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Black Beauty is a Beautiful Bore: Movie Review

Photo: Buena Vista Pictures
Photo: Buena Vista Pictures

Disney+ has brought a modern, feminist twist to Anna Sewell’s bestselling book Black Beauty. Anna Avis’ retelling of the 140-year-old story is bright and beautiful. Unfortunately, it’s also slow, campy and boring to watch.

Instead of being full of events like great dramas should be, it’s full of script inconsistencies that are made worse by the shallowness of the screenplay. The calm music and bright vistas on screen are stunning to see, but all that work is undermined by the schmaltzy, inescapable gentleness that will turn young viewers off from reading the much better source novel.

The film is a (light and unaddressed) modern retelling of Sewell’s 1877 book about a wild horse named Beauty (Kate Winslet) who’s brought from her family of horses to a ranch in Utah. There, she meets a teenage girl named Jo (Mackenzie Foy) who forge a bond that carries them both through their hope of staying together.

Kate Winslet’s voiceover narration as the titular horse feels like she’s fighting her own nature because it both works and doesn’t at the same time. On one hand, it honours the original perspective of the horse’s character in Sewell’s book by allowing Black Beauty to be the star of her own movie.

On the other hand, Beauty’s dialogue is vastly different from the book, and Winslet delivers the flowery lines with an even more pandering tone. Instead of her voice as Beauty feeling sincere, it comes off like that of a babysitter frustrated she has to be bothered reading a bedtime story to the kids she’s looking after.

Most of the modernizations don’t alleviate this problem, either. Setting it in 2020 Utah poses the aforementioned inconsistencies in the script. An awful one finds Beauty joking about humans “being carried around” on what is a motor vehicle, then explaining to the audience in narration how “Jo’s parents died in a car crash” one scene later.

Foy is best actor in the film by far, having grown exponentially in presence since her last Disney epic The Nutcracker and the Four Realms two years ago. She also brings the most sincerity to the screen.

Iain Glen’s John Manly is another puzzling performance. He’s committed and grounded, playing a convincing worker in many otherwise dull, early scenes. His American accent, unfortunately, is subpar, and anyone who’s seen Game of Thrones will find it hard not to compare John Manly to See Jorah Mormont.

In short, the storytelling is rudimentary throughout, and the natural beauty in Guillaume Roussel’s cinematography is diminished by a release limited to living rooms and laptops for streaming audiences.

There are some brilliant elements that make this new Black Beauty truly beautiful. It’s undermined by cheap modernism and a glacial pacing that make the movie unavoidably boring, and the changes are more radical as the film continues.

The movie isn’t bad. It’s also so forgettable that, with several scenes adding nothing to the plot, it was hard to stay awake until the end. It won’t disappoint any audiences interested in the material, but it won’t be a beauty for anyone else.

Black Beauty

5 out of 10

PG, 1hr 50mins. Family Drama.

Written and Directed by Ashley Avis.

Starring Kate Winslet, Mackenzie Foy, Iain Glen, Fern Deacon and Calam Lynch.

Now streaming on Disney+ for subscribers.

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