Much Ado About Nothing. - movie reviews

National Review, June 7, 1993 by John Simon

KENNETH BRANAGH'S film adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing raises some interesting and important questions that go beyond the specifics of this enterprise. Thus it seems to me that no matter what they do, American actors will never equal British ones in Shakespeare, at the very least because they have not the right language. British English has a melody; American English has not. More precisely, British English is like classical music; American English is like a marching band.

I am, of course, aware that Shakespeare's own English sounded more or less like that still spoken in parts of West Virginia, and not at all like the "high" English my generation associates with Oxford, the Old Vic, and the BBC. No matter: once you have gone forward with linguistic evolution, there is no turning back - at least no turning back with impunity.

At the risk of incurring another reprimand from Bill Buckley, I permit myself a further musical analogy: Beethoven may have composed for the old fortepiano, because that is what was around. But in his innermost ear, where he wasn't deaf, he heard a more evolved sound, that of the great piano-fortes to come: the Bechsteins, Bosendorfers, Steinways, and the rest. That is the piano music for today, and what the great composer, ahead of his time, must have heard in his mind's ear. I like to think that Shakespeare's ear was a similar time-traveler; in any case, after hearing Gielgud, Ohvier, Redgrave, and Richardson, who would go looking for Shakespeare in Appalachia?

In this Much Ado, we have along with the British actors four from the United States and Canada, who labor under a further disadvantage. There is such a thing as Shakespearean training, such as very few American actors get at all, and even fewer with anything resembling adequacy. This is chiefly a problem on the stage, where diction cannot be electronically augmented, or sounds funny if it is. But even the best cinematic sound cannot get around the leveling of American accents, a flatness harder to climb over than the Himalayas.

Robert Sean Leonard, as Claudio, comes off best, which is to say not very well rather than embarrassingly. The beanpole-ish, coltish actor (remembered especially for the wretched Dead Poets Society), has an undeniable boyish charm and a nice General American speech. He is a sincere and earnest actor but lacks the ultimate inspiration, the difference between a routinier and a pathfinder, a solid workhorse and a star. I always find myself sympathizing with his effort rather than thrilling to his achievement.

The Canadian actor Keanu Reeves plays Don John, usually designated as the Prince of Aragon's bastard brother, but here called his "half brother," as a stock, bearded villain, undistinguished by verve, flamboyance, or mere individuality. His heavy-lidded eyes are usually at the same aperture as the mouth of a child being force-fed spinach, and he snarls his way listlessly through his lines. At that, he is better than Michael Keaton, who manages to play Dogberry, one of the funnier parts in the Shakespeare canon, as a very tight cannon. There is no comic looseness here; instead, Keaton steps into his part as into someone's discarded wad of chewing gum. You cannot play Dogberry's pomposity condescendingly from the outside; Dogberry does not perceive himself as a pompous fellow, he merely is one.

As Branagh has instructed his designers, the period could be anywhere between 1700 and 1900, but the locale is not a never-neverland. His Much Ado is a weekend-long country-house party in the most magnificent of Renaissance houses. It is the fifteenth century Villa Vignamaggio, the Gherardini family's Tuscan pleasure dome at Greve. To transfer the play from the now industrialized Messina to this nook in mid-Chianti country was a neat idea - especially when you consider the production designer's addenda. Tim Harvey has added to the villa of Mona Lisa's parents a small private chapel, incremental formal gardens, and the quattrocento's answer to a Bel Air swimming pool, an Etruscan-style open-air bathhouse. Still, it all manages to look authentic, which is where the trouble comes in: What is Denzel Washington, a black Prince of Aragon, doing in such a persuasive period setting.?

A black prince, whose name isn't even Edward, and who has a white bastard (or half) brother? Let me get this straight: The Moors were never driven out of Spain. In fact, the African-Aragonians ruled enlightenedly over the Iberian peninsula, and only when they, occasionally, wanted to make whoopee with members of the lowly white minority did this produce such amazingly pure-white bastards as Keanu Reeves - I mean, Don John.

Washington is a fine actor in the right part - consider his searing Malcolm X. But he has no Shakespearean training, as he painfully demonstrated in the title part of the New York Shakespeare Festival's hapless Richard III. Moreover, his idea of sounding genteel makes him talk with a kind of fake finishing-school accent; he is also too young for the part and lacks royal bearing. Furthermore, a black actor presents a technical problem in a nocturnal torch-lit scene. If you light the scene so that it really looks like torchlight, a black face merges with the ambient dark. To watch a white actor talking to a uniform from which no head protrudes reminds one of Archibald MacLeish's Fall of the City, wherein an empty suit of armor on horseback conquers a cowardly town.