The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare On Film #9: Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

Tags

Joss Whedon, Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

#9: Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

Joss Whedon’s remarkable follow up to The Avengers was, a bit surprisingly, Much Ado About Nothing.

If a superhero movie demands that characterization needs to be squeezed in with an eye-dropper between pyrotechnical explosions and sublime, seizure-inducing battles between IMPOSSIBLE BEINGS, Whedon squeezes in characterization about as well as anyone. Yet his work adapting Shakespeare demonstrates a capacity to let characters think and feel and act in recognizable ways that are precisely as rich and complex as Shakespeare intended.

Whedon’s contemporary setting offers us a relatively tasteful world, yet it is filmed in black and white that both semiotically nods to the sense of the oldness of the source material and also—and this is huge—places the comedy in a neutral context.

So many film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work are too eager to pour on the opulence, as if material luxury was necessary to match the exquisite language of the bard, a habit that I have privately nicknamed architecture porn. Carlo Carlei’s 2013 film of Romeo and Juliet is egregious in this regard.

Whedon’s film is serious about Shakespeare without ever being pretentious, or using Will’s cultural cachet as a form of self-aggrandizement. All of Whedon’s choices are meant to serve the drama.

To people unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s comedies, the chief difference between a comedy and a tragedy might be anticipated in extreme levels of humor or seriousness, but such an emotional binary is seldom demonstrated by Shakespeare’s plays. Hamlet happens to be wickedly funny, and Romeo and Juliet, with Mercutio’s wit, has its hysterical moments. Some Victorian productions of that play uncrossed the stars for those lovers with a happy ending. (Repulsive, no?)

The real difference between comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays is almost entirely what happens in the last act. Comedies end in marriages, and tragedies end in piles of corpses. Until then, the stories could go either way.

Much Ado About Nothing is a paradoxical title, because in one sense what is considered nothing is really the destruction of a woman. To be publicly jilted and shamed for a scandal on her wedding day in Shakespeare’s time is about as bad as it would be today. Shakespeare makes us feel that, and so does Whedon and his excellent cast.

This Much Ado is also distinctly American, which in this case is not a detriment.

As a director Whedon’s focus make us feel this world so powerfully. I suspect the film was shot in sequence, for the acting begins fairly well and grows better, more comfortable with Shakespeare’s words, as the story progresses.

Kenneth Branagh filmed this play in 1993, and while watching his Benedict verbally spar with Emma Thompson’s Beatrice is dishy, most of the actors don’t even seem to be in the same movie. The acting styles clash. Keanu Reaves out-acts Denzel Washington. Michael Keaton stole the movie as the zany comic relief Dogberry, sort of a Dickensian recycling of Beetlejuice cartoonishness. (That isn’t a slam.)

One impressive side-note about Joss Whedon’s film is that the score is by Whedon himself. The music never resorts to the pomp that is too often heaped onto Shakespeare films (I am looking at you Patrick Doyle). Instead, the music skirts melodrama without ever being trite or clichéd or flimsy. The music is beautiful, and never quite predictable. The touch is light, but suggestive of darkness.

The year before The Avengers came out, Kenneth Branagh directed Thor. Perhaps Whedon directed Much Ado over territorial spite. Or maybe he happens to love Shakespeare. Having seen this film a few times, I would have to guess the latter.

Now that he’s no longer on The Avengers franchise, perhaps Whedon will try another play out for the screen?

NOTE: This review originally appeared in a slightly different version in the other Drunken Odyssey Shakespeare blog, Shakespearing, on November 16, 2014.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Shakespearing #19: Much Ado About Nothing

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

David Foley, Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespearing, William Shakespeare

Shakespearing #19 by David Foley

Much Ado About Nothing

Why are Beatrice and Benedick so funny? Maybe you can’t appreciate the force of the question unless you’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, unless you’ve struggled through the sometimes dusty corridors of his humor, laboriously reconstructing jokes and trying to imagine how they landed four hundred years ago. So why is it so easy to laugh with Beatrice and Benedick?

I find among some old notes the following thoughts on The Importance of Being Earnest:

What survives in Shakespeare, as in Wilde, is wit (Beatrice and Benedick, e.g.). This seems counterintuitive. You’d expect the low humor to survive. What’s more universal than a fart joke? What’s easier to get than a pratfall? This ignores the extent to which wit is an action, an action of the mind. “Play of mind” is one way we describe it to our students, and both terms—play and mind—seem important. Earnest proceeds by paradox. A paradox, if we’re to believe Wilde, is the basis of the play. Its theme, he said, is “that we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality.” The action of that paradox—the way that play of mind plays in your mind—is the work of the play. The reason we need wit is that it remakes the world for us, reorganizes it, reimagines its constraints. “Heartless,” Shaw called the play, but can any gift be more generous than a remade world? Or to be more precise, the gift is not the remade world—since why should we care if late Victorian England gets remade?—but the act of remaking it.

This puts the relationship between the parallel plots of Much Ado in a new light. Riverside says that Beatrice and Benedick are the “subplot” that provides a “vital interest” to the main plot of Hero and Claudio. But if that’s true, why do we leave the play convinced that they’re our leads?

My guess is it’s because they manage the meaning of the play for us; they tell us how to read its putative main plot. Most art, it seems to me, even before the open rebellion of the Romantics and the Modernists, registers an uneasiness about existing forms; and Hero and Claudio represent the existing forms. Claudio’s love for Hero is entangled in advantage. Even in its first throes, he asks for assurances that she’s her father’s heir. He throws her off as tainted goods only to be persuaded to marry another (albeit fictional) heiress of Leontes’ family. This idea of love as acquisition and woman as commodity, subject to inspection and repudiation, gives poignancy to Beatrice’s repeated cry: “O that I were a man!” As if that would give her power to remake the world.

Instead Beatrice and Benedick remake the world through wit. Like Wilde, they look at the “serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality.” Their last exchange in which Benedick takes Beatrice “only for pity” and she takes him “partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption” is a liberating critique of the sturm und drang of the other plot, whose seriousness seems strangely trivial.

The forms are sturdy: the audience of 1598 was not likely to question the happy ending of Claudio and Hero. But Beatrice and Benedick allow us to reimagine it. Like Elizabeth and Darcy, in another work where the forms are sturdy, they allow us to breathe the bracing air above the constraints while remaining firmly anchored to them.

_______

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.