Witches could be the next big thing: Beautiful Creatures follows editions of the necromantic evil Queen in Snow White and The Huntsman and Mirror Mirror (both 2012), the eponymous prey of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and the wicked sister act of Oz The Great and Powerful (both 2013). After the recent hordes of vampires and zombies, disturbing and morbid figurations of metaphoric power reprocessed into beings fit for the pop culture mass-market, witches are a logical next subject. Clearly produced with an eye to courting the Twilight market and received by critics with the same general scorn as that series, this version of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s opener to their Caster Chronicles franchise nonetheless feels very different and stirs gentlemanly impulses in me to scrutinise it more fairly. Beautiful Creatures possesses an actual sense of humour and an almost inimical attitude to parochial Americana than that displayed by Twilight, whilst kicking off with many advantages of budget and casting. Doubling up on writing and directing duties is Richard LaGravanese, who once upon a time wrote Terry Gilliam’s great The Fisher King (1991), and moved into directing with the surprising Living Out Loud (1998). Since then LaGravenese has specialised in the genre least likely to bring critical hosannas, the chick flick, and his return to fantastic material comes through a prism of the classic melodrama Hollywood used to make a lot, about and for female audiences, which always assumed that the strife between imperious ladies constituted the true, subterranean social battleground whilst men whistled away in ignorance. Beautiful Creatures only takes this to an extreme. The narrative voice here is male, that of young Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), but the story is all about the girls.
Ethan is a recently orphaned young Southern gentleman, resident in the town of Gatlin, North Carolina: although a popular member of the football team, he is nonetheless also a voracious reader and wannabe intellectual increasingly alienated from the mores of his locale. His pretensions are signposted by a usual roster of brainy teen author obsessions, particularly Kurt Vonnegut. His eye is captured by new girl in town Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), who trails mysterious phenomena and is ostracised as a malefic influence by the religious-bitchy complex that dominates the town, with Ethan’s former sweetheart and chief mean girl Emily Asher (Zoey Deutch) a particularly cruel inquisitor. Lena is the niece of the locale’s biggest landowner, the reclusive Macon (Jeremy Irons), and is now living with him after a peripatetic childhood. Sullen and sharp-tongued, sporting a tattoo on her hand that mysteriously counts down each day, Lena fends off Ethan’s advances, but hormonal gravity, a mutual love of transgressive-hued literature – Lena gets Ethan hooked on Charles Bukowski – and a dark, shared historical secret makes attraction inescapable. Ethan soon finds himself up to his neck in a clandestine world: the Duchannes are Casters, witching folk who labour under a peculiar curse. Female Casters are beset by forces almost beyond their control on their sixteenth birthday, forces that determine whether they’ll be good or evil witches, and for the Duchannes femmes, their fate is exclusively wicked, so Lena seems doomed to follow in the footsteps of her malevolent mother, Serafine, and her cousin Ridley (Emmy Rossum), who was as good-natured and fearful of turning as Lena is, but was reborn as a strident bitch-queen.
Beautiful Creatures starts well in conjuring a signposted but winning version of misfit chic, laced with LaGravanese’s humour, in a fashion that tries to escape the terminally bland template of Twilight. Ethan and Lena banter well, testing each-other’s reactions and sensibilities in swapping smart-mouthed quips. Ethan could easily have been played as another dull, perfect himbo avatar for a teen girl audience – he’s sporty! and hot! but also cool and smart and reads and he’s, like, really committed! – but LaGravenese and Ehrenreich, fresh from apprentice work with Francis Coppola on Tetro (2009) and Twixt (2011), make him convincing in his slightly overworked pretensions and ego. Ethan speaks wryly of Gatlin’s seamy institutions, like the local movie theatre, prone to showing films already on DVD and advertising them with misspelt titles: Interception and Finale Destination 6 are seen showing. Whereas Twilight never escaped what was for many the disgrace of being conceived by a Mormon housewife and being crammed full of discomforting metaphors for that worldview, Creatures takes pot-shots at religious oppression, parochial viciousness, and social ostracism of the peculiar, almost to a point that becomes obnoxious for going too far the other way, exploiting a lazy disdain for small towns. On the other hand, the peculiar, half-hidden richness of Gatlin’s underworld provides strong metaphors for the individualism and complexity of such hamlets. The Duchannes own the mansion on the hill, whilst Amma (Viola Davis), local librarian and Ethan’s pseudo-adoptive mother, proves to belong to another Caster clan, sporting a mighty collection of pseudo-tribal tattoos and voodoo chic as she tries to contact her ancestors for some aid for the poor assailed living, rebuking Macon all the time for his imperious incapacity to ask for help rather than demand it.
The story’s coded approach to adolescent drama is likewise intriguing, channelling coming-of-age anxieties into the conceit of the either-or schism that besets the witches, fashioning metaphors for the strange variances genetic inheritance and character moulding can inflict, and foil our pretensions to rectitude and wisdom when facing adulthood’s quagmires. Rossum’s Ridley enters the film like an explosion of charismatic, haute couture evil and strident force, charging into Gatlin in her red sports car, wrapped in black lace that manages to be chic and ruthlessly wanton at the same time, and quickly seducing Ethan’s pal Link (Thomas Mann): the film’s most interesting shot depicts Ridley screwing Link on a raft in the middle of the bayous with alligators swimming around them, a potent image of sexual evil. Rossum, always a welcome presence in spite of her excruciating career choices, walks into the film and walks off with it, even as the film then essentially sidelines her for the next hour and a half. Irons, who never seems confident with American accents and whose Southern drawl is downright corny, nonetheless invests his part with charisma and a sufficient mix of dark aggression and familial affection to make Macon’s divided character interesting, culminating in a scene where he invades the local church congregation, who have been whipped up into a righteous fury over Lena’s presence in the local school, and efficiently reminds all present that he’s still the silent overlord of the locality.
Macon finds his sister Serafine has however implanted herself in the body of the Link’s batty mother Mavis Lincoln (Emma Thompson, having fun), thus following on from Dark Shadows’ (2012) making the evil witch also the head of the local witch-burners, an idea replete with satiric value. The film takes an initially pointed stance against the domination of small-town American life by repressive cliques and religious conservatives, but later tries to make peace as Amma affirms a faith in God in spite of her Caster nature, arguing that only humans decide which of the deity’s creations are worthy and normal, a touch that awkwardly suggests the filmmakers want to keep the faithful in the audience on side whilst still arguing for tolerance. Similarly uncomfortable are the film’s attempts to maintain balance between its overt fantasticality and its desire to court the teen romance audience, by having Lena entreat Ethan to give her everyday experiences before her time runs out. This justifies their going on dates to the movies when they’re afraid she might soon morph into a destroyer of worlds.
At least the film finds some knowing feeling for teen behaviour, entwined at points with a sneaky sense of the detachment of modern youth from the forces that shape their lives: a wry exchange between Ethan and Link, wanting to extract themselves from the tedium of Civil War re-enacting, agree to shoot each-other with their blank-loaded muskets so they can go and watch Aliens on Blu-Ray, only for the shot Link fires at Ethan to prove a real bullet. There’s also a dash of film-buff humour in a sequence where Ridley first seduces Link, distracting him from the cue to see a revival of Gilda (1945) by appearing as Rita Hayworth and glamorously enticing him into her evil embrace, offering possibilities for a layered, sneakily meta-narrative take on the femme fatale as magician of guises designed to ensnare men. Serafine and Ridley try to manipulate Lena’s seemingly inevitable slide towards the dark side, but Amma helps by giving the teen loves access to a library of Caster lore, in search of spells that might dispel the curse. The roots of the curse are hinted at until properly revealed in a sequence set in the local movie theatre, where the lovers clutch a transporting keepsake that unveils their fate like an unreeling film on the screen. The curse proves to have been taken hold in the Civil War, when a battle that engulfed Gatlin, the one which the present-day townsfolk ritually re-enact, claimed the life of Ethan’s ancestor and period avatar, whose fate kicked off the curse. Hysterical with grief, Lena’s ancestor, in love with him, revived Ethan after he was shot, an act the automatically brought the dark curse upon her and her kin, and she promptly killed her revived lover and lots of soldiers too.
Given the bounty of possibilities and engaging attributes Beautiful Creatures offers, it’s quite genuinely astounding but inarguable that the film falls flat on its face by the end credits. Whilst the substance and potential is there, the storytelling is ultimately deeply confused and the narrative development inept. LaGravenese’s direction is a great part of the problem, sloppy and unfocused, allowing scenes to ramble on and repeat. Characters, particularly Macon and Lena’s extended clan including Gramma (Eileen Atkins) and Aunt Del (Margo Martindale), are introduced but then kept to scantly defined, seat-warmer roles, begging many unanswered questions, like why these ladies aren’t afflicted by the Curse. Apart from that scene with Ridley, Link, and the alligators, the film badly lacks Southern Gothic, and cries out for flavour and a sense of immediacy: too much of the film is styled and paced like a bland TV pilot. Considering how this milieu has been engaged by filmmakers over the years – Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, Bill Condon’s Sister Sister ( both 1987), Iain Softley’s The Skeleton Key (2005), and Bertrand Tavernier’s In the Electric Mist (2010) stand amongst many recent films that run the gamut from middling to great but still wring lustrous and lurid energy from such locales – LaGravenese’s evocations of atmosphere, even granting the broad younger audience he’s looking for, are dull and cloddish. Major revelations are delayed far too long, characters disappear for long stretches, and time passages are indiscriminate.
The special effects are thankfully rather sparse, but the few LaGravenese offers are hackneyed enough to be tedious anyway, including a kind of sticky black goo that envelops Ethan that looks like leftover CGI software from Spider-Man 3 (2007). A would-be set-piece that sees Ethan trapped and unable to speak whilst Ridley and Lena stoke each-other’s rage over the family dinner table, set rotating by the storm of their powers, is a nicely conceived metaphor for the discomfort of all would-be family members confronted by the baggage of the clan, but it’s clumsily staged and finishes merely as risibly comedic. Ehrenreich and Englert are both good but lack chemistry, which makes the film’s excessive emphasis on their repetitive frustration all the more. Particularly problematic is how the film essentially renders Ethan a superfluous character in the last quarter after Lena erases his memory. She does that for the dual purpose of protecting him from her world and also because she finds a spell that demands a love-one be sacrificed to atone for the initial sin, and she attempts to swing a Jesuitical solution. But it also helps render the story build-up an emphasis on Ethan’s reactions to Lena and her world dismayingly inconsequential. Macon pulls a switch that delivers a genuine sacrifice, and the film’s interesting punch-line, which sees Lena claim both her dark and light sides and emerges from trauma and battle as a dichotomous, ambiguous figure of immense power, offers a superb idea that’s fudged badly. A sequel might wrangle something from it, but that seems a doubtful proposition.
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