The danger of trying to do a supernatural comedy-romance is that you’ll wind up being as funny as “Twilight,” with all the raw sexual energy of “Bewitched.”
“Beautiful Creatures” isn’t quite that bad, though it did make me long for the cleverer “Dark Shadows” (which I liked more than most did). This one’s a sort of Civil War-inflected contemporary love-horror show that features such scary moments as a teen making windows shatter, a banquet table that spins like it’s on a turntable and Jeremy Irons attempting a Southern accent.
Ethan (Alden Ehrenreich, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Johnny Knoxville) is a South Carolina orphan who reads books that were considered controversial 50 years ago and yearns to break free of the South. His minder (Viola Davis), a librarian, once promised his mother to keep him safe, but mainly this consists of delivering his meals. No parents, but full maid service? Already the movie is a teen dream, although I can hear the 17-year-olds in the audience muttering that the deal is off if they have to read J.D. Salinger.
The freaky new girl Lena (an appealingly quiet Alice Englert, daughter of filmmaker Jane Campion) lives in the local haunted mansion kept by the mysterious Ravenwood clan headed by her uncle Macon (Irons). When the Christian girls at school, encouraged by the town evangelical (Emma Thompson), tease Lena about being a Satanist, she responds by accidentally on purpose making the windows explode in the other kids’ faces.
She and her family are “casters,” which is the new PC term for witches. On her 16th birthday, she’ll get signed up permanently for either the dark side or the light side, though there’s also this Civil War-era curse on her which makes it kinda look like the light side’s chances aren’t so good.
But, hey, as demonstrated by her wicked cousin Ridley (Emmy Rossum), being a dark caster means you get sexy black-lace outfits, vampy makeup and a tendency to kill the boys for fun. Stick to the light side, and apparently you get stuck with the baby-sitter look forever.
Lena and Ethan have been having these dreams about each other in Civil War times, when she pictures herself as a Southern belle and he as a Confederate soldier. And thanks to a highly contrived Civil War re-enactment (in which Ethan participates, for some reason, despite knowing it’s lame), they’ll relive their Olden Days drama again.
Not that I’m complaining. It sets up the ladies for a climax in which everybody is spilling out of their big wenchy low-cut Tara hoop dresses while they fire spells all over the place. There are worse ways to pass the time. And after girl-meets-vampire and girl-meets-zombie movies, at least in this one it’s the young lady who gets to do cool stuff, leaving the boy to be the girl.
You will have guessed that the film is based on a tweener novel, hence the virgin-slut dynamic, the dress-up games, the worries about not fitting in at school, the family from hell and the Corleone-sized thirst for vengeance. Some of this is pure “Twilight” in theme. Yet the tone is completely unlike Bella’s earnest anguish.
Writer-director Richard LaGravenese (“The Fisher King”) is the wrong man for this job: He’s too smart to take the material seriously, so he keeps throwing in jokes, bits of camp, pieces of flair. Lena makes it rain directly over Ethan’s head, Irons raids David Bowie’s 1970s wardrobe, Thompson seems to think she’s on “Saturday Night Live” and we learn that the longtime ancestral home for casters was Washington, DC — until Nancy Reagan chased them away. The comedy defuses and deflates the drama, frustrating those who would be swept away by belief. As my daughter puts it when I, out of boredom, relate the fairy tales in silly voices, “Daaaad! Just read it regular!”