementioned update to Gaston: neither of which changes the characters or the plot but brings them into sharper focus.

Perhaps most importantly for this moviegoer, Beauty and the Beast never forgets to embrace with exuberance the playful weirdness of a film that includes a talking wardrobe, a barking footstool, and a boisterously romantic candlestick who turns a dinner invitation into something out of Busby Berkeley. It is the kind of film that touches the heart in the right places but isn’t embarrassed to leave you with a big dumb grin on your face as a talking clockface excretes gears in alarm. It’s a film that has more emotional range than we have any right to expect from a remake of an animated fairy tale.

But it’s also a film that, as the song goes, may have something there that wasn’t there before. I’m reticent to call it a brain or a heart or something so reductive, nor do I want to chalk it up to je ne sais quoi, though one character actually does. But unlike some of Disney’s more recent live-action updates, it has an unflappable demand to exist and ends up a worthy successor to the original.

Beauty and the Beast is rated PG for “some action violence, peril, and frightening images.” Directed by Bill Condon. Written by Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos. Starring Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Josh Gad, Kevin Kline, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson.

Mr. Holmes (2015)

Amid the recent Sherlock Holmes renaissance – two films and two television shows in six years – there seems to have been something of an effort to find the “more authentic” Holmes by doing something quite different from Basil Rathbone in a deerstalker cap. Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes takes a similar tack, albeit by locating Holmes in his later years, giving us a more sobered and more affective detective than the others, one that succeeds largely on the shoulders of its star performer, Ian McKellen.

Mr. Holmes finds the great detective (McKellen) in exile-by-retirement with his housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her son Roger (Milo Parker). While tending his bees and staving off senility, Holmes is haunted by his failing memory of his last case and the need to resolve it before his powers of deductive reasoning falter for good.

First of all, Ian McKellen is absolutely amazing in this film. Among the panoply of talented Sherlocks we’ve had in the past few years, McKellen is, I can safely say, in a league of his own. I confess I haven’t seen much of Jonny Lee Miller’s Elementary performance, but Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch have wildly different though engaging screen presences; both, however, do have a similar superhuman aesthetic about them, detaching them somewhat from the Doyle stories. McKellen’s Holmes, on the other hand, is the definition of grounded, all the more so because of the weight of his past and, he confides in one of the film’s most intriguing turns, the burden of his own fame in the wake of Watson’s publications.

McKellen is mesmerizing, unsurprisingly so given the fact that he apparently can do anything on screen. In another striking debut by a child actor, though, it’s Milo Parker’s scene-stealing turn as young Roger that makes the best impression. As a kind of new Watson to the aging Holmes, Parker plays precocious deftly, reminding one just a little bit of Thomas Brodie-Sangster in Love Actually. (Or maybe I just think all British children are alike.) To make one’s mainstream debut (setting aside Robot Overlords, of which I hadn’t so much as heard) opposite two giants like McKellen and Linney is one thing, but to hold your own is something else entirely. Parker provides the biggest laughs in the film, as well as the most emotional moments when we see what constitutes growing up in a home with Holmes.

Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most was the pronounced lack of action in Mr. Holmes. Obviously, we wouldn’t expect rousing fight choreography from a septuagenarian playing a nonagenarian, but the big screen Sherlock has of late been something of a master martial artist, but Condon’s treatment is much more contemplative, much more sensitive than the casual (or careless) snark of RDJ and Cumberbatch. Consequently, the film has an air not of melancholy but of introspection, mirrored quite well by the film’s balance of three distinct timelines which unfold and interweave to address all the unfinished business of Holmes’s life.

Mr. Holmes is a quieter Sherlock Holmes film than that to which we are accustomed of late, but it’s in the vein of what we might call “traditionally British” – the same as what Eddie Izzard satirized as “room with a view with a pond and a staircase.” I don’t recall a pond, but there is still the same serenity in Mr. Holmes, something very calming amid the otherwise blockbuster summer season. And at the center of it all is a very wonderful performance by Ian McKellen, one which ought to be seen by any self-professed admirers of the great detective.

Mr. Holmes is rated PG for “thematic elements, some disturbing images and incidental smoking.” There is mention of miscarried pregnancy, bee stings, and loneliness; Holmes discusses smoking pipes and cigars.