Much Ado About Nothing [1993]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. On the one hand, it is nice to go back to lighter fare than last month's drink-from-the-firehouse pace of cramming four fairly heavy plays, each of which took a little footwork on my part to properly appreciate, into a single month; On the other hand, I'm not sure this was the cool drink my parched mouth thirsted for.

I have a general principle for fiction, which is best put thus: A sufficiently harsh critic should have to try harder than a heckler to drag you through it. If someone can drag you in 140 characters so thoroughly that no further elaboration is necessary, you as a creator have earned the abuse. This was borne from witnessing a play put on by the most local of theater troupes whose only line, after a seeming eternity of interpretive motion and voiceover, was to say, slowly, deliberately: "My name is [character] and I've been here a loooooong time." Which is then repeated by the other performers. You don't want to give the audience the satisfaction of hollering "you're watching this play too then?", which I had to suppress in me*

In much the same way, I got to the end of this and thought: "Damn, title doesn't lie. That was much ado about bupkis."

Negative reactions aside, I am going to at least try to say nice things about this, nicer than "wow it looks like they shot this at a CVS at 2pm." Nicer than "I think they cast Scowling Keanu and Robert Sean Leonard in this to make Branagh's utterly boneless Benedick land better." Nicer than "I can't believe anyone on earth thought this was to be an Oscar play, even if it was the English Patient-pretentious 1990s". I am trying to keep in mind that this was made on a budget, to try to have Shakespeare accessible, appealing to more than just bloggers twenty years later, largely intended to be watched on a cathode ray television at standard definition, and was Branagh's second film directorial effort - they aren't all A Haunting In Venice.

Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers describes directing, in its purest sense, as being tone management. Branagh (and by proxy, his composer, Patrick Doyle) do a foul job at managing tone. Doyle in particular is .... what variety of contemptible theater kid do you have to be to enjoy this hey nonny nonny faux-renfaire music? Meanwhile Branagh.... There was a convention for many years, before streaming, and largely before home video playback, that acting performances on stage should be gigantic - you need to reach that back row - and acting performances for television should be large - it needs to translate to a fairly small screen - but the only actors who were allowed to use nuance, small acting, small moments - a tiny droop of a face, a pain in the eyes when smiling - were actors in cinema, on the biggest of screens. It feels like Branagh heard that and was like, No, we're putting on a play, play everything like you would a play. Aim for opera-level dramatic. We've got Brian Blessed here and we're going to use him, dammit.

Growing up in the 90s, there seemed to be a flattened and singular vision of the Sober, Serious Bourgeois Film; this seems to want to live both in that and also a tex avery, wolf sees an attractive lady and starts beating himself over the head with a frying pan, cartoon at the same time. Maybe that's just the play — the Benedick/Beatrice plot is very screwball, the Hero/Claudio plot dire, Don John may as well be scored by french horn, but Dogberry - especially as played by Keaton - should probably be saxophone. None of these should get the "romantic" strings and horns here. I guess we'll see over the next couple weeks whether it's the dish or the recipe that's less than the sum of its parts.

Despite the many detractions I've laid out, there are still performances here. Emma Thompson is a delight when catty and a force of nature when aggrieved. Michael Keaton is a clown [positive, akin to Bill Irwin], a mode I love to watch him in. Keanu Reeves is not given much to do, but he gets to be a full-on snidely whiplash villain, which is interesting if only for its rarity across his filmography.

One stray final comment: The final big-production aerial shot being so jerky & bumpy is a fun relic of its time; I guess nowadays we'd get that with a drone and digital stabilization.

Thank you for watching with me on My Year of Shakespeare, I hope this hasn't been overly acerbic, I was looking forward to chocolate and got a mouthful of raisins. Next week we're watching the 2012 Much Ado About Nothing, which does not wear the pretenses of being a Kenneth Branagh picture, but is instead a.... I'm looking at my notes and this is a Joss Whedon picture? Uh oh. Surely this will be fine.