The Shakespearean equivalent of one of Leonard Bernstein’s fondly remembered Young Peoples’ Concerts, Kenneth Branagh’s “Much Ado About Nothing” presents a pleasant, simplified, heavily emphatic version of a classic text.
The film actually begins with text printed out on the screen, follow-along style, as a way of tuning the audience’s ear to Shakespearean meter.
This “Ado” is sunny and brightly performed, with music and dance and pretty costumes, and without too much of that darned poetry. Branagh’s adaptation eliminates about 50 percent of the play, and what remains is largely plot-a comedy of mistaken intentions and bickering lovers that could (and frequently did) serve as the basis for an Astaire-Rogers musical.
Branagh has cast himself as Benedick, officer in the victorious army of the Prince of Arragon (Denzel Washington) and confirmed woman-hater. Opposite Branagh is his wife, Emma Thompson, as Beatrice, sharp-witted ward of Leonato (Richard Briers), at whose country villa the prince’s army is pausing on its way back from battle.
Old rivals in a duel of polished insults, Benedick and Beatrice cordially despise each other until their friends attempt an experiment. Planting the suggestion with Benedick that Beatrice secretly loves him, and the complement with Beatrice, the lords and ladies of the villa sit back to enjoy the romance, as love blossoms-as it so often does-out of mutual misunderstanding.
Providing the more serious parallel plot is the tale of Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard), a young count taken with Leonato’s daughter, Hero (Kate Beckinsale). A conspiracy authored by the evil Don John (Keanu Reeves), makes Claudio believe that Hero is less than virtuous, bringing the action to the brink of tragedy.
Branagh isn’t much interested in that supreme Shakespearean insight, which consists of bringing comedy and tragedy ever closer together, into the ambiguities and half-tones of lived experience.
Instead, Branagh keeps his hues bold and distinct, playing the comedy as if it were the broadest kind of farce and the tragedy as screaming hysteria. When he wants to suggest lustiness and license, he sends dozens of white-gowned extras chasing through gardens and corridors; when he wants to portray despair (a low point is the chapel scene between Benedick and Beatrice, after Claudio’s failed wedding), he resorts to face-reddening, vein-popping shrieks and screams, as if he were staging a college revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.”
Never a natural filmmaker, Branagh is greatly aided here by his cinematographer, Roger Lanser, who uses a Steadicam mount to create passages of extended, swirling camera movement. The images are more decorative than genuinely expressive, but visually the film is a dramatic improvement over the flat, cramped “Peter’s Friends,” which Lanser also shot. Tim Harvey’s production design, which transfers the action to an appealingly indistinct, Regency-Victorian time frame, emphasizes summery whites, browns, and beiges.
In Beatrice, Thompson finds a role to showcase the flashing wit that first made her a star in British satirical revues; she has an insolence that, like Lauren Bacall’s, is tremendously sexy. Branagh is not her match in verbal agility (he tends to slam home his gag lines with exaggerated gestures), but he holds his own very nicely.
The juveniles are a bit more callow and pallid than even juveniles need to be; Keanu Reeves’s villainous John is a nearly complete disaster, mired in an antique menace that went out with sawmills and twirlable moustaches.
After an uncertain start, Michael Keaton’s addled constable Dogberry acquires some eccentric authority, and Denzel Washington swiftly establishes the nobility of his prince. It is symptomatic of this “Much Ado,” however, that Branagh neglects-and even represses-the Prince’s underlying loneliness and melancholy. Branagh clearly doesn’t want these dense and somber shades to taint the bright, primary colors of his Shakespeare; they are a lesson for another time.
“Much Ado About Nothing”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed and adapted by Kenneth Branagh; photographed by Roger Lanser; production designed by Tim Harvey; edited by Andrew Marcus; music by Patrick Doyle; produced by Branagh, David Parfitt and Stephen Evans. A Samuel Goldwyn Company release; opens May 21 at the Fine Arts Theater. Running time: 1:11. MPAA rating: PG-13. Brief nudity.
THE CAST
Don Pedro…………………………………………Denzel Washington
Benedick………………………………………….Kenneth Branagh
Claudio…………………………………………..Robert Sean Leonard
Don John………………………………………….Keanu Reeves
Beatrice………………………………………….Emma Thompson
Dogberry………………………………………….Michael Keaton
