The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #1 by John King

Romeo + Juliet (1996)

It’s a forbidden secret that Shakespeare was a playwright. At least that’s the impression one can get from an American education, in which students are forced to read the plays without necessarily watching the plays. It would be like honoring the Cohen brothers by reading O Brother Where Art Thou while never ever watching it.

I am obsessed with Shakespeare on film.

While getting out to the theater to see Shakespeare well-performed is sublime, film is another capable medium for his work—much better, to my thinking, than the bare words on the page, even as amazing as those words are.

Shakespeare worked with a rather bare stage in the O of the Globe Theatre and its predecessor in his writing career. In Henry V, he apologized for the inability to transform the scenery at will. Perhaps he would have liked film very much.

Having said that, Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet is bullshit.

Where do I start? The most obvious flaw is the acting in this rock video version of Shakespeare. The callow adolescents never manage to dignify Shakespeare’s words, not only in their sounds, but what they signify. Especially awful is Claire Danes, who for half the film grins goofily as if saying, “Look, I’m so doing Shakespeare.” Or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio was too dreamy.

Only Vondie Curtis-Hall as Captain Prince and Pete Postlethwaite as Father Laurence seem to comprehend what they are doing.

Compounding these generally trite performances is the overstated music, special effects, and cinematography. The urban world beats that the actors must compete with for our hearing is a constant liability. The metaphorical weather patterns make those of The Matrix seem subtle. The fast-motion segments, severe editing, and ear-shattering foley noise make following the words an impossibility.

These concerns are, of course, not random, but rest at the foundation of Baz Luhrmann’s very flawed aesthetic, for he believes that American popular culture ennobles us as much as any classic work can. Our television news is our prologue and epilogue. Nobles dress like pimps and frat boys on spring break. Verona is rendered trendy as Verona Beach. Our pop music is liturgy, our teenybopper songs of angst, opera.

I doubt whether this aesthetic can be made compelling, but I can say that in Luhrmann’s hands it is not. When James Joyce compared the twentieth century to the classical and Elizabethan worlds, the result was tragicomic. Luhrmann has little sense of humor, and what he does possess comes off with the sophistication of, say, Benny Hill.

As an editor, cinematographer, and even costumer, Luhrmann is immensely talented; as an artist who presumably has something to say, however, he reveals himself a lowly hack, ultimately the very quintessence of idiotic vulgarity, swirling about in kaleidoscopic worship of his own absurdly inflated sense of cleverness. One must understand Shakespeare to transform Shakespeare. The words, and how they are uttered, matter.

Fuck you, Baz Luhrmann.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #2 by John King

Titus (1999)

If a postmodern, ahistorical approach to Shakespeare repulsed me in the hands of Baz Luhrmann, that aesthetic charms the shit out of me in the hands of Julie Taymor in her adaptation of the brutal, early Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus.

For example, the campaigning of those who would be emperor of Rome, as well as the victory party of the successful consul, is accompanied by the syncopated horns of swing jazz. The middle of the twentieth century (fascism, cars, music, technology) is conflated with the architecture, aesthetics, and technology of ancient Rome without any sense of self-congratulation (a la Baz Luhrmann). The viewer doesn’t get the sense that the director thinks all art is beautiful and crazy.

Rather, one gets the sense that the violence of antiquity and the present day are rooted in the continuous psychology of the human race.

The film begins with a little boy smashing a variety of his toys (fighter planes, Roman soldiers, wind-up robots) and desserts before a loud television in a rage of childish glee.

The building he is in is bombed as Titus Andronicus returns with the Roman army in a triumph that belies his weariness at having killed so many, at having lost so many, including his sons. The boy from the opening scene will turn out to be Lucius, Titus’s grandson.

The difference, of course, is that Julie Taymor imagines that art might matter, that the mad fugue of smashing that young Lucius undertakes is not, as Bas Luhrmann seems to think, the sum total of art itself, even if such anarchy might be a part of art, and a significant part of the human condition. We should not be content with that.

When you have a screenplay involving ritual slayings, dismemberment, and cannibalism, it helps if Anthony Hopkins is your lead actor; what makes Titus even more disturbing than The Silence of the Lambs, however, is that the story isn’t some vamp on abnormal psychology. The carnage and psychosis of Titus Andronicus is the entirely natural outgrowth of honor and tribalism and war. Clarice Starling represented us trying to see into the mind of madness; the characters of Titus probably are us.

Which is to say Anthony Hopkins is playing a much different character, and really one needs a man of almost unthinkable stature and humility to play this part of the general who does not want to rule Rome. The bombast of the role would sound absurd of a lesser actor. Somehow, Hopkins gives this character a scope one can, despite the odds, empathize with.

Jessica Lange, as Tamora, the vengeful, conquered queen of the Goths, is also deeply impressive, and holds her own against Anthony Hopkins.

Alan Cumming, as Saturninus, is a wonderfully campy tyrant–equal parts Marilyn Manson, Pee Wee Herman, and Hitler.

Harry Lennix, as Aaron, however, is what makes Titus the most sublime.

Aaron the Moor is Shakespeare’s other black part, except that Aaron is all Iago and not at all like Othello. He is Shakespeare’s greatest villain, and his malevolence is astounding. Yet we are given to know why he is willing to destroy so much, and like Richard III has decided to relish the villainous role that has been given to him.

The great strength of Shakespeare is in his characterization, the depth of his understanding of human psychology centuries before this was a mode of human inquiry. We are still learning from him what it means to be human.

We don’t need Shakespeare to seem dusty, or appropriately Elizabethan or medieval or ancient or purely historically accurate (although a thoughtless carelessness with historical setting is disappointing). We don’t need Shakespeare to be acted by the English. We just need good actors, and a director who understands the poetry and the psychology of the words. With Titus, the cast and director Julie Taymor would have pleased Shakespeare immensely, although he would, of course, be impatient for his royalties, should he have lived so long.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #3 by John King

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)

Shakespeare’s language is sometimes poopooed by naïve readers as too old. I have, as a professor, been told good-naturedly by sniffing students that he wrote in Old English. In fact, Shakespeare is too new for the Middle English of Chaucer. His language is modern.

His style, on the other hand, is a beautiful monster that is unique, throughout history, to him. Compare him to his contemporaries—they are not difficult to understand. The power of Shakespeare’s language has to do with how deeply he saw into the human condition, and how he created a style capable of expressing it. He did so with bathos, mixing erudition and country speech. He did so by letting speech extend itself in soliloquies, the forerunner of the internal monologues of the Modernist era. He did so with the giddy delight of a genius, using every word at his disposal.

While good actors make the language natural and relatively easy to understand through the context of performance, film directors who approach the bard often feel a certain zap upon their heads. How can they compete with the amazing fire of his words?

One gesture, in visual and musical terms, is pomp, to make the scene a triumph of grandeur … and this can sometimes work, although by now it’s a cliché of Shakespeare films, and tends to be the most unimaginative point-of-entry for fleshing out the plays. Oh, it’s Shakespeare, so polish the brass and gold, wear finery, tell the orchestra to make the listeners’ nipples hard.

In Michael Hoffman’s 1999 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the solution was to relocate the play to Italy, and use opera and Felix Mendelssohn’s music to parallel the grandeur of Shakespearean language. Verdi’s “Brindisi,” the delightful drinking song from La Traviata, appears several times. The musicality of Italian opera smoothens out the potential strangeness of the play’s words.

This movie thrived on what is often one of the pitfalls of Shakespearean casting: Hollywood. Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer have top billing, and they don’t disappoint. Kevin Kline manages to imbue Nick Bottom, the excitable amateur actor, with humane empathy while still exploiting the part for broad laughter.

Michelle Pfeiffer, siren of current day lyricists, is credibly sexy and regal as the Fairy Queen.

Rupert Everett as the fairy king Oberon and Stanley Tucci as his satyr servant Puck seem really wonderful together, subtly reactive to one another’s performance, but comically out-of-synch.

Sam Rockwell as the amateur actor Francis Flute steals a scene late in the play, suggesting the amazing actor he would later become. Calista Flockhart, as the woebegone Helena, turns out to be much funnier than I could have anticipated from those scary ninety seconds when I tried to watch Ally McBeal back in 1998.

The movie has a deep bench, including numerous actors who would become famous after this movie, like Christian Bale and Dominic West (that guy from The Wire).

David Straithern, as King Theseus, gives the only wooden performance, as if he could not get past remembering the lines in order to emote anything from them. Sophie Marceau (who was the princess in Braveheart and Elektra Kane is The World is Not Enough) easily outacts him in this movie, even though English is not her first language.

The first Hollywood go at this play (1935) starred Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney, and Mickey Rooney. The thing is beyond unwatchable.

When my doctor says I can drink again, I’ll try to review it.

This 1999 version may be the most fun film of Shakespeare’s work. Dream is, after all, a comedy. It is a love story, but the theme is that love is an inexplicable form of madness.

So, you know, the story is true.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #4 by John King

Hamlet (1990)

Franco Zeffirelli is a creature of opera, and was friends with Maria Callas. He directed the version of La Traviata I attended at the Met. Yet when he directs films of Shakespeare, he avoids the bombast and hyperbole of the operatic mode altogether.

His Hamlet is earthy.

The problem with Hamlet, as Laurence Olivier simplistically put it in his own epigraph to a film version of the play, is that “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” The prince of Denmark is charged by his father’s ghost to enact vengeance in Act 1. Emerson Venable tried to reconcile the four act delay of this revenge in his short book from 1912, The Hamlet Problem and its Solution—which is a more complex way of saying that Hamlet’s mind was a powerful engine of philosophy and conscience. He delays killing Claudius because he worries his own motives are too impure—his “prophetic soul” wanted to kill his uncle before he knew the new king was guilty.

Zeffirelli gives his Hamlet a medieval setting, and focuses on Hamlet’s worries of mortality, that the mind will become food for worms, then dust. The opening shot is of the prince pouring earth over his father’s sepulcher.

Olivier’s Hamlet isn’t bad, but isn’t necessarily good, either. I hate to say it, but the 1948 film isn’t dramatic enough. Olivier is skinny, and Hamlet comes off as a feckless aesthete.

Zeffirelli’s solution was to cast Mel Gibson, of Bird on a Wire fame.

Before the sanctimoniousness of Braveheart, before the snuff film of The Passion of the Christ, before his anti-Semitic run-ins with the police and consequent disgrace, Mel Gibson was a talented actor, an athletic one capable of menace. (Except for the ending, Lethal Weapon was actually a good film, before all those sequels.) When Hamlet is told the news of Claudius’s betrayal, he watches the king from above the castle and strikes the roof with his sword, sparks flying. His mind is undoing him, but his body threatens to undo him as well.

Ian Holm is a lucid Polonius, comic and shrewd.

Helena Bonham Carter is sublime as Ophelia.

The part of Ophelia is really the litmus test of any production of Hamlet—she suffers directly what Hamlet thinks he is suffering. She cannot be the perfect daughter and lover, and is destroyed by what the royal court of Denmark carelessly asks of her. Her mad scene is unforgettable.

Glen Close shines as Gertrude, a difficult part to make likable.

Alan Bates as Claudius, the venerable Paul Scofield as the ghost, and Nathaniel Parker as Laertes all do revelatory work as well.

Hamlet is a moody play. As my friend Numsiri once had to point out to me, it’s a bummer. But Mel Gibson squeezes out as much mook humor as can be discovered in the part.

The scenes from the play are not only truncated—the Polish plot is withdrawn entirely—but boldly re-arranged as well. This Hamlet moves with a good momentum, and drives its story home masterfully. It is also the Hamlet that turned me solidly into the Shakespeare junkie that I am. It is my Hamlet.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #5 by John King

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990)

Tom Stoppard is a great playwright, a British postmodernist who well knows how literary meaning is culturally constructed. His play and film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1990) are wonderful accomplishments that construe the comedy team of Hamlet’s bumbling college friends as the hapless heroes of the story, as if Beckett were feeling more chipper and rewriting Hamlet with Didi and Gogo from Waiting for Godot. (Or Eliot, who in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock imagines himself not as the tragic hero, but merely someone to swell a progress”—except Stoppard is wickedly funny, whereas Eliot never was).

Stoppard’s film “adaptation” of Hamlet consists of more new material than Shakespeare’s original play, since the scenes not featuring tend to happen elliptically, in the background of R & G’s points-of-view. When the original text is enacted, the scenes come off as flat, as if their familiarity as set-pieces makes them odd, as if R & G can only guess their roles.

Iaian Glen (who plays Jorah Morment, always pining for his Khaleesi on Game of Thrones) looks like he is 19 years old as Hamlet, and does nothing wrong as an actor, except he never quite takes in R & G as being alive. Neither does Donald Sumpter as Claudius. R & G are interchangeable to the court.

Or maybe it’s to indicate our own overexposure to this Freudian tragedy, or Stoppard’s weariness with it, as a playwright contending with this warhorse. Or maybe it is to drive the point home that we are R & G, and their vivid confusion in this grand narrative of someone else is our lot. (It’s just like life, really.)

Tim Roth and Gary Oldman are priceless as the titular comic characters, questioning their existence and purpose—with brilliant obtuseness—all the way to the gallows. They are like Laurel and Hardy on hash, with a spot of Monty Python tossed in. Gary Oldman is the vulnerable, Stan Laurel type. Tim Roth is the alpha of these two fools.

The other remarkable performance in this story is the bombastic, elusive, and debased lead player, as played with astute panache by Richard Dreyfuss. His refrain about his own low standards, and the necessity of pleasing the awful tastes of audiences, is “Times being what they are…”

He is now, of course.

We are left to ask, along with the creature of Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” “what to make of a diminished thing”? An astounding lot, actually.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #6 by John King

The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1995)

Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out in his Post-modernization of Shakespeare’s most famous play. The ways in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are more about us than about Shakespeare or the Elizabethans is mostly subtle, with the suggestion that modernity is an accident of human evolution, and that our fates, and the meaning of our existence, are probably accidental as well. If we are not creators, we are, in some sense, on our way to the gallows in a fog of self.

Stoppard is less subtle in his other version of the Danish prince’s tragedy, The Fifteen Minute Hamlet.

Here, Shakespeare is both an Elizabethan artist at court, and is also, anachronistically, a filmmaker who has accelerated the pace of Hamlet’s story, by ripping out whole pages from the text, in order to make it palatable to his king. The blocking of the scenes is clever, allowing instant transitions between scenes and acts in a barn, and compressing the play down to just the essential ideas, just the essential tropes, just the essential actions. A production of the full text of Hamlet takes about three and half hours, and your average stage version comes in over two—this version comes in under 15 minutes.

To the viewer who doesn’t know the source material, this abbreviated show will likely seem incoherent, the visual logic of the story taking overwhelming precedence over its linguistic and psychological sense. Of course, adapters of Shakespeare worry that such semiotic incoherence is precisely how his plays will be experienced by a general public that has been so coddled by Hollywood spectacle and narratives that even those asleep in comas can follow.

At the same time, few productions attempt the whole Hamlet, because three and a half hours (or nearly four with an intermission) is even more Shakespeare than Shakespeareans can want to see in one sitting. In this sense, all productions of Shakespeare are a remix.

In The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, the king sees a preview, and is dismissive of the product. Shakespeare goes back to the editing booth, and cuts the fifteen-minute Hamlet in half, to enthusiastic royal and popular approval. The playwright is quietly mystified, but is nonetheless proud that his jittery remix is somehow a smash.

Have I mentioned that The Fifteen Minute Hamlet is wickedly fucking funny?

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #7 by John King

Shakespeare in Love

Sooner or later, we had to talk about Shakespeare in Love.

This is kind of the British version of a Hollywood-does-Shakespeare treatment.

Joseph Fiennes, brother to Ralph Fiennes, plays Shakespeare.

Rupert Everett plays the playright Philip Marlow. Judi Dench plays an imperious Queen Elizabeth.

Simon Callow plays the Master of the Revels. Martin Clunes plays the actor Richard Burbage. Imelda Staunton plays the real-world equivalent of Juliet’s nurse. Colin Firth, who graduate students in my day pined over as Mr. Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice, plays the monstrously-arrogant Lord Wessex.

Tom Wilkinson plays Hugh Fennyman.

Geoffrey Rush, who is Australian, plays theatre-owner Philip Henslowe.

From Hollywood, Gwyneth Paltrow plays Viola De Lesseps, and Ben Affleck plays Ned Alleyn, actor extraordinaire.

The premise is that Shakespeare is a scattered genius who stole ideas and lines from the very atmosphere of London, and the plot of Romeo and Juliet from the love affair he was having at the time. For hardcore Shakespeareans, there is an abundance of inside jokes.

Of course, the entire film is an inside joke—the Elizabethan period is both worshipfully recreated and occasionally undercut by a postmodern understanding of history and psychology.

Tom Stoppard co-wrote Shakespeare in Love with Marc Norman, a mysterious television and film writer who wrote an episode of Mission Impossible in 1970, and directed three episodes of White Shadow. Marc Norman has a decade-long gap in his career from 1985 to 1995. In that mid-nineties return, he wrote the Geena Davis pirate-epic Cutthroat Island.

Shakespeare in Love won the best picture Oscar for 1998. I like it anyway.

What I want to know is how Stoppard and Norman collaborated on the script. The idea that Shakespeare was not some absolute literary deity was put forth in Stoppard’s 1976 play, The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (filmed in 1995), and one is inclined to believe that Stoppard did most of the work. It is that witty, despite the occasional Hollywood flourish and old-fashioned mores that one might be inclined to assign to Norman.

Then again, if the thesis of Shakespeare in Love is correct, then perhaps Norman is responsible for much of what was good in the screenplay, and dignified and ennobled Stoppard’s contributions, whatever they are.

The occasional Hollywood moments make the film seem momentarily trite, or too contrived, but the climax of the film, and the major moments of the film, manage to be compelling work.

And the acting is top-notch. Even the Americans perform well, including Ben Affleck. Especially Ben Affleck.

If you have watched Romeo and Juliet lately (a good version, say Franco Zeffirelli’s, and not Baz fucking Luhrmann’s), then Shakespeare in Love is a fine film, better than many more serious, straightforward adaptations of the bard’s work.

The idea of Shakespeare being a horn-dog and a playwright capable of sublime affection is a dialectic that feels about right. And its thesis—that if we are imaginative enough, we can survive love—is an impressive one.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #8 by John King

Romeo and Juliet (1968)

Shakespeare in Love is a meta-narrative that simultaneously enacts Romeo and Juliet while imagining the story behind the play’s composition.

So it’s about time I reviewed a straightforward Romeo and Juliet, so let’s talk about Franco Zeffirelli’s version from 1968.

This is the only good cinematic R&J I know of, apart from Shakespeare in Love.

At the height of the psychedelic era, Zeffirelli went with a traditional setting: the early Renaissance, in a Verona that actually looks like an Italian city from that era.

While I am not against some Modern re-settings of the plays, and not even against anachronistically jumbling several eras, depending on the context, the psychology of Romeo and Juliet, in particular the psychology of Juliet, needs to be understood in a much more patriarchal world.

More on this later.

The male citizenry of Verona seem prone to violence, but that may be because everyone is wearing codpieces that are painfully tight.

My late colleague, Kevin Crawford, once pointed out to me that Zeffirelli’s shrewdness in approaching the violence of this tragedy is to have most of it be realistically awkward and inept. Some of these men and boys might know how to fight, but outside the context of a duel, the result is farcical chaos that nevertheless causes havoc in the marketplace and town. Men’s fists are bent at the wrist as they try to pummel each other in close quarters in the mud, in their colorful, striped breeches. Terrified chickens and furniture get in the way.

The weird scope of the wretched melee of Act I is important, as it sets up the drama, and the heartwarming and heartbreaking turns of the back-to-back fights in Act III.

Oh, right. This is a love story.

While a terrible Romeo can ruin any R&J, the litmus test of any production is the quality of its Juliet, because that is the most difficult part to pull off.

Juliet is smarter than Romeo, yet she “hath not seen the change of fourteen years.”

Romeo is a teenaged serial lovelorn seeker of unrequited love (emo before there was emo), a dope who can’t help falling psychotically in love with women–in fact, he was at the Capulet’s party to prove he could not find another woman more beautiful than Rosaline when he sees Juliet. Zeffirelli carefully shows Romeo watching Rosaline intently, the camera following her dancing–when Juliet is seen behind her, and the camera cannot look away from Olivia Hussey, I mean Juliet.

According to IMDB, Hussey was only fifteen when working on this film; according to math, she was seventeen, or perhaps sixteen, or both, unless the film was made two years prior to its release.

Something about her–her costume, her poise, her youth mixed with such “change”–lets us believe that not only would Romeo find her so much more beautiful than the perfectly beautiful, Rosaline, but that his claim that she has ended his youthful, changeable longings might also be right.

But Olivia Hussey can act. As I said, Juliet is the toughest part, because she must withstand Romeo’s advances and negotiate his commitment to her, all while being dazed by her own feelings of love for him.

Her father seems reluctant to see her wed in Act I, but that changes after her cousin Tybalt’s murder by Romeo.

I remember reading Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade, and asking my teacher why Juliet didn’t just run away to be with Romeo when he was exiled from Verona. When they meet outside her balcony, she even tells Romeo that if they wed, “all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay / And follow thee my lord throughout the world.”

Eloping a few days after their secret wedding! Why is that not a better plan than elaborately faking a suicide?

Sure, the Friar is hoping to mend the feud between Montagues and Capulets, but who cares what he wants. Why did Juliet accede to this freakishly dangerous plan when her father threatens to disown her?

Dunno, my teacher said, as she tried to keep a student from smashing another student to death with his desk.

Bad things happen when you read Shakespeare’s plays without seeing them performed.

The answer is, of course, that Juliet cannot easily imagine that she can be a wife, but no longer be a Capulet–no longer be her father’s daughter. Once again, she isn’t yet fourteen.

Juliet trusts the priest, after the nurse betrays her, but swearing that heart and soul she thinks Juliet should marry the plan Paris because of her father’s wishes, and because a relationship with Romeo would be doomed. This after the nurse has been so complicit in her charge’s relationship with Romeo.

When Juliet awakes in the tomb next to Romeo’s corpse, the good Friar whines, “A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents.” Sure, blame God for making that horrible plan backfire.

I can have these observations about the psychodynamics of Romeo and Juliet because the movie is good rather than screamingly stupid (I am looking at you, Baz Luhrmann).

The cast includes Michael York (who you might know as Basil Exposition, Logan of Logan’s Run, or the Brian Roberts from Cabaret), Milo O’Shea, and Leonard Whiting as Romeo. Laurence Olivier visited the set and talked his way into the movie as the prologue, and other voices.

Often when directors stay especially traditional in setting, the effect is dusty boredom, but that isn’t at all the case with this Romeo and Juliet. It’s a gem.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare On Film #9 by John King

Much Ado About Nothing

Joss Whedon’s remarkable follow up to The Avengers was, a bit surprisingly, Much Ado About Nothing.

If a superhero movie demands that characterization needs to be squeezed in with an eye-dropper between pyrotechnical explosions and sublime, seizure-inducing battles between IMPOSSIBLE BEINGS, Whedon squeezes in characterization about as well as anyone. Yet his work adapting Shakespeare demonstrates a capacity to let characters think and feel and act in recognizable ways that are precisely as rich and complex as Shakespeare intended.

Whedon’s contemporary setting offers us a relatively tasteful world, yet it is filmed in black and white that both semiotically nods to the sense of the oldness of the source material and also—and this is huge—places the comedy in a neutral context.

So many film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work are too eager to pour on the opulence, as if material luxury was necessary to match the exquisite language of the bard, a habit that I have privately nicknamed architecture porn. Carlo Carlei’s 2013 film of Romeo and Juliet is egregious in this regard.

Whedon’s film is serious about Shakespeare without ever being pretentious, or using Will’s cultural cachet as a form of self-aggrandizement. All of Whedon’s choices are meant to serve the drama.

To people unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s comedies, the chief difference between a comedy and a tragedy might be anticipated in extreme levels of humor or seriousness, but such an emotional binary is seldom demonstrated by Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet happens to be wickedly funny, and Romeo and Juliet, with Mercutio’s wit, has its hysterical moments. Some Victorian productions of that play uncrossed the stars for those lovers with a happy ending. (Repulsive, no?)

The real difference between comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays is almost entirely what happens in the last act. Comedies end in marriages, and tragedies end in piles of corpses. Until then, the stories could go either way.

Much Ado About Nothing is a paradoxical title, because in one sense what is considered nothing is really the destruction of a woman. To be publicly jilted and shamed for a scandal on her wedding day in Shakespeare’s time is about as bad as it would be today. Shakespeare makes us feel that, and so does Whedon and his excellent cast.

This Much Ado is also distinctly American, which in this case is not a detriment.

As a director Whedon’s focus make us feel this world so powerfully. I suspect the film was shot in sequence, for the acting begins fairly well and grows better, more comfortable with Shakespeare’s words, as the story progresses.

Kenneth Branagh filmed this play in 1993, and while watching his Benedict verbally spar with Emma Thompson’s Beatrice is dishy, most of the actors don’t even  seem to be in the same movie. The acting styles clash. Keanu Reaves out-acts Denzel Washington. Michael Keaton stole the movie as the zany comic relief Dogberry, sort of a Dickensian recycling of Beetlejuice cartoonishness. (That isn’t a slam.)

One impressive side-note about Joss Whedon’s film is that the score is by Whedon himself. The music never resorts to the pomp that is too often heaped onto Shakespeare films (I am looking at you Patrick Doyle). Instead, the music skirts melodrama without ever being trite or clichéd or flimsy. The music is beautiful, and never quite predictable. The touch is light, but suggestive of darkness.

The year before The Avengers came out, Kenneth Branagh directed Thor. Perhaps Whedon directed Much Ado over territorial spite. Or maybe he happens to love Shakespeare. Having seen this film a few times, I would have to guess the latter.

Now that he’s no longer on The Avengers franchise, perhaps Whedon will try another play out for the screen?

NOTE: This review originally appeared in a slightly different version in the other Drunken Odyssey Shakespeare blog, Shakespearing, on November 16, 2014.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #10 by John King

Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Kenneth Branagh is an astoundingly good Shakespearean actor. And with his first Shakespeare film, Henry V (1989), he seemed equally adept as a director.

His Much Ado About Nothing would prove otherwise.

His casting is a bit deranged, and his directing style with a grab bag of Hollywood stars and English actors seems to be laissez faire, so that many of them seem like they are acting in different movies in the same movie.

Robert Sean Leonard, for example, plays Claudio as if he is supposed to be a hideously bad actor rather than a soldier who has fallen in love.

Let’s put it this way: in Much Ado About Nothing, Keanu Reeves clearly out-acts Denzel Washington.

Reeves emotes like a by turns thwarted and ecstatic villain, whereas in the early scenes, Washington seems unsure of himself, as if his mouth was a machine for the manufacturing of sounds that might or might not be words.

Denzel gets better as the film goes on, and picks up a slight British accent the more he speaks with the English cast. There is a scene between his Don Pedro and Emma Thompson’s Beatrice that is quite touching.

But so much of the plot hinges on the mawkish Claudio, and Robert Sean Leonard is the Platonic form of Bad Actor here. Presumably he was cast because of his previous role as the sensitive prep school lad with ambitions as an actor in The Dead Poet’s Society (1989). Surrounded by bona fide Shakespearean actors, though, and as a man this time, he looks perpetually awkward by comparison. That he has a douchey surfer’s haircut in Much Ado doesn’t make his performance any more bearable.

I mean it’s so bad.

Leonard isn’t a terrible actor, but one can’t thrust an American actor into a Shakespeare film and expect good results unless the actor has some experience and training with Shakespearean drama.

About 300 words into this review, you’ll get the feeling that I think this movie is bad, and it isn’t. Branagh’s Much Ado is uneven, but there are some fine reasons to watch it.

Watching him and Emma Thompson trade witty barbs as Benedick and Beatrice is wonderful, and when they are tricked into thinking that the other loves them, thus causing them to wonder if they themselves might be in love with the other. When wit and irony give way to earnestness is even funnier than their combative dialogue.

And then there’s Robert Sean Leonard.

At around the fifty-first minute, I find myself wondering if I can get through this movie in one sitting, and then, Michael Keaton arrives as the night constable Dogberry.

I have seldom seen a man look so greasy. Keaton approaches the role with Beetlejuicean ferocity, and leans into the rough comedy of Shakespeare’s characterization. He mugs before the other actors so much, it’s as if he’s trying to get them to laugh on camera. That he takes the part so far, and the others actors don’t laugh, is one of the best things about Shakespearean comedy ever captured on film. His accent is part Scottish, part demonic cartoon.

There’s an early scene in the movie, when Don Pedro’s men ride in to see Leonato, the governor of Messina. It’s as if the forces of Hollywood are imperiously approaching a land governed by English actors who know their Shakespeare.

There’s a degree of pomp in this film that I am not comfortable with. The phoniness borders on camp, or perhaps is sometimes campy.

The song Shakespeare wrote for Much Ado, “Sigh No More, Ladies,” is performed three times in the film, once wistfully, once hopefully, and once triumphantly. The singer tells them, “be you blithe and bonny, / Converting all your sounds of woe / Into hey, nonny, nonny.”

Is the song nihilistic, jingoistic, ironic?

What worries me about the pomp in the film is the sense of complacently wealthy white people celebrating how life’s difficulties are but a momentary illusion. This Much Ado About Nothing ends with a breathlessly filmed orgiastic epithalamium, a dancing processional to “Sigh No More, Ladies” sung joyously.

Benedick who is about to marry his Beatrice, tells Don Pedro, “Get thee a wife,” not knowing that Beatrice has turned down Don Pedro’s proposal much earlier in the film. Don Pedro, played by Denzel Washington, disappears at the beginning of the final sequence of “Sigh No More, Ladies.” The camera uses a crane that gives a god’s eye view of the scene, and the scene is bereft of Don Pedro.

Plus Claudio doesn’t deserve his Hero, here played by a rather young, but thoroughly capable Kate Beckinsale.

If Hero ran away with Dogberry, that would be an ideal ending, satisfying the Aristotelian unities—for this particular version of Much Ado About Nothing anyway.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #11 by John King

Henry V (1989)

Two weeks ago, I mocked Kenneth Branagh’s weak casting and directing, because I had to. I mean, Robert Sean Leonard.

By now, if you’re reading this, you’re obviously asking yourselves, how will this rogue rank Branagh’s Shakespeare films? Like this, from best to worst:

1. Henry V (1989)
2. Othello (1995, directed by Oliver Parker)
3. As You Like It (2006)
4. A Midwinter’s Tale (1995, a comedy about a beleaguered production of Hamlet)
5. Twelfth Night (1988, in which Paul Kanfo directed an adaptation of a stage production originally directed by Branagh)
6. Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
7. Hamlet (1996)
8. Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000)

The top four are top notch, Numbers 5 and 6 are a mixture of good and bland, and the last 2 are only as good as the liquor you’ll be drinking while watching them. Your liver may not survive Love’s Labour’s Lost, actually. (Alicia Silverstone plays one of the leads.)

But lest you think me hopelessly blackened in heart, let me devote the rest of this review to Branagh’s finest film, Henry V.

For Americans, the history plays have often been under the radar, as the intricacies of British history before Shakespeare’s time can seem rather obscure, especially since these plays often had multiple parts whose connective narrative threads can seem elusive. For British theatre-folk, though, they are much more familiar, and for a young actor like Branagh, trained in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, who would play Henry V in the Royal Shakespeare Company, filming the play and portraying the part would seem like a normal enough of a maneuver.

When Laurence Olivier wanted to declare himself a film actor and director of Shakespeare in 1944, he did so with Henry V. (L.O.’s first film work of Shakespeare, As You Like It, did not yet convince him that Shakespeare could be meaningfully filmed.) Of course, the timing of Olivier’s Henry V was fortuitous for a British public eager to feel patriotic and keep its spirit up. Henry V is about a young king who, after several dissolute years as a prince, strives to be an ideal monarch for his people, and fights for the rights of England without compromise.

Arguably, for Branagh to adapt Henry V for the screen is more problematic, for patriotism outside of a Nazi subtext asks a lot of its viewers. Henry will appeal to his priests (who privately, corruptly think mostly of their own statuses) and then throughout the play to God.

There is also the matter of the chorus, who will provide the audience with exposition at the start of every act. He opens the play with an apology that the stage cannot present the epic spectacle of the narrative:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

This warning is meant for the sparse stage space of Shakespeare’s day, not the scenery that a modern movie is capable of showing. Often enough, in this film, the scenery will seem to lack nothing concocted by a Muse of fire.

This meta-theatrical hemming and hawing, however, comes off as charming, as we see the peerless Derek Jacobi prepare us for the film while stalking about a film set before thrusting open a large door to a black room.

Henry V had a limited budget, so some of the scenes were done sparsely. Frankly, there is a humility to the production that is so intimate and lets us focus on the exquisite actors.

And the acting in Henry V is perfection. Branagh begins the film as a calm, quiet king asking for counsel from his cabinet and from his clergy.

While the ambassador from France conveys an insult to him and his kingdom, Branagh manages one of the finest examples of modulation in any acting performance ever, as he moves from his calm to powerful, meticulous rage.

In his adaptation, Branagh shows Henry’s dissolute ado (borrowing from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2), and also shows how the king treats his own psychological make up as a tool, and how he draws out the psychology of those around him, including known traitors, and the various attitudes of the common soldiers fighting for him, and for England. Branagh shows Henry to be a trickster in fooling those around him, but a trickster with a heart so large that it will do anything to be a good man, and a good king, which at times will cost him his own humanity.

The cast is superb. Gigantic, sonorous, beautiful Brian Blessed plays Exeter, the king’s uncle; you may remember him as Prince Vultan (leader of the Hawkmen) from Flash Gordon. The intense Ian Holm is Captain Fluellen. Paul Scofield plays the woebegone king of France. Robbie Coltrane, who the world knows as Hagrid, plays Sir John Falstaff in some flashbacks. Judi Dench plays the inn keeper Mistress Quickly. Emma Thompson mines as much humor as is possible from the part of Princess Katherine of France. (Shakespeare really thought French accents were simply hysterical, for some reason. It gets worse in Merry Wives of Windsor.) If you squint, there’s a fifteen year-old Christian Bale playing Robin, an iconic boy for the commoners and the soldiers. Every actor in the film seems to know what to do, seems comfortable with rendering Shakespeare into the real.

And this Henry V is earthy. The battle scenes show the ugliness of war, and the exhaustion and confusion and the nauseating amounts of mud and blood that result from thousands of men swinging blades at one another’s heads for hours.

Of course, this is the play that has the “St. Crispen’s Day” speech in which Henry rallies his tired, weary soldiers who will be facing a massively larger, well-rested French army.

Here Patrick Doyle’s score rallies in melodic triumph, which seems appropriate; in later films, he seems to launch such pomp for the mere sake of Branagh seemingly never saying no under any circumstances.

Branagh does try to give his audience reasons why the French would fail at Agincourt: the French show ample hubris (that is in the text) and the English employ archers while the French do not. But what is remarkable to me about this Henry V is that Branagh seems as humble and earnest as Henry is. He gets me to cheer for England’s success, despite the fact that, unlike most Shakespeare junkies, I am not an anglophile whose heart tingles at the sight of the Union Jack, nor am I capable of believing that God will direct the fate of a nation’s military initiatives. But I am capable of believing that Henry believes that God will guide his hand, which is a remarkable thing.

The setting and the performances are all straightforwardly superior. Branagh followed in Olivier’s footsteps, and outdid him with his first Shakespeare film.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #12 by John King

Hamlet (1996)

With his Hamlet (1996), the gulf between Kenneth Branagh’s acting and that of his Hollywood peers widens. In the early going of Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Denzel Washington doesn’t quite know what to do. In the early going of Hamlet, Jack Lemmon (like Washington, one of the finest actors Hollywood has made use of) is not quite in the same movie as the other actors. It’s like watching a painting created by artists from different schools (Realist, pointillist, surrealist, cubist), if they don’t quite realize they are from different schools.

It’s not that Jack Lemmon does a bad job, per se. Charlton Heston gives one of the last great performances of his career as Player #1, and it is an impressive set piece (likely written to honor one of the elder actors of Shakespeare’s troupe).

Robin Williams plays the unctuous Osiric with a peculiar, self-satisfied glee that reminds me of Claire Danes’s performance in Romeo + Juliet, although Osiric is, in Robin William’s defence, a comic character.

Oh, right. Osiric is in this Hamlet because one of the novelties of this adaptation is that Branagh did the full Hamlet. Normally, Osiric is cut or minimized, since the tedious fact of setting up the duel between Laertes and Hamlet doesn’t seem dramatically necessary and comes in after the three hour mark.

I don’t know about you, dear readers, but this rogue doesn’t like to do even the things he likes to do for much over three hours at a time.

One can tell that Branagh suspected the problem of his own casting, since the principal parts are given to Shakespearean veterans, or at least British actors. He is Hamlet. Derek Jacobi is Claudius.

Julie Christie, a Hollywood veteran (Doctor Zhivago), is nevertheless an Englishwoman who studied acting in the Royal Central School for Speech and Drama, whose most famous alum happens to be Laurence Olivier.

Richard Briars (who was in Branagh’s Henry V and Much Ado) is Polonius.

Brian Blessed, who can do no wrong, is the ghost of King Hamlet.

Kate Winslet (British, despite being in Titanic) is Ophelia. Michael Maloney is Laertes (British); he played Rosencrantz in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990). Nicholas Farrell is Horatio; he played Montano alongside Branagh’s Iago the year before in Othello, and was also Antonio in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night.

When those who have been trained in Shakespeare come across their Hollywood counterparts, the contrast is immediate, no matter the good intentions and intelligence of the non-Shakespeareans. My suspension of disbelief unsuspends itself.

Plop.

Franco Zeffirelli, who happens to be Italian, can mix and match actors from various regions and make them cohere into an idiom that places them in the same imaginative world. Branagh, for some reason, cannot.

There seems to be an impulse to jam American actors into minor parts whenever possible. This is tragically on display during one of my favorite parts in Hamlet, the gravedigger scene. The lead gravedigger is played by Billy Crystal, who performs Shakespearean humor like his normal schtick.

To be fair, if the acting were more Americanized in this film, then Crystal’s performance almost works (although it seems like a sadly watered down version of his wise, marginalized character in The Princess Bride). But you can actually see Crystal acting,  as if there is a delay between him deciding to make a face or a gesture and the realization of that action.

What makes the scene unbearable for me, though, is that Simon Russell Beale, who is considered to be the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, is cast as the second gravedigger.

(If you haven’t heard of Beale, check him out as Falstaff in the BBC version of Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, as part of its Hollow Crown series. SRB is mighty.) Imagine asking Derek Jacobi to step down as Claudius because Steve Martin has agreed to play the part.

In the right production, Steve Martin would be the perfect Claudius. But in Branagh’s hands such a Hamlet would be Cheaper by the Dozen Part III.

The good news is that Hamlet is largely filled with Hamlet, unlike a Godzilla movie where that shrieking, ginormous reptile tends to be painfully fucking scarce. And Branagh may be a bad director, but he is a breathtakingly good actor.

So his Hamlet is more wildly uneven then outright bad.

The difference in acting valences might seem fascinating if this were a nightmare Hamlet of the dream realm, as if the oddities of acting idioms might denote the metaphysical torments of creatures from a David Lynch story making their way through the Black Lodge, or living inside a radiator. But the setting of Branagh’s Hamlet is a Denmark that seems like a very proper 18th century British castle in which there is no herring to be seen, but does happen to be coated with a pristine layer of snow.

And at one point King Hamlet is envisioned as sleeping in his frozen orchard at the moment of death–you know, the one where he was, as far as the royal court of Denmark knows, stung by an adder.

This works symbolically, at the total expense of realism, unless we want to think that Denmark is a stupid, stupid place, or else is infested with warm blooded poisonous serpents. And the symbolism isn’t strong enough to make me not crave a story that makes sense on a literal level.

The dream theory cannot rescue Branagh’s demented casting, seen abundantly in Much Ado, and which will get unfathomably worse in Love’s Labour’s Lost, starring (cough) Alicia Silverstone.

Much more to my liking is Branagh’s other, less famous Hamlet, a brilliant, self-aware comedy that lasts about ninety minutes. But you’ll have to wait until next time for me to tell about that.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#13: A Midwinter’s Tale (1996)

If Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is a luxury train under the blithe control of an engineer who’s uninterested in whether his cargo stays on board while shooting through an icy landscape, then the engineer of A Midwinter’s Tale cares not only about his passengers, but their baggage as well.

Oh, in England A Midwinter’s Tale (1996) was called In the Bleak Midwinter (1995).

Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this film about a troubled production of Hamlet just before he filmed his own adaptation of Hamlet, and both films came out in the U.S.A. in 1996, not that both films received the same amount of attention. Few people know about A Midwinter’s Tale. It is one of Branagh’s truly fine works despite his not appearing in front of the camera.

At 33 years old, Joe Harper (Michael Maloney) is nearing the end of his vital years as an actor without having the ability to find any acting jobs, despite the best efforts of his indulgent shark of an agent Margaretta (Joan Collins). Joe’s sister Molly is trying to raise funds to save an old church in the tiny village of Hope, Darbyshire. His solution to both problems is to mount a production of Hamlet in the church on Christmas Eve, with him as director and, obviously, also playing the lead role. The cast and crew are comprised of people even more desperate and dysfunctional than he is.

As I said in #12, this is Branagh’s good Hamlet. It would be another eleven years before Branagh would direct another worthy Shakespeare film (As You Like It, 2006).

A Midwinter’s Tale is just over an hour and a half. It’s shot in black-and-white, which makes it not resemble Love, Actually at all.

The ensemble cast is a marvel. Richard Briars, who has played in all of Branagh’s Shakespeare films, plays a veteran actor who bullies his way into this wayward production because he yearns to perform in Shakespeare just once. He is rather surprised in the read-through at the start of rehearsals to discover that Gertrude will be played by a man in drag. Julia Sawalha (who played Fiona in Ab Fab) plays Nina, who will be a nearsighted Ophelia whose emotions run high. Michael Maloney (who would go on to portray Lartes in Branagh’s Hamlet) is a wonder, and reminds us that gifted actors are ignored every day.

There’s a light, old-timey nightclub song called “Why Must the Show Go On?” that is heard twice in the film.

Branagh’s actual film of Hamlet doesn’t seem to have the answer, or to have even asked the question, or perhaps he answered the question to well with A Midwinter’s Tale.

In this modest comedy, a variety of British actors play actors playing in Hamlet, and Branagh’s writing is so deft here. There is obtuse slapstick mixed with speedy, dry wit, and the story manages some dramatic, emotional moments about life’s great disappointments from people who understand their disappointment and are trying, urgently, to transcend it. In this meta-context, Hamlet is a tragedy that these actors can tap into, and the connections are surprising. By contrast, Branagh’s Hamlet is affected, too composed, too in love with its own decoration.

A Midwinter’s Tale is a wonderful Christmas film, and happens to be my 3rd-favorite favorite Hamlet of all time (after the Zeffirelli and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead).

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#14. Richard III (1955)

I’ve decided to deviate from my survey of Kenneth Branagh films lest this guide get too tedious, especially since his miserable Love’s Labour Lost is lurking for me like some malicious ghost. (The very prospect scared me away for a month.)

Instead, I pivot to that first British actor and director whose iconic relationship to Shakespeare on film is an essential part of his mythos: Laurence Olivier.

I must confess, your favorite Shakespearean rogue took a long time learning to love Olivier. When I was growing up, when dinosaurs freely roamed the earth, his name itself signified that elevated cultural sophistication that no reasonable person would want to inflict on himself. In my senior year of high school, my excellent teacher, Ms. Musgrave, showed us his grainy black and white film of Hamlet, which had terrible sound quality that diminished Olivier’s greatest strength: his voice. And Olivier was not a method actor, so that to me the whole thing seemed deeply imbued with affect. He was a traditional thespian, for whom how to speak and where to stand were paramount over sense-memories and emotional discovery. Although I have tended to exaggerate this quality.

My colleague Kevin Crawford, a peerless Shakespearean actor himself, harshly poo-pooed my poo-pooing of Olivier. What I didn’t know then was that Olivier is a more impressive director than he is an actor, and he is a better actor (and this is obvious to me now) than I gave him credit for.

Richard III is his best film.

The setting for this film is tradition, some version of historically accurate with a hint of storybook whimsy added, like the giant crown in the eaves of the castle that looms over the proceedings of the court.

Richard III is a hunchbacked, malformed man who is second in succession to the throne when his oldest brother becomes king after a period of civil war. As a soldier, as a leader of arms, he had purpose, but in peacetime he has nothing but his own loneliness and worthlessness to look forward to. So he begins to plot his bloody way to the top.

Richard is a bad character, like a two-dimensional vice character that Shakespeare might have plucked out of a morality play and given psychological depth to. And Olivier, in a striking soliloquy that is filmed in a single take, looks us in the eye and confides his great frustration, his sense of honor, and his plans to us, the audience.

That he trusts us with this information makes us feel gratified, and perhaps a bit implicated, as he warns us of what he will do to his family. Olivier’s portrayal is nuanced, letting us understand how much he might feel conflicted by this vast impulse that has taken him.

One of his schemes is to woo and marry the Lady Anne (Claire Bloom), whose father and husband both died by his hands in the civil war preceding the play.

He begins this suit over the coffin of her husband, Edward. Shakespeare’s psychology is fascinating. Richard is wooing a beautiful noblewoman, which he perhaps has the nerve to attempt since the odds of succeeding are so low that failure should be considered less important than the audacity of the attempt.

Considering the context, Lady Anne is not receptive. But Richard is unrelenting in asserting his love for her, and makes himself vulnerable to her vengeance if that means making her happy. He forces her to choose to love or murder him.

Is it the agency he grants her, her own grieving weariness, or perhaps an inkling that for his vulnerability, for his devotion, for himself, that makes her relent, and accept his proposal?

In a romantic comedy, this would be the happy ending.

But Olivier’s Richard III also shows us the joys to be found in wickedness, and he will boast of his victory over love to us.

But the real relationship of Richard III is between Richard and his willing conspirator, the Duke of Buckingham, played to perfection by Ralph Richardson.

Olivier and Richardson are so reactive to one another’s performances that our joy in their Machiavellian schemes turns into great fun, until Richard decides to start bumping off children.

There are so many great performances in the film, including John Gielgud as Clarence, the nice, middle brother whose innocence runs the risk of being sentimentally intolerable. If Richard’s eldest brother, King Edward IV, is a bit corrupt, or at least flaky, Clarence’s assassination gives us reason to pause in our admiration of Richard.

Claire Bloom as Lady Anne is astoundingly good, in one of the most difficult parts of all of Shakespeare. If we don’t believe that she has truly, psychologically capitulated to Richard, then the rest of the story doesn’t matter.

Olivier gives Richard a surprising amount of heart, and the vulnerability he has shown Lady Anne we will also see from time to time, when he isn’t scheming, even when he has committed to being a villain. Olivier’s Richard can know fear.

It is a shame that I forsook Olivier for so long. His acting was amazing, but he was generous as an actor, and surrounded himself with equally talented people. And for all my expectations that he was somehow atavistic in supporting a historical sense of Shakespeare, Olivier possessed an artist’s eye in interpreting Richard III, and also in his Henry V. In R3, he rearranged scenes, changed lines, made much visual use of Mistress Shore (the extramarital consort of Edward IV). Perhaps Olivier is not the place to start for fans of Shakespeare on film, but among all the Shakespeare films I’ve seen, this version of R3 has grown on me the most, and is the most rewarding one to put in the Blu-ray player once more, and hit play.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#15. Othello (1995)

If we can agree, dear readers, that Olivier’s Richard III (1955) is both perfect and, in its own way, a bit old-fashioned, Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) manages to treat the tragedy realistically, with some degree of historical accuracy and dramatic poignancy, so that the story seems timeless, which is a feeble word we use to describe work that feels simultaneously old and terribly relevant.

Let’s begin by talking about the casting of the ever-underrated Laurence Fishburne  as the title character (five years before his first turn as Morpheus in The Matrix). Parker’s Othello is now 21 years old, so it bears observing that this was the first time that a black actor was cast as Othello in a prominent feature film. We were spared the grotesque spectacle of seeing a white actor such as Orson Welles (1952) or Laurence Olivier (1965) in blackface.

Visually, Fishburne offers a legitimate case for why Desdemona would fall in love with him despite the absolute opprobrium of her father.

As a Hollywood film actor, he manages the difficulty of the text perfectly, and makes the play the sublime experience it is meant to be.

Othello is a Moor, and since we don’t quite know exactly what a Moorish accent sounds like, Fishburne goes with a somewhat eloquent Caribbean voice, with some Arabic accents added, so that on a linguistic level, his cultural otherness is expressed by his very voice. The court of Venice spoke with believable Italian accents (not to be confused with whatever Paul Sorvino was doing in Romeo + Juliet). The courtiers and soldiers speak with English accents. By having his actors make such precise choices with some logic to them, Oliver Parker’s version of the play has a vocal texture that seems intoxicatingly real, unlike the motley casting in the Shakespeare films Branagh has directed since Henry V.

And if we are spared Branagh the director, we are treated to Branagh the actor, one of the best actors in the history of cinema, giving perhaps his best performance as the tortured Machiavellian officer Iago. It’s hard not to root for Iago, who takes such pleasure in his evil schemes, in his own thoughtful soliloquies, in his insults. (Othello has Shakespeare’s sharpest insult, by the way: “You are a Senator!”) Branagh gives him the occasional mugging for the camera, as if we are confederates for this virtuoso performance.

As the plot promises to grow more bloody, Iago, like any great liar, appears to believe in his own lies. Perhaps he does.

For writers, Othello is a remarkable study in the craft of characterization. What makes this play the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies–in your rogue’s infallible opinion–is how much we understand and care about all of the characters, including Iago, despite the fact that he will not explain himself for his crimes. This story shows us how frightening it is to define ourselves as others see us, when others overlook us, and how love is, for so many people, the most destructive force in the world.

Certainly, these themes appear in Macbeth and Richard III, but the naivety and stupidity of many of those characters make me less filled with dread in the watching. The tragedies in those two plays seem too inevitable, people functioning themselves and one another to death. Macbeth in particular I have to be tricked into liking.

Even Desdemona, Job-like in her willingness to suffer, enters into the final night of her life with open eyes. She would rather risk whatever violence he intends than dishonor her love for him. By strangling her, Othello knows on some level he is destroying himself, too.   This is the metaphysics of love–we overlap into another person, and sacrifice part of ourselves to it. Of course this could seem like average codependence, too, if you are cynical.

Oliver Parker’s Othello is a masterpiece. It is fun and heartbreaking. As compelling as a devouring rose.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#16. As You Like It (2006)

Some enthusiastic newbies to Shakespeare crave an authentically Shakespearean experience, something satisfyingly old-looking, true to history, and they will primly turn their nose up at productions that have the gall to change the setting of a play.

This is a truly silly position. Oh, there isn’t anything terribly wrong with having a traditional setting for Shakespeare’s plays, as Olivier’s Richard III proves. But there is an obligation for every new production of Shakespeare to actually be new, not just enact the plays like a theatrical jukebox for eternity.

Also, the idea of the purity of a setting is problematic if we consider that the plays, including the history plays, are historically imaginative or else inaccurate (such as the tolling of the clock in Julius Caesar). There is a theatrical approach to Shakespeare called period practice, which strives to painstakingly recreate a theatrical experience that Shakespeare’s own audience would have witnessed. Such shows forgo modern effects, pyrotechnics, staging, and lighting, yet they don’t take this approach all the way and have the female characters portrayed by men. Such productions imagine the bard in heaven blessing them for not using all of the tools of modern theater to entice an audience to buy a ticket for the show.

What is an appropriate historical setting for Macbeth? The eleventh century, based on Shakespeare’s source material, or the early seventeenth century, when the play was written and performed? Or in an alternate universe where the eleventh and seventeenth centuries overlap? Or Ontario, circa the winter of 1967, perhaps?

Getting too excited that a production looks sufficiently dusty is in absurdly wretched taste.

In his essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), Henry James wrote, “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donee: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.”

In the case of a play like As You Like It, the setting isn’t especially all that clear in the first place. A dukedom in France. The forest of Arden. It’s basically another comedy, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that is about flight into a pastoral landscape, in this case caused by Frederick claiming his older brother’s title as duke and then exiling his brother. The court’s loyalties are split in two, with the Duke Senior’s entourage following him in the wild.

Kenneth Branagh set his film in late 19th century Japan, in an unnamed treaty port, thus making the presence of Englishmen, well, plausible. Treaty ports were places where the countries that signed such treaties enjoyed extraterritoriality, meaning they were not subject to the laws of that land. Traders brought families and followers with them and created “mini-empires,” according to a caption at the start of the film. This choice of setting allows for a more believable sense of the drama, that jealousy in families could lead to tragic trajectories.

You know the difference between comedy and tragedy, in Shakespearean terms? Comedies end in marriage, tragedies end in a pile of corpses. Hamlet could be a comedy until he ups and stabs Polonius. And the comedies could turn more dark, if a confrontation were to turn fatal, like it did with poor Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.

A caption in Branagh’s film tells us that the traders and their entourages in Japan “tried to embrace this extraordinary culture, its beauties and its dangers.” Now I can’t help but wonder at the colonialist privilege entailed in this setting, which Branagh tries his best to alleviate by representing very few Japanese people, and by lavishing cinematography upon impressive examples of Japanese architecture, costumes, and painting. Yet traders are not necessarily interchangeable with colonial powers, and unlike colonialists, these traders do try embrace Japanese culture, in a mixture of East and West that looks rather opulent and Romantic, yet not altogether fake, either. Branagh isn’t vouching for the political worldview of his characters, just as Francis Ford Coppola was not serving as an apologist for the mafia, I suppose. The politics of this film, the degree of cultural appropriation involved, remain an open question for me.

Patrick Doyle’s arrangement for the song “Under the Greenwood Tree” includes a koto, which sounds awfully strange, or strangely awful, plucked with the melody.

There is something fascinating about Branagh’s casting, though: Branagh does not star in this film, apart from a clever cameo at the film’s close.

There is something else fascinating about his casting: it’s not his pathological pandering-to-Hollywood approach.

Oh, Alfred Molina plays the clown Touchstone, and Kevin Kline plays the gloomy Jaques (the original Eeyore). But Kevin Kline has training in Shakespeare, and proved himself in a film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Alfred Molina acquits himself deliciously as a fool, adding a dash of zaniness like Michael Keaton in Much Ado About Nothing. And despite being known as a Hollywood actor, Alfred Molina is, I’ll be damned, actually British.

Most of the cast is British. Brian Blessed plays the two brothers, both the gentle soul and the angry usurper.

Romula Garai, Brian Blessed, and Bryce Dallas Howard.

Bryce Dallas Howard, not terribly famous, sounds reliably British as the play’s main character Rosaline, despite Howard being American. Romula Garai is by turns touching and delightful as Rosaline’s cousin. And Richard Briars brings compelling dignity and nobility to the role of Adam, an old servant who is in search of a world in which loyalty and kindness are rewarded.

As the jumbled nature of the previous two paragraphs reveals, the cast of this film coheres and makes my binary dissection of their performances by country of origin (as is easy in other Branagh films) difficult. These actors are all in the same movie. Branagh has stopped slapping unprepared actors into the bard’s work. And he likely took a more careful hand as a director of his actors by not acting in the film himself. Perhaps someone spoke with him after Love’s Labour’s Lost. Perhaps he had trouble getting funding after that. Perhaps Shakespeare’s ghost visited him in a dream and asked him, “What the fuck?”

As You Like It is a tremendous film, actually, moving and sad and a romp, with actors delivering the music of Shakespeare’s language so naturally, and acting so well together, that it does what great art does: it wakes us up. It makes us more alive. It fills us up with the intelligible world.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#17: Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000)

Oh fuck.

Fuck.

I mean: shit.

Don’t see this movie.

Don’t see this movie unless you are totally high.

Okay, let’s consider what Branagh tried to do with Love’s Labour’s Lost. This adaptation presented the Shakespeare comedy as a Hollywood musical from the late 1930s, in which Shakespeare’s language is interrupted by songs from the great American songbook (Gershwin, Porter, Kern, et cetera) and dancing appropriate to a bygone age. I don’t really object to the idea, as I love all of these things, and after all, this is a comedy.

But. I mean. Really.

Part of the problem is that the film oozes not with nostalgia, but with especially fake nostalgia for a time none of these primary actors actually experienced. Part of what made Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly amazing is that they weren’t being nostalgic–they were modern for their own time. Gershwin was modern. Cole Porter was modern. If you are going to go retro, you need to inhabit the past as if it were modern, too. Branagh does this as an actor. Branagh fails to persuade anyone else to do this as a director.

The plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost is chiefly about four men who swear an oath to devote themselves to three years of a spartan, celibate, academic life.

Part of the problem is that so many of the principle actors, well, suck. Matthew Lillard, who you may remember as Shaggy from the live action Scooby Doo movies, or as the sad assistant in 13 Ghosts, plays Longaville. Alessando Nivola, surely hired for how cool his name is, plays King Ferdinand of Navarre, not that you can tell from his performance. Adrian Lester blandly plays Dumaine. Contrasted with Branagh, they seem like malfunctioning animatronics, except when they can distract us with their barely-adequate choreographed dancing.

Part of the problem is that some of the actors REALLY suck.

Alicia Silverstone portrays … the princess of France? She has a twinkle in her eye some naïve actors get (like Claire Danes) when they grab the opportunity to try Shakespeare. Look at how awesome I am, she seems to be implying, while being abysmally, quite shittingly, bad. This is the sort of acting one sees in sitcoms for children. She makes faces as articulate as the puppets from a Sid and Marty Krofft show

Richard Clifford, as the servant Boyard, is compelling, as is Richard Briers as the curate Sir Nathaniel. They aren’t onscreen long.

About the time you consider swallowing bleach, twenty-five minutes in, an even goofier subplot interrupts the story.

Timothy Spall (who played Wormtail in the Harry Potter films) is actually quite good as Don Armado, whose accent strains comprehension.  (Shakespeare found foreign accents inexplicably funny.)

Nathan Lane plays Costard, the clown, and musters the sort of low energy vaudeville that Billy Crystal brought to the gravedigger in Hamlet. It succeeds neither as lively vaudeville (again, when vaudeville was great it was modern), nor as Shakespearean tomfoolery.

And then, mother of shit, squeaky-voiced Alicia Silverstone fucking sings.

This is the nadir of Branagh’s casting. The spread-out good performances drown in a sea of mealy-mouthed ham acting. Few of these actors are in the same movie, and those who are aren’t in a good one. In so eagerly chasing down Hollywood with Shakespeare, Branagh forgot to make it good.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#18. The Worst Production I’ve Ever Seen (An Interlude)

Well, dear readers, your rogue has been delinquent these last few weeks, while he was in the throes of preparation for Litlando, which was I daresay a smash. Part of the problem with my next post is that I reached a pique of condemnatory rhetoric last time, and it felt so deliciously cathartic, and I doubt I shall see any Shakespeare film quite so bad ever again.

And yet I was not quite prepared to change modes, and see something good, and then say something positive. So this week, I will tell you the story of the worst stage production of Shakespeare I’ve ever seen.

In September of 2005, I attended a college production of Hamlet at my alma mater, Florida Atlantic University, directed by someone named Desmond Gallant. Now university theatrical productions can be unpredictable in quality, a bit like college football, actually, and normally I wouldn’t hold a university production to the light of criticism, for the kids are still learning, and so why select such a target? But this show was farcically wretched, and could only be a success as a parody of Hamlet.

That tic of some gushing new actors to Shakespeare, that self-satisfied glee that seems to announce the awesomeness of the actor totally doing the shit out of Shakespeare, was all over the actor playing the Danish prince. He is the worst actor I have ever seen. If you have ever seen William Shatner perform the “to be or not be” soliloquy, and if you had also seen this other fellow in 2005, you would say that Shatner is clearly the more refined talent. If you compare the most histrionically overwrought performance of Shatner chewing up the cheap scenery of Star Trek, you would also still say that Shatner was easily the more refined actor. This actor seemed to be doing a parody of Shatner, yet without any satirical intention.

One wonders why this untalented fellow was cast as Hamlet, when the finest actor of the troupe played the buffoonish Polonius, in this case a Polonius with a cockney accent and a lisp. He was a joy to watch, which made it all the more difficult after the third act. Half the audience failed to return after intermission. One of my friends was really digging the performance, though, as if it was a twisted John Waters experience. The show was almost more camp than could be endured.

The actress playing Ophelia was a much better actor than he-who-butchered-Hamlet. She was articulate, and exquisitely beautiful, and full-figured, what people in the Enlightenment might have called of glorious embonpoint. Botticelli-esque. I felt embarrassed for her having to share the stage with that prancing goofball. But I was even more embarrassed when, because of the placing of a zig-zaggy bridge on the German expressionistic set, Ophelia had to walk at her own funeral.

At the end of the play, when the actors emerge from the piles of bodies in order to take their bows, one was disappointed by this resurrection.

That December, the altogether amazing Estelle Kohler of the Royal Shakespeare Company performed her one woman show at Florida Atlantic University, and I was doing my best to let this sublime show counteract the toxic absurdity of the Hamlet that had been perpetrated on that very same stage.

And then I noticed knowing, wry laughter behind me at some of Kohler’s comments about performing Shakespeare. “That’s so true,” chortled the abominable Hamlet behind me, “I know exactly what that is like.”

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

#19. Coriolanus (2011)

If, like me, you’re an American with a functioning cortex, then the current political climate looks dire, with presidential candidates presented to the public precisely like any other capitalistic commodity by public relations and branding firms, with an almost absolute loathing for polysyllabic words or anything resembling actual ideas, plans,or philosophies about governance, and thus the most wonderfully alarming Shakespeare film to watch right now would be the Ralph Fiennes’s masterpiece, Coriolanus.

Coriolanus is the story of a fierce general of the Roman army whose prowess makes him a likely candidate for consul, or chief magistrate, of Rome. Reluctantly, he agrees to be considered for the great title, but he is a soldier, and cannot bring himself to show off his war wounds to civilians or otherwise sell his experience as a soldier to the people or persuade them that he is likeable or someone they should identify with. Most soldiers cannot imagine his mind, the life he has lived in defense and promotion of Rome, so the citizens of this republic are even less capable of understanding him, and he really doesn’t want to be understood by them–or reduce himself to someone who would be understood by them. This does not please certain tribunes, who rile up protesters until eventually instead of naming him consul, Rome banishes Coriolanus.

Bad plan.

Coriolanuis then, having gone a bit insane from being exiled by the country he has fought so desperately for, faces Tullus Aufidius, his old enemy from the last war. Although they hate each other, their clash is such an intimate, unequivocal way that their bond is actually much stronger than that they felt for their countries, their families, even, and they combine forces to attack Rome.

Ralph Fiennes is an amazing reader of Shakespeare. His voice is an exquisite instrument only hinted at in previous film roles. (He did win a Tony for a stage production of Hamlet in 1995.) Really, Coriolanus requires someone of stature, intelligence, and a booming voice, as the part is a truly rare one. The part is likely to come off goofy if not played to perfection by a master actor.

Coriolanus has an enviable supporting cast as well. Brian Cox plays Menenius Agrippa, a senator of Rome, but one almost with the spirit of a Shakespearean fool or clown, a tragic figure who cannot endure his inability to stop the hubris of the tribunes in their presumption that Coriolanus was of no use to Rome because he had defeated all of Rome’s enemies, that Coriolanus would evaporate without his country. Despite his ironical outlook, Menenius is ashamed that he could not unify Rome politically, or keep the citizens from feeding their rage against their own sense of helplessness by attacking a man who protected them, but did not love them, and who felt compelled to protect them from themselves.

Volumnia and Virgilia, the steely mother and the nerve-wracked wife of Coriolanus, are played to perfection by Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain.

Impressively, Chastain’s English accent and enunciation of Shakespeare seems like an equal match for the impressive cast. As a wife grieving over the injuries and loss that might come to her husband, as a wife who is ill-suited for her martial spouse, yet who nonetheless loves him profoundly, Chastain is not only compelling, but agonizingly lovely, reminiscent of Claire Bloom in Olivier’s Richard III.

Gerard Butler, of 300 fame, plays Tullus Aufidius, Coriolanus’s foe and later ally.

Butler in fact manages to match Fiennes in gravitas and physicality, and is able to deliver Shakespearean lines much more fluently than Frank Miller’s. (Fiennes is a better director than Zack Snyder, obviously. Uwe Boll may be a better director than Zack Snyder.)

The contemporary setting for this Coriolanus works quite well, and unlike Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, has no campy side-effects from the time-switch. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, the psychology at work feels totally contemporary, and the theme–that there can be no dignity or sanity in politics, and to try to have either is to annihilate oneself–is rather depressing, yet this Coriolanus is also sublime, and entertaining to watch, and gives one’s imagination room to think in, for the politics and realities of our own day.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

20. Macbeth (2015)

Confession: I don’t like the play Macbeth, which I regard as the tragic story of a porter who is trying to do his job when Scotland decides to miserably implode, politically speaking.

MACBETH

[Aside] If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,

Without my stir.

If only the imbecile went with that. Instead, he tries to outsmart the prophecies of the weird sisters, which (again) makes me not much like him. We are supposed, I suppose, to grasp hold of the importance that this opportunity does to Macbeth’s ambition, his greed for power, that did not seem to exist before it was awakened and then inflamed by his wife. Perhaps such dangerous temptation could happen to any of us, provided we are Scottish officers who encounter a trio of gothic weirdos after a miraculous performance in battle.

Basically, then, any performance of Mackers has to trick me into liking it.

Justin Kurzel’s film starring Michael Fassbender as our title character, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth, and David Thewlis as King Duncan, is a visionary go at the material. The setting is traditional, yet the ambient score, mesmeric violins and bagpipes and bass and who knows what other instrumentation, and the cinematography, using slow motion and flashbacks over soliloquies, makes the material feel gloriously vital.

Part of the subtext of the play is that the Macbeths are childless, and implied in their plot against the king, in their coup, is an erotics of mourning, and the script by Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso lean heavily into this, beginning with the funeral of their son. Lady Macbeth is driven by her anger at her loss. And the sexual relationship between the patricidal maniac and his wife is seen as a consequence of their sorrow, a compulsive attempt to ease one another’s pain.

After the murder of Duncan, Fassbender climbs into bed next to the corpse. The jump cuts during intense scenes simulates well the tortured mental state of its characters.

Michael Fassbender delivers his lines with minimal affect, allowing his Macbeth to be a quiet warrior. Most of the acting is in a martial set to his jaw, and a hard look in his eyes, that is holding his rage and sanity barely within. The scenery, cinematography, and score mix so well with this minimalist approach to the role that its psychology is powerful–much more so than when actors try to ride every nuance of Macbeth’s hysterical attachment to his idea of his fate.

Marion Cotillard is very much Fassbender’s equal as Lady M. Theirs is very much a love story, and while I may not adore the play, this is a much more successful treatment of this material than, say, Natural Born Killers. Cotillar’s Lady Macbeth shows courage to be her husband’s companion when he seems to be losing his mind and a threat to her.

They might be both going mad, but not equally mad, or the same kind of mad, at the same time, and we see Lady Macbeth fear and mourn the loss of her husband even as she succumbs to her own overwhelming grief at the enormity of their crimes.

The approach to the weird sisters is also sublimely done, strange, yet psychologically believable. The mental confusion that such a phenomenon would cause is well simulated by the film editing. (I won’t give more away on that score. In stage productions, one of the joys is the new ways one must find to simulate the sublimity of those three prophesiers.)

Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso managed to almost rush through the plot of Macbeth as quickly as can meaningfully be done, and makes us feel the drama with a wonderful amount of force. The premise of the play–a man contends with the perverse whims of fate–is rather uninteresting when dwelled upon and catalogued as extensively as Shakespeare’s full text does. The relationship of these characters to one another, on the other hand, is capable of moving me.

Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth is an unforgettable psychedelic meditation that indeed charms me into this bizarre tale of sound and fury, signifying, perhaps, nothing.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.