I love Twelfth Night and I love Trevor Nunn, so I was very excited to see this movie. I thought that it was sure to be a winning combination, so I had very high expectations as I sat down to watch it with my sister. When it was over, she announced that she liked it better than Kenneth Branagh’s Twelfth Night, and despite a couple of reservations, I think I have to agree with her.
Nunn opened with a scene on the boat in which Viola and Sebastian are singing and doing a magic act in drag, followed by the storm and breakup of the boat. The whole thing was narrated by Feste, who stood on the shore and watched solemnly. I actually liked the opening sequence, because it established Viola and Sebastian’s identities in relationship to each other, and set their close bond early on, so that when they were reunited later, it really had some impact. I even liked that Feste was on the cliff watching the everything, since it gave his position as the observer of the whole story more depth. He even picked up the necklace that Viola shed and returned it to her when her identity was revealed. However, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why Nunn chose to add lines for Feste’s narration. Here’s a tip for anyone adapting Shakespeare: if you’re tempted to add lines of your own, don’t. You are not as good a poet as Shakespeare, and you will sound either silly or stupid or both. That’s really all there is to say about it. There’s no reason why those sequences needed narration to explain them: they would have been perfectly self-explanatory if just done silently.
The text was considerably re-arranged, and for the most part, the re-arrangement worked well. It allowed the relationship between Viola and Orsino to develop more gradually, provided a mini-climax by placing Viola and Orisno’s fight about women’s ability to love right before Viola goes to try to woo Olivia again, only to find out she is married to Sebastian, and it inter-cut between a lot of scenes to give a better sense of when things happened in relation to each other. The cuts were broad but not deep: little bits of almost every scene were lost, but nothing was lost in its whole, and I didn’t feel that the spirit of anything was eliminated or altered by the cuts. The couple of times I found myself feeling shocked that a passage was cut, it always turned up later. Overall, the cuts and re-arrangements served to make it more cinematic and quickly paced, and though I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the scene order as Shakespeare wrote it, there wasn’t anything wrong with this one either.
The setting was generically nineteenth century Europe, a period that worked fairly well for this story. Olivia lived at a beautiful villa with expansive gardens, and Orsino in a lavish castle. The beauty of the scene set up what is essentially a festive love comedy, but crashing waves on rocky, dangerous shores surrounded all of Illyria. I thought the set-up of Illyria simultaneously being a military state and an Edenically beautiful place was a nice juxtaposition.
Imogen Stubbs brought everything to the role that Francis Barber (the Viola in the Twelfth Night I previously reviewed) did not. She was lively, witty and charming, so it was no mystery why Orsino and Olivia both were instantly taken with her. Everyone fancied her at least a little, and it would have been impossible not to. Because of her charm and vivacity, her sadness actually came across much better than did Barber’s, for two reasons. Primarily, because she wasn’t crying all the time, when she did become sad, the emotion came across very touchingly, not just as more of the same. Also, she was a character you had a real reason to invest in beyond the fact that she was in an unfortunate situation, so you were drawn into empathizing with her much more than Barber’s Viola.
Miraculously, despite being very feminine and gorgeous normally, she made a mostly convincing guy. Despite her quite convincing disguise, this movie chose to heavily emphasize the extent and difficulty of her costume: there were two scenes showing her either putting on or taking off her costume, showing her packing, binding and putting on a moustache. The physical pain of binding was also made clear, as was the ease with which she could have been discovered by almost any physical contact. They also took effort to show how she had to be involved in a number of the “man activities” such as fencing, riding, smoking, and playing pool and cards. The difficulty and arduousness of her disguise was emphasized throughout, which had two effects. Firstly, it illustrated the constant danger of discovery she was in and made her position with Orsino seem much more precarious. Secondly, it emphasized how neurotic a character she is, since she willingly takes this upon herself with very little reason. They attempted to make it seem that she had to disguise herself to avoid danger, but that still didn’t provide a good reason why looking like her brother was a good idea, so the fact still stood that she did it for her own not entirely rational reasons.
Stephen Mackintosh looked remarkably like Imogen Stubbs and made a decent Sebastian for her. His treatment of Antonio throughout was fairly distant, and his interest in Olivia was certainly motivated entirely by Helena Bonham-Carter’s good looks, but his grief for Viola was genuine enough, so their reunion was effective. I loved the touch of them both pulling the same vanishing coin trick with Feste and other little similarities between them that were scattered throughout movie. It really drove home that they are, in some ways, two parts of the same whole.
Toby Stephens and Helena Bonham-Carter both shone as Orsino and Olivia. Stephens’ Orsino was completely neurotic, in love with the fantasy of love and attended by a long train of followers who were thoroughly bored of his dramatics. No wonder he fell so quickly into friendship with Cesario: Cesario was the only one who would put up with him! He was self-indulgent, dramatic and shallow, but somehow never quite unlikeable because of his sheer dedication to his own silly romantic world he trued to create.
Helena Bonham-Carter had real chemistry with Imogen Stubbs, and instantly fell for Cesario, who had the unique ability to make her smile. She was plainly bored with everyone else, including Feste, and she fell for Cesario both because he was new and because, with his strange manner, he was totally different from everyone else. Her very real chemistry with the elusive Cesario made her love for him feel appropriate and not random, despite its sudden onset. Her mourning for her brother was genuine, but her promise to shut herself off from the world for years was clearly more an attempt to avoid Orsino than a real intention: she had, by no means, retreated from life. She was also a very funny Olivia: her utterly gobsmacked look throughout the last scene had me and my sister in stitches.
Mel Smith’s Sir Toby Belch felt like a very prominent character in this, as did Nicholas Farrell’s Antonio. In Branagh’s production they both faded into the background, so it was interesting to see how different actors could suddenly bring the characters into much sharper focus. I know Nicholas Farrell for playing Horatio in Branagh’s Hamlet, and here, he’s once again been cast as the ever-loyal best friend. Antonio was charmingly devoted, just enough so that I wondered if something more than friendship was at work in his feelings for Sebastian. Sebastian, in return, regarded him warmly but not lovingly, and clearly didn’t know quite what to make of Antonio’s heaping of affection. Antonio was also a man to be reckoned with: he escaped the police in Illyria, broke up a fight and insulted Orsino to his face. In the end, instead of leaving his future uncertain, the film made clear that he was released from all punishment and allowed to join in the merrymaking with the rest of the crowd.
Smith’s Sir Toby was rather malignant and not particularly into merrymaking. Instead of starting out harmless and fun, his drunkenness and antics were unpleasant from the beginning. Something about his malignancy made him stand out as the leader of the group much more than Maria did, and his presence was felt much more strongly. Despite a malignantly powerful Belch, the rest of his crowd was a little bit bland. Aguecheeck was more socially awkward than stupid, and though he was quite funny, he was far too ridiculous to be believed. Maria felt like a fairly minor character, neither particularly charming nor particularly repellent. She didn’t have the vivacity to implicate the audience in her bullying of Malvolio, and the guilt seemed to fall much more heavily on Toby Belch than on her. I didn’t like that the audience was kept at more of a distance from the mocking of Malvolio, since that rendered the final scenes with him less horrible for the audience to watch. You felt bad for him, but you didn’t feel personally guilty, as you did in the Branagh production. Overall, Imelda Staunton’s performance as Maria felt sort of invisible, especially next to the overpowering characters surrounding her, and I thought the production was much weaker for it.
I wasn’t too impressed with Nigel Hawthorne’s Malvolio either. One has to tread a fine line with him: make him too likeable and there’s none of the hilarious schadenfreude, make him too unlikeable and his fate has no impact. Hawthorne certainly leaned towards the latter of these, and his passion for Olivia didn’t seem wholehearted enough to justify his acceptance of the letter as anything other than sheer gullibility. Malvolio has to simultaneously be unlikeable and very sympathetic, and I wasn’t sure that Hawthorne hit the second of these two factors well enough. Overall, he was too much of a caricature and not enough of a character.
I adore Feste as a character, and Ben Kingsley did a good job with him, though I still prefer Anton Lesser’s performance in the Branagh Twelfth Night. He played Feste as a wandering, inward character, willing to play any part that was necessary but always keeping at a distance from everyone around him. He was very morally ambiguous- he comforted Olivia when she was sad, but he also happily dressed up as the Priest to fool Malvolio. When they initially started planning the trick for Malvolio, Feste slipped away, but he clearly hated the man as much as any of them. He knew and kept Viola’s secret for her, but he also deliberately made her uncomfortable about it when he brought up her facial hair. His ambiguity was interesting, as was the idea that he was willing to take up or shed any act that the people around him wanted him to. When he was with Maria and Toby he played them a song when they asked, danced and acted silly when they asked, and slipped away when they began plotting and had no more need of him. He dressed up as the Priest for them and then delivered Malvolio’s letter to Olivia. He seemed to be not immoral, but amoral, willing to do anything that was needed of him, and play any part that he had to. Beneath that all was the real man, who remained elusive throughout. He was loved by everybody, especially Maria and Olivia, who both cared for him deeply, and he seemed to care for them in return, albeit in a strange, detached way. He was possessed by wanderlust, always looking ready to leave at any moment, and in the opening sequence he had left the city to go sit by the cliffs for days to observe the shipwreck. At the end, he left again, singing alone to himself. When he sang he seemed to be most at peace, and most of the time when he was alone, he was humming. His songs were decently arranged, but I didn’t love all the melodies. None of them seemed like the deeply hummable kind of melodies I imagine Feste singing, but none were bad either. Kingsley has a nice though plain voice, but the far-off look that he had in his eye every time he sang was what gave each of his songs their magic. Ultimately, this Feste belonged to everyone and no one, with the real man fading to a mystery behind the roles he constantly took on and shook off.
Overall, it’s an impressive success on a number of levels. Had they avoided the urge to add to the text and given Maria the power to draw the audience into her bullying, it could have been nearly perfect. As it was, it was very good, in no small part due to remarkable performances from Imogen Stubbs, Helena Bonham-Carter, Ben Kingsley and Toby Stephens.
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