We resumed our movie-going on Valentine's Day with Beautiful Creatures, another fantasy movie based on a YA book. I went into this movie venture this year knowing that we would probably see movies that would be really stupid or disappointing or just not my thing. I was fully expecting Beautiful Creatures to be a shallow, overly angst-ridden movie with a terrible setting and horrible accents and a real disappointment. I went into the movie fully prepared to mock it the whole way through. You could say I had low expectations. I even refused to tell V what movie we were going to see before we got there.
But then I watched the movie, and I actually quite enjoyed it.
Beautiful Creatures is based on the book of the same name. Ethan is a teenager who can't wait to get out of his hometown of Gatlin, South Carolina, a Civil War-obsessed tiny town. He has been dreaming of a girl for months before she moves to town. Of course, they immediately fall for each other, despite the effort that Lena (the main girl character) puts forth to tell Ethan to leave her alone since "her people" can't mix with "his people." (Hint: his people are ordinary mortals.) It becomes an epic struggle over the balance of light and dark because she's, like, important and powerful and stuff. If this sounds pretty generic to you, that's what I was afraid of going into the movie.
When the movie started, Alden Ehrenreich (who plays Ethan) opened his mouth, and an abrasively fake southern accent came pouring out. I know that's how actors are trained with southern accents, but I halfway expected Forrest Gump to come running across the screen. (Have I mentioned that horrible fake southern accents are one of my pet peeves in movies? Not to mention that accents to change over time -- Americans sound much more generic now than they did seventy-five years ago.) Honestly, the Best Southern Accent Award should go to British actress Emma Thompson or American actress Viola Davis (who, according to IMDB, is actually from South Carolina).
In any case, the initial encounters between Ethan and Lena are somewhat predictable, despite supernatural elements involved, although Ehrenreich plays Ethan with enough charm to pull it off, and Alice Englert plays Lena as very quick-witted, which is what that character needs. It was also refreshing to see two teenaged characters who were actually pretty witty. In the end, however, it is the "adult" actors (I use quotation marks because while Alice Englert looks like she's turning nineteen, while Alden Ehrenreich looks like he's about to turn twenty-nine) who save the show. Their portrayals add enough depth to keep the background struggle between light and dark from appearing hopelessly shallow and add enough heft to the story to prevent it from falling flat. It is through their portrayals of Macon (Jeremy Irons), Serafin (Emma Thompson), and Amma (Viola Davis) that the narrative appears in three dimensions. It had heart.
Now, if they'd only portray real Christians instead of openly hypocritical cardboard cutouts, then we'd be getting somewhere. Okay, so maybe they came close with Amma.
In the end, Beautiful Creatures was good enough to see, but not good enough to buy when it comes out on DVD. I might give the book series another shot, though -- from the public library.
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