King Lear [2018]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we watched the 2018 BBC/Amazon adaptation of King Lear.

I'll be frank, this was a disappointment. I think it was under-adapted for the screen, and at a technical level muddy and aspired-to-workmanlike. It was a squandering of its impressive cast in a muted adaptation that fights for coherence in its transition from stage to screen. The only other version of King Lear I've ever seen was the Brad Neely/Creased Comics version and this one suffers in the comparison.

The adaptation, such as it was, took place in a Coriolanus [2011]-like vaguely-unplaceable modern Europe. There were parts that were intended to be Gloucester, Cornwall, Albany, France - which I could deduce through dialogue - but by virtue of no time being spent on "setting up an image to convey a sense of place" and "everything being six shades of fucking brown", there was not a real sense of place beyond "inside", "outside", and "in a courtyard". The adaptational differences seemingly ended at "what if it happened today". I understand there is a purist's impulse to 'keep everything exact' to the play but if this had been my week one watch for this project I would've cancelled, hung it up entirely. You need to meet people whose first brush with this sort of thing at least part of the way — introduce characters, develop a sense of place, convey images competently.

All the lines were so muted, mumbled, un-ADR'd, and then "adapted directly from the place" that I felt like I was the one stumbling around with no sense of what was going on; when the narrative was handed to minor characters, they were not introduced, set up, we were just supposed to have a familiarity with the play to recognize them. Some would even resurface later in different garb and frankly, one vaguely British indistinct actor looks like another to me; it took me to my second watch to clock that the guy from one scene was the unintroduced guy from another scene.

I know I've tended towards brevity and dismissal in the past few posts and that is on me, but there's little to say about this other than "skip this one"; it is a waste of your time, a waste of Amazon's somehow-skint money; you cannot hire solely actors. You need to pay for a cinematographer or at least have a director who gives a shit. Someone who can look at a scene and say, maybe this should be more dynamic than yet another mid shot. This looked like it was colorgraded by someone who never outgrew the PS3 "brown means real" video game fad; it doesn't help that most of the costumes are military fatigues! I don't know if I've seen a movie with such squandered potential since the star wars sequels.

It's really a shame, casting-wise — Hopkins was great in Titus, Thompson was one of the few enjoyable parts of Much Ado '93, Pugh, Watson, Broadbent, Menzies, these actors can all put on a hell of a show in the hands of a competent director. This did not have one.

Ideally a different adaptation will be better-fit for gaining a base understanding of the play; probably won't be next week's, where we're watching Ran [1985], the Kurosawa adaptation. Thank you for reading along with My Year of Shakespeare.