This is another one of those movies to which I have a strong sentimental attachment. I remember my first time seeing it with more clarity than I remember a large portion of my childhood, because it had such an effect on me. From around the ages of six to ten, I had seen a couple of stage productions of Shakespeare plays, mostly shortened versions of comedies geared towards children. I thought the whole spectacle of going to a play was quite fun, but I had no idea what was actually happening in any of them. Shakespeare’s language could have been Ancient Anatolian for all I understood.
And then I saw this movie. I was in fifth grade, and my parents had rented it for the family to watch. I loved it. I understood what was going on, and I laughed at the humor and wordplay. So, naturally, I assumed that they weren’t using Shakespeare’s actual text, since that would have been impossible to understand. When I learned that it was actually Shakespeare’s language, it was a total epiphany for me, because, suddenly, what had once been so intimidating was understandable. Not only understandable, but funny and real and ever so fun to watch.
Before writing this review, I had seen this movie a slightly unholy number of times, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to see that there are some flaws here. Overall though, it’s a spectacular piece of work.
It opens with Beatrice, played by Emma Thompson, reading out “Sigh No More”, to a picnic being held at Messina, before the messenger comes bearing the news of Don Pedro’s arrival. Then, there’s a very long scene as the men arrive and everybody washes, changes and prepares to welcome the soldiers. I know I just posted a review railing against overuse of silent scenes, but I thought this one was very worthwhile, because it established the festive mood that was maintained through most of the play. Messina is an open, beautiful place, where everybody is put in high excitement at the prospect of welcoming guests. The whole place is vital with the excitement and community, and I think it sets the scene at the Tuscan Villa beautifully.
In some ways I think Branagh’s desire to create a festive, celebratory play ended up hurting the production, because it means the ending must be utterly joyful, erasing the darker undertones in the middle of the play to get there. For the ending to be purely happy, Claudio has to be someone that the audience can stand as Hero’s husband, and thus, his bad behavior has to be either de-emphasized or excused. Branagh attempted to do this in a couple of ways, and it kind of worked. Firstly, he cast a dreamy-eyed, romantic Robert Sean Leonard to play Claudio, who played him as unrelentingly naïve and idealized, engaging in adolescent puppy-love with Kate Beckinsdale’s innocent, adorable Hero. Casting such an utterly blameless and virginal Hero should have put more emphasis on Claudio’s cruelty, but by constantly emphasizing his all too genuine anger, grief and repentance over Hero’s devastation, Claudio seemed like as much a victim as she was.
While this did contribute to making the ending an uplifting celebration to life, I felt it was slightly dishonest to the play, because the fact that Claudio and Don Pedro instantly believe the worst of Hero is left unexamined. By portraying them as being just as much victims as Hero is, their behavior is really excused. Similarly, Hero’s ordeal seems to be portrayed as just something women must learn to put up with, since men will be men and occasionally throw you over a bench on your wedding day. I feel like the play gives an extremely negative portrayal of Claudio, and men in general, that is glossed over by this movie.
However, few movies can compare in being just a sheer joy to watch, in no small part because of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s electric Beatrice and Benedick. They chose to emphasize that a previous relationship had occurred between them, especially with Beatrice’s line “I knew you of old,” which she says bitterly, after he has walked away from their fight. With that fact firmly in place, their sparring always stays just on the edge between good-natured and cruel, with neither them nor the audience quite sure which side it falls on. Despite, and perhaps because of that ambiguity, they were consistently hilarious. In addition to being far and above the funniest people in the play, they also avoided caricature, and became characters whose happiness the audience could truly invest in. They thoroughly deserved each other, and cared about each other, and I got the sense that very little changed after Don Pedro’s trick except their willingness to admit what had always been true.
There is some shuffling of the scenes, particularly in the middle of the play, but I don’t think the reorganization does much harm, and may help to drive the motion forward at a faster pace. Aside from that, the text was cut very lightly, and I felt that little of substance was lost from the cutting. I actually liked the fact that Claudio’s plan of action after seeing “Hero” with Borachio was cut. It added some suspense as to what he was going to do, and it made his treatment of her at the wedding all the more shocking.
There are really only two missteps in the movie, one of which is hardly Branagh’s fault. The first, and most major one was the casting of Keanu Reeves as Don John. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom what was going through his head when he made that decision. Reeves was very rightfully nominated for a Golden Raspberry award for his performance, as it was truly awful. I didn’t ever quite get the sense that he knew what his lines meant. However, Don John coming off as stupid isn’t all bad, since he really is a second-rate villain, and the part is small enough that it was easily overlookable in the context of the rest of the movie, which was pretty uniformly fantastic.
The other error was Michael Keaton’s Dogberry, who was simply not funny. Part of that is that Dogberry as a character is not particularly funny, especially in contrast to the rest of the Grade A humor in this play. However, I have seen Dogberry played well, but Keaton wasn’t up to it. All of his humor was overdone and frankly rather tiresome. So, he’s pretending to ride a horse. He walks into things. He falls asleep while talking. He farts. It’s pretty dull stuff. I spent every moment he was on screen wishing we could get back to the interesting bits and watch Beatrice and Benedick argue some more. Part of it was that I found him very difficult to understand, since he says his words with just enough of a mumble that noticing the linguistic mistakes Dogberry makes is very difficult. In a character whose entire sense of humor is verbal play, making the words difficult to understand is fairly unforgiveable. His only funny scenes were the ones where he was talking to Leonato, but those were only funny because of Richard Briers’ gorgeous comic timing with his reactions to Dogberry’s idiocy.
Despite some casting errors and the avoidance of the play’s more serious issues by making Claudio sympathetic, I thought the movie was fantastically enjoyable and well done. Perhaps as a serious interpretation of the play it was lacking, but in my mind it made up for it by just being pure fun from start to finish.
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