MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Joss Wheedon 2012)

[Chris Knipp]

Joss Wheedon: Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/1253/gr8d.jpg
Amy Acker as Beatrice eavesdrops in a scene from Joss Whedon's new film version of Much Ado About Nothing

House party

As I watched Joss Wheedon's energetic yet flavorless black and white contemporary movie version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing I found myself paying more attention to the set than to the actors. The film was shot at Wheedon's own house in Santa Monica. Wheedon directed the Marvel Comics The Avengers, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3275-THE-AVENGERS-%28Joss-Whedon-2012%29&highlight=avengers)which last year made $623,357,910 domestically, nearly tripling the production budget. Given that kind of bankroll, you can't help wondering where he chooses to bunk down. And this is a very nice house indeed, but quite free of conspicuous display. It's big, airy, light, pretty, tasteful. It looks like a great house for entertaining -- and indeed the play, as shot, unreels like a party, with characters continually pouring each other drinks from omnipresent wine bottles and bars. But the house also feels stripped of anything personal, as if "staged" for showing by a real estate agent to potential buyers. The pictures are bland, the chandeliers quiet. Contents of bookshelves look uniform. It's hard to tell if they contain books or DVD's. If they're books, does he read them, I wondered, or are they just filler? Outside there's a little hill and what could be a park beyond. It's luxuriously quiet. All very posh, understated -- and bland.

This movie is bland and neutral too. The processed black and white images, "fifty shades of gray," typically for digital lack the voluptuous richness of classic black and white films. Wheedon has added bits of pop music and some energetic stage business, but not much excitement. The result feels like like a dressy college or small town production -- the clothes don't look cheap -- with a few pro actors sifted in to help things going. Nevertheless at times the rhythm is gone (if there is any) and the action goes momentarily quite disconcertingly dead. The delivery of lines is generally fluent; an effort has been made. These are good looking people. Nothing extraordinary. Most of the cast are said to be Wheedon regulars, the whole production sort of a "stunt" or a "lark" executed in a couple of weeks.

Of course one can only admire Joss Wheedon for spending his spare time in such a literate manner. But as I watched I was haunted by a damning memory of Cate Blanchett in a trailer of the new Woody Allen shown just before this film came on. The intense comic spin she put on her one or two lines blew away all the dialogue of Wheedon's Much Ado. Perhaps in the effort to shape it to contemporary American rhythms foreign to their original tone, the Much Ado dialogue is made curiously colorless. Clever ripostes lose their punch; elaborate parallelisms are muffled. To liven things up, slapstick gestures are added. Somebody falls down. A man flops around outside a window in a pathetically overwrought effort to make his eavesdropping comical. Someone has a cocktail in a swimming pool wearing diving goggles. Alas, a swimming pool adds nothing to Much Ado.

Shakespearean texts aren't easy to follow at the best of times. They're full of words whose meanings have since changed. The comedies have tricky plots with a galaxy of curious Italianate names to learn like Benedict, Claudio, Borachio, Leonato. This time, it's even harder. The actors aren't very easy to distinguish. Color, and colorful costumes, would have helped, but are absent. All the visuals and action are bravely contemporary. But the dialogue, though trimmed, is still Shakespeare. Hence there is a disconnect. The look, the behavior, the intonations are so far from the Elizabethan world, the sensation is like watching a film while listening to an unrelated sound track. One can scarcely credit that these words are coming out of these mouths.

I don't mean to imply that Wheedon's Much Ado is a total failure. Its neutrality may be seen as a virtue compared to such overbearingly baroque extravaganzas as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. Its light touch explains how Anthony Lane of The New Yorker could choose to call it (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/06/24/130624crci_cinema_lane) "a filigree of a film." Wheedon may take too much away, but he also doesn't add too much. In principle I would certainly totally agree with Lane in saying we should "laud the fact that this movie was made at all." Imagine the man behind The Avengers, the violent high-concept horror film The Cabin in the Woods, (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3264-THE-CABIN-IN-THE-WOODS-%28Drew-Goddard-2012%29&highlight=cabin+woods) and TV series like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" bothering to make a movie, just for a lark, of a Shakespeare comedy. Lane is right, but quixotic, and doubtless tongue-in-cheek, in voicing the hope that "other large-scale directors will be inspired to launch similar ventures. Michael Bay does Congreve? J.J. Abrams blows us away with 'Lady Windermere's Fan'? Bring 'em on." Maybe. But it's not gonna happen.

Still it's hard to see how this movie has received so many good reviews. The mystery is partly solved by knowing that Joss Wheedon is a "cult" director, and that the Toronto debut of Much Ado had plenty of has fanboys and fangirls on hand, laughing uproariously at every effort to draw a chuckle, delivering a final ovation on cue. Once the ball gets rolling, critical acclaim tends to follow. And the critics' hearts are in the right place: they want to encourage "culture" on US screens. But American film goers in search of the best in stage-to-screen entertainment might do better to watch one of those UK import "National Theatre Live" productions.

Much Ado About Nothing, 107 mins., distributed by Roadside Attractions, opened in the US 7 June, with the UK release date 14 June 2013.

[Chris Knipp]

I notice that on IBDb User Comments, the big praise for Wheedon's MUCH ADO comes from those who declare themselves either big Wheedon fans or big Shakespeare fans. If they are neither, they are not much impressed. Anther viewer said exactly what I did: that colorful costumes (requiring color film) would have made it possible to distinguish the actors, and without that, one can't keep the characters straight.

[Chris Knipp]

Corroborations.

I find that in his own review Chris Cabin of Slant agrees right off with my own starting point, that the setting of Wheedon's MUCH ADO is more interesting than the play itself, as filmed:
More interesting than the frenzy of love-drunk ploys that overwhelm a party of "noble" men and women in Joss Whedon's adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing is the setting of the film: the writer-director's own sprawling Santa Monica estate. Employing every nook and cranny of the grounds, every room and patch of grass, this low-scale, scrappy production of Shakespeare's famous work is dependent almost entirely on what Whedon co-owns with his wife, producer Kai Cole, and a stable of actors who he has long-standing relationships with. Indeed, Whedon transforms Much Ado About Nothing into a kind of home movie, though one that feels primed and calculated for a wide audience, made cheaply with friends and close colleagues but devoid of the vitality and unpredictability of creative necessity.
--Chris Cabin, Slant (http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/much-ado-about-nothing). .

Cabin has more favorable things to say about the production than I did:
What Whedon gets right is the grand foolishness of the Bard's robust comedy. The filmmaker brings out a sense of wild comic fury in his cast that has been utilized only to limited effect in previous incarnations of the play, and his no-frills handicam camerawork cedes the screen to the antic buffoonery.

I'd like to add that Anthony Lane points out one key plot element that keeps a contemporary setting for MUCH ADO from making sense: that it hinges on the no longer current notion that a bride must be a virgin.
...as in all modern dress productions of Mush Ado, we hit a bump. The story upholds the idea of a virgin bride, whose besmirching becomes a kind of death. Hero, wrongly thought to have consorted with a man on the eve of her wedding, is cast aside not just by the groom but by Don Pedro and by her own father. By what standard, then, can the movie begin, as it does, with Benedick waking up in Beatrice's bedroom and sneaking out with his clothes? Such conduct may be allowable, and natural, within the world that Wheenon builds, furnished with cocktails and swimming pools, but it scars the moral landscape in which the play takes root. That is why the film, though hip and quick, tends to float free, away from social contracts of any import, toward the fantastic.
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker. (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/06/24/130624crci_cinema_lane)

Again this underlines that the action one is watching on the screen doesn't fit with the words one is hearing.

[oscar jubis]

I am extremely happy to read your comment towards the bottom of your review that states that "critics want to encourage culture on US screens". I used to read your reviews , Hoberman's and Rosenbaum's but since they retired from reviewing (was it 2009 and 2008, respectively?), I only read yours. And I notice what an excellent job you do of accounting for the critical reception of current releases. If you are moved to write that critics want to encourage culture, I believe it and I am tickled pink.

I am a big fan of Kenneth Branagh's version which is now 20 years old! I like it so much it's hard to think how one can improve on it, which might be relevant to the decision to set the new one in the present.

[Chris Knipp]

I can't replace Hoberman and Rosenbaum, but I appreciate your reading my reviews. Note that I said 'they want to encourage "culture" on US screens.' There is a difference, culture vs. "culture." And I mean to insinuate this desire has elements of both wishful thinking and lip service. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the good intentions are there.

There are always reasons for dong modern-dress versions of Shakespeare. Some such effotts work better than others. Such versions may work best if the modern dress is not simply and strictly contemporary. For instance the 1995 Richard Loncraine-directed RICHARD III set in an imaginary Thirties-style Fascist England; with Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, Jim Broadbent. That was one that I thought worked extremely well, and the new costumes helped us to accept Ian McKellen and forget Lawrence Olivier as Richar III. Needless to say, there was no one of the calibre of those actors in Wheedon's new MUCH ADO. I've never gotten around to seeing Brannach's MUCH ADO. Re-watching the trailer, I'm reminded that it is very elaborate and has a lot of famous actors, Robert Sean Leonard, Brannagh, Keanu Reeves, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton, in their physical primes, speaking the lines with more the emphases and rhythms -- and the verve -- one expects from Shakespearean comedy. I can see how you might love it. Wheedon did a verson in completely contemporary clothes and in his own house above all simply to save money. Shooting on location in Italy, in costume, with a star-studded cast was not an option for him. David Edelstein however says Wheedon is more respectful of Shakespeare's text than Branagh was.

Some critics think the mixture of styles of actors, English and American, in Branagh's MUCH ADO (unlike his career-making HENRY V) didn't really work; and that was what I feared, and what kept me away. (I'm not qualified to say whether it really worked or not, till I see it, of course.) Branagh's film MUCH ADO largely won the hearts of viewers and critics, both here and in England. On the other hand, there's no doubt that the fact that the actors in the new Wheedon film version are nearly completely unknown is a potential advantage in drawing attention to the play and not to mesmerizingly charming and good-looking stars like Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington, Robert Sean Leonard who would be distracting (as could be the lovely Tuscan landscape). The NY Times critic A.O. Scott specifically says he prefers the Wheedon MUCH ADO to the Branagh one -- but he admits a bias toward contemporary American versions of Shakespeare; claims "the Italian political context in which Shakespeare embedded his couples was never very plausible or coherent" -- surely a rather extreme way of justifying a new version that abandons that in favor of contemporary upscale Santa Monica! It's complicated. I am just judging this new film on its merits, not comparing it with any other one.

By the way, the trailer of Wheedon's MUCH ADO, in my opinion, makes it look faster, funnier, and smarter than it is in person. In the current style of digital trailer editing-on-speed, it is just a quick mix of mini-second clips, not as lingering a look at any moments from the actual film than the Branagh-era trailer provides.

[Johann]

I'm a little amazed that Wheedon would do Shakespeare, and in black and white.
Is he showing the world that he can be literate with his cinema and need not be pigeonholed as a maker of fluffy commercial movies?

Cate Blanchett and I have the same birthday. I feel special. LOL

[Chris Knipp]

An entertainment of the rich, I suppose.

I think Cate may be good in this one. They say Woody's gone back to "serious" but it looks like campy fun to me. Anyway it's a romp for Cate. See the trailer here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_f--aY0poI).