Watery
Another day, another Disney raid on its own vault.
The Little Mermaid
Director: Rob Marshall • Writer: David Magee, based on the screenplay by Rob Clements, John Musker, and the traditional story by Hans Christian Andersen
Starring [English]: Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Awkwafina, Jacob Tremblay, Noma Dumezweni
USA • 2hrs 15mins
Opens Hong Kong May 25 • IIA
Grade: B-
Let me just start by pointing out that the live action remake of Disney’s (bizarrely) beloved, rejuvenating The Little Mermaid is 135 minutes long to the original’s 83. WTF?
With that out of the way, yes, The Little Mermaid represents the ongoing plunder by Disney of its own IP/catalogue, this one making headlines for the trolls freaking out about the mermaid in question being Black. Not for being a half-fish woman. Who sings. Not for being terrifyingly eager to get on land in order to fill a classically gendered role for some white dude. No. Being Black was the issue. What’s wrong with people?
Those fools aside, Disney, incoming reboot director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods) and songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda (Moana) run everyone’s favourite merperson Ariel (now played by Halle Bailey of Beyoncé protege group Chloe x Halle) through a mostly faithful rehash of the 1989 film, scored to the dulcet tones of cash registers ka-chinging worldwide. The debate is getting tired (Snow White, LIlo & Stitch, maybe Moana, get over it), and so the short version is that by remake standards, The Little Mermaid is among the least offensive of the bunch; it’s got a long way to go to catch up to Beauty and the Beast’s literally tone-deaf uselessness.
Gurl, leave him there
We meet Ariel on the eve of some kind of moon, when she misses a family meeting and her racist dad King Triton (Javier Bardem), whose seven, aggressively diverse daughters make it appear he has a baby mama in each of the seven seas, bemoans her obsession with humans up top. She’s curious, even though life underwater is brightly coloured and vibrant despite being well below the ocean surface (it’s dark in the deep), is free of standard physics and resembles Disney’s Strange World. You know the rest. Ariel saves a human that can’t swim, Eric (Jonah Hauer-King, delivering ’90s boyband realness), and goes to her sea witch auntie Ursula (Melissa McCarthy in Divine-lite drag mode) for help getting the guy after she gets all horned up and falls in love in about 15 minutes. That said, the 15 minutes translates into almost an hour of wholly unnecessary screen time. Then they sail into the sunset as creepy merpeople watch. Marshall is precisely the vanilla, pedestrian director to accomplish this.
Of Mermaid’s problems, Bailey is not among them. She’s got a natural screen presence and she certainly has the pipes to carry a Disney musical. Likewise the CGI budget is up there on the screen, in the floating hair and and buoyant watery milieu. Even the odd patois of Sebastian the bodyguard crab (voiced by Daveed Diggs) and the mutterings of Ariel’s pals, Flounder (Room’s Jacob Tremblay) and seagull Scuttle (Awkwafina) can’t get in the way. It’s that Ariel still has little to no agency, and she’s made into more of a stalker this time. Progress? Add to that Hauer-King being, arguably, Disney’s least charismatic Handsome Prince in recent memory (his solo “Wild Uncharted Waters” is a low point, though the very Miranda-ish “The Scuttlebutt” works better than it should) and you have a recipe for more soulness product feigning modernity.
Because here’s Disney again going bonkers with the D&I and cramming a racially and ethnically rich cast into its retconned catalogue, despite it coming across as anything but organic; patching over historic boneheadedness is performative and doesn’t address the issue. Trouble is, do we bitch about the cynicism or hope the House of Mouse is being genuine? Eric’s mother, Queen Selina (Noma Dumezweni) is a new character, his Black adoptive mom, but you have to ask what the character truly brings to the story, other than an additional, bloating 10 minutes. Perhaps the try-hardness of it wouldn’t clang so hard if Ariel were a more rounded character who wasn’t stripped of her voice. Yes, that’s the message, and yes, Bailey’s presence adds a narrative frisson that wasn’t there before. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Why go back to the well when you could just let diverse creators create new stuff. This is just exhausting now. — DEK