Belle actually surprised me a bit. The ads paint this as a movie about a young, mixed-race girl in mid-1700's England and the struggles she is up against in an intolerant and very class-conscious society, especially when it comes to affairs of the heart. And while that is the main crux of the story, there is so much more.
Belle starts when a young British Admiral delivers his illegitimate daughter, Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a result of a union between him and a slave, to his father to look after her while he is away. The father (played by Tom Wilkenson-Hollywood's go-to guy when they need a stuffy Brit) is no less than the Earl of Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England, one of England's highest legal positions. He already is looking after another niece as well, and he and his wife raise the girls together as their own, but is subject to a few more rules. She cannot eat with her family in company for one. So she has status, but not really. Anyway, Lord Mansfield is overseeing a case where a slave ship intentionally drowned its cargo and is attempting to collect on an insurance claim of damaged or lost cargo. The outcome of the case would signal the beginning of the end of slavery in England as a legal institution. The story is based on true events, but true to Hollywood style, only loosely.
The story mostly focuses on Dido and her status in English high society. It repeatedly makes comparisons of English marriage to slavery, where marriages are economic transactions and women, the assets of that transaction. The theme of "people are not items or property" is hammered home repeatedly in case you missed it the first nine times it was brought up, and this is the central problem with the movie. It takes on too many themes, and cheapens them all by its ambition. There have been a few movies that have touched on slavery and racism lately: Amistad, The Help, Lee Daniel's The Butler,12 Years A Slave, yes, even Django Unchained. While they all attempt to be great, they all fall short of the mark for one reason or another. In Belle's case, there is a profound movie from a feminist perspective, women being treated like cattle. This would have been a great movie on its own. It would also have been a great anti-slavery movie as well, focusing on the crucial court case. But the court case backstory seems shoehorned in, so as to give the movie's message more weight. This forced plot has the effect of undercutting the impact either plot has, making both fairly ineffective and reducing what could have been a great film to sub-par status.
That doesn't mean it's all bad. The movie is sumptuous and beautiful. It is exquisitely acted and shot. It is a little ham-handed in its storytelling, and is especially trite when it comes to how the soundtrack is used. Virtually every Hollywood cliché is evident, further cheapening the film's dramatic impact in my opinion. It's sad, because this film could have had some heft, but instead is kind of forgetful. This is unfortunate, considering the importance of the message in today's society, where we still grapple with the problems that the reprehensible practice of slavery wrought.
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