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Much Ado about Nothing
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| 電影導演 / Kenneth Branagh |
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Branagh's Much Ado about Nothing
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Margarette Connor
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 Introduction |
Much, very much has been written about this version of the play. Branagh is famous for his Shakespeare adaptations--this was his second. His first was Henry V then Much Ado was followed by Hamlet in 1996 and Love's Labours Lost in 2000. His very first Shakespeare directing job was Twelfth Night in 1988 for television. He also did a semi-autobiographical film, In the Bleak Midwinter, in 1995, which is about a collection of "lost" actors putting on a Hamle t fundraiser in a small country church at Christmas. If you get a chance to see it, do. It's a sweet and touching film. |
In fact, "He can justifiably be credited as the person most responsible for the rise of Shakespeare as a leading author for the contemporary cinema. In his casting, Branagh has pursued an international flavor, freely mixing Americans like Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Denzel Washington, and Keanu Reeves with veteran British Shakespearean actors like John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, and Richard Briers, as well as with actors from other European countries." (Meier)
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The Shakespeare Boom |
Branagh himself has said about his role in the contemporary Shakespeare "boom": "I want to resist becoming, through the power of movies, some kind of representative for Shakespeare in the popular mind, or at least that bit of the populace that has edged towards it because they have seen Much Ado or Henry V or Hamlet . I think it's very dangerous for me as an artist to feel as though I know what I am doing. But in fact it turns out to be no danger because I know I don't! It's all about being a practitioner and challenged each time by the difficulty of doing it well and all the same minefields being ahead of you, perhaps particularly if you've been doing it for some time." (Meier) |
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Film critic John Simon wrote of Branagh, "The actor-director describes his way with Shakespeare as ‘that sort of blood-and-guts, high-octane approach,'…. Here he applies the high octane to high comedy with similarly fueling results. But he is good with the more introspective passages, too, notably the grand Beatrice-and-Benedick scene (IV, i), which in the play takes place at the very church where Claudio repudiates Hero. Branagh transposes it to that chaste, little chapel he had especially built, where it takes on a bittersweet intimacy: this is the Chapel Perilous where the knight is tested to the utmost by his lady."
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What the Critics Say |
I very much enjoy the film, but there are parts that irk, or don't seem "right." And the film came out to great reviews, though there were some small voices of dissent out there. As Richard Ryan wrote in Commentary, "The critical hyperbole which has greeted this effort is utterly astonishing. One is perhaps inured to lack of restraint in the New York Times 's Vincent Canby--"a ravishing entertainment," he called Branagh's movie--but even less flappable reviewers lost their heads. Stanley Kauffmann, for example, was so enraptured that he reviewed the movie twice for the New Republic, in notices filled with gush. Emma Thompson, Branagh's wife and co-star, Kaufmann wrote, is "the first screen actress since Katharine Hepburn to make intelligence sexy"; or, again, "Branagh's astonishing energy ... makes him the Atlas on whom this world rests"; or, finally, "one doesn't often cry for pleasure at a film. It happened here." In New York magazine, David Denby, too, envisioned audiences weeping with joy. |
He continues, "Clearly these are critics famished (and who is not?) for real culture on the screen. But we do the muses no favors by inflating the mediocre and the merely popular, which are the categories into which Branagh's Much Ado falls. Branagh has himself freely confessed his belief in "popular entertainment." Explaining his project in a laudatory New York magazine cover story, he remarked: ‘ Much Ado means that for a whole generation of kids, some grateful teacher, with a gasp of relief, will be able to say, "Here are girls with cleavages and boys with tight trousers, class. You will now shut up for an hour and a half and pay attention!' With this Branagh has issued his own indictment: the popularizing on display in Much Ado is the sort that insults the populace." |
Richard Corliss was another of these hyperbolic critics. He had this to say: "Branagh is a trollop for art. His bold mission is to ensure that everybody--everybody on this planet for whom Shakespeare is unknown or a school punishment--gets it, gets the power and the humor of the poetry, if not its unabridged grandeur. So he encourages Michael Keaton to play Dogberry, the lame-brained lawman, as a veritable triumvirate of Stooges--all spitting and farts and head butts and scrotum grabbing. He wants similarly capitalized emotions from the romantic leads. Go bigger, higher, grander, clearer, he tells them. Speak loud if you speak love. |
"Well, it works. This isn't the best Shakespeare on film--a photo finish between Olivier's Richard III and Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight--but it may be the best movie Shakespeare." |
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But in a way, for all his hyperbole, I think that Corliss is on to something. Branagh's definite strength is that he helps people "get" ShakespeareI saw this with my own 14-year-old "test audience." When he was younger, he'd watch Shakespeare and not realize that it was SHAKESPEARE. But when he hit a certain age, maybe 10, acculturation got to him and he no longer wanted to join me in watching Shakespeare works. But I think between Kenneth Branagh and Kate Beckinsale, he might be hooked again.
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More Ryan: "Still, even with its flaws, a director who calls on the text's softer voices--and especially on its darker side--can elicit a work of intriguing complexity. Branagh, however, does little more than cast one or two suggestive glances in the direction of the play's higher nature. In his high-camp retelling, what is solemn, lovely, and deep in the original text has largely been obscured, if not altogether excluded. Branagh, in fact, has drastically edited and reworked the comedy--not to disguise its structural flaws but to make it palatable to his imagined ‘generation of kids.' Although he has avowed that he wants to give us ‘an uncluttered Shakespeare,' what this movie is remarkably uncluttered by is things Shakespearean."
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Pandering to Youth Culture |
So here is one critic who didn't like the cuts Branagh made. We hear this sentiment echoed in Simon's review: "Branagh has cut and transposed much of the play, making for less ado and more nothing. But that's what you get when you compress the locale and time frame and cater to a youth culture impatient with too many fine points, too much poetry." Again, critics see this as aimed at a youthful culture. I rather wonder if the inclusion of the then super-hot Keanu Reeve and pin-up boy Robert Sean Leonard were made with these young people in mind. And Denzel Washington, an interesting choice for the Prince, Don Pedro, was hot off his Oscar-nominated Malcolm X performance. So his casting may have been a bid for bringing in a young, black crowd. |
They are very difficult to pinpoint, Branagh's cuts, because in this film, at least, he goes through many passages and cuts one line here, one line there. He seems to take out the things that make Benedict seem like a ladies' man, though there is the bit about he how he hurt Beatrice. He really did have to keep in that bit. But watching the film and knowing the play, it's hard to pinpoint the cuts. He really did turn this into a fun, romantic romp. |
As Collins writes: " Much Ado About Nothing was released in early summer 1993, coincidentally at about the same time as the spectacularly successful romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle . The films have more than their time of release in common, however, for Branagh seems to have decided to suppress the play's uneasiness about the roles that gender imposes upon both men and women and make his Much Ado resemble, as far as possible, one of Hollywood's popular romantic comedies. I do not speak critically. Branagh has done what, it seems to me, all directors of Shakespeare's comedies must finally do: decide whether to emphasize in performance the conventions of the genre with its happy ending or those elements, always present in Shakespeare's comic scripts, that call the conventions of the genre into question. Branagh chose to affirm the conventions of the genre and thus made Much Ado About Nothing into a beautiful, enjoyable, and commercially successful romantic comedy. (Collins)
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Shift in Focus |
One major shift in the play comes in the very opening titles, with Emma Thompson reciting "Sigh, no more, ladies, sigh no more," in what will become the theme of the film, really. In Shakespeare's text this song is performed only once, and at Don Pedro's command, with the intent of softening up the cynical Benedick. In the film, however, this minor verse assumes much greater significance. As the movie opens, we Thompson slowly reciting the words to the song as they appear one after another on a black background. But, as Ryan notes, "unfortunately, it is an argument whose implications, as we shall see, Branagh fails to pursue". |
And what of the "Sigh No More" scenario? In the play, the notion that "men were deceivers ever" is borne out by Don John's repeated efforts to spoil the marriage of Claudio and Hero, as well as by other masculine deceptions. And in the play, too, the verse carries a second nuance: that women must counter the inconstancies of men with their own "blithe" indifference. Branagh has given us a taste of this not-always-merry sexual warfare in Beatrice, who denounces marriage and who seems to live in a state of sustained antagonism toward the opposite sex. But the women who should be supporting her in this sentiment are absent from his screenplay as they are not from Shakespeare's own version, where both Hero and her maid, Margaret, who is used to trick Claudio into thinking Hero unfaithful, have a great deal more to say and do. (Ryan)
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Beckinsale's Hero |
Another change, mostly from cuts, comes from the Hero character. She didn't say much in Shakespeare's play, and in this version she says even less. Her bawdy scenes with Ursula, Margaret and Beatrice before the first wedding are cut. But Kate Beckinsale does a great job at what she has to play with. It was her first movie role, but she'd done television. When she was making the film, she was actually a college student. John Simon, in a rather scathing review of the film, writes of her, "Hero, played by a mere Oxford student on temporary leave - the enormously personable and spirited Kate Beckinsale - totally overshadows her Claudio, even though he is the best of the Americans. It makes you wonder why she would be so upset to be ditched by such an insignificant popinjay, an obvious upstart trying to marry above his station." Although I didn't agree with much of what Simon wrote, I thought he was right on the money in this review. |
Her Hero, I think, does a great job of showing how much of a cad Claudio really is. Is it me, or is it hard to like this Claudio with his pettiness and sneering? I thought in a way it was a good performance as it underscores what I see as Claudio's weakness in the text, but he was universally panned by the critics. Ryan writes, "He pants a good deal and is generally annoying, in what is apparently an imitation of adolescent romantic hysteria. The best that can be said for his performance is that it could be overlooked if it were not for the disasters around it."
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What of Claudio? |
And Simon writes, "Robert Sean Leonard, as Claudio, comes off best [of the American actors in the film], 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."
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Keaton's Dogberry |
Another character who is up for much criticism was Michael Keaton's Dogberry. Sometimes I watch it, and I like it. Sometimes he annoys me. My 14-year-old test audience loved it, but he was at the age when flatulence is still a good joke. Almost all the critics bring up the three stooges similarities (and I have to wonder if young audiences even know the three stooges). (http://www.threestooges.com/) |
Ryan: "Then there is the very odd performance of Michael Keaton as Dogberry, the unhinged constable. Though it is standard to read Dogberry as a pompous buffoon, Keaton has reworked him as a maniacal madman, a cross between Moe of the Three Stooges and one of Monty Python's raving twits. I must confess I liked the result, but it is also true that amid the cozy sentimentalism of the rest of the film, Keaton's nervy weirdness is seriously out of place, and has even upset many of the critics who frothed over the movie; one such offended party accurately called Keaton's characterization ‘surreal.'" |
Stanley Kauffman, who for the most part gave the film a glowing review, had this to say about poor Dogberry: "The disaster is Michael Keaton as Dogberry. I simply have no idea of what he was doing, what person he was trying to play. His painful performance proves yet again that Shakespeare's low-comedy characters need clowns, actors who are funny in themselves before they begin their parts. |
"Someone like Joe Pesci might possibly have had the shtick to do the thick-headed constable. But Keaton is just a straight actor, sweatily trying to be funny--with muggings, long pauses and an ire that may be meant as comic but seems Keaton's attempt to hide the fear that he is failing." |
This isn't really a fair analysis of Keaton, who worked as a stand-up comedian and was a member of the comedy troupe Second City. He is also well known for his comedic roles in films such as Mr. Mom, Beetlejuice and Night Shift.
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The Lead Couple |
Branagh and his then-wife Emma Thompson's Benedick and Beatrice were mostly praised by the critics, though Ryan thought Benedick was too mannered.
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About the Setting |
As Branagh has instructed his designers, the period could be anywhere between 1700 and 1900, but the locale is specific. 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. These were the parents of the Mona Lisa. Tim Harvey, the production designer, added to the villa of a small private chapel, incremental formal gardens, and the Etruscan-style open-air bathhouse.
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Branagh on Shakespeare –An interview in Cineaste |
"For many people there continues to be the sense that this writer and his work, which has this Masterpiece status, is something to fear and dread, something that will somehow expose their lack of learning or intelligence. My experience has been that when people have had a good experience with Shakespeare, it's beyond perhaps just the snob factor, and feeling rather clever, it's something that can open up a certain part of themselves which, from that point, starts to be much less intimidated by great works of literature." (Cineaste) |
Cineaste: It's quite clear from the casting of your Shakespearean films, especially Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, that you believe it's not only possible but in fact preferable to present Shakespeare by combining classically trained English stage actors with American or European film actors with little or no prior experience with Shakespeare. Would you explain why you prefer this approach and how you go about making that work effectively, especially when you have to deal with actors with such a wide variety of acting experience and techniques? |
Branagh: It can be difficult … trying to achieve this comfort level, a sense that the people you're watching are not concerned about sounding Shakespearean or proper, they're simply being in front of you, and happening to talk in a heightened language. There are many ways to achieve that. Sometimes it's by casting people who your instinct tells you are very close to the kind of character you want them to play, or who you feel have an intuitive understanding of such a character, or who have an intuitive understanding of cinema and are comfortable in front of a camera in a way that is not necessarily the case with classically trained theater actors. Therefore trying to find confident actors is important, actors who will not be intimidated, whatever discipline they come from, and who, if they come from the world exclusively of film, will be prepared to engage in the rehearsal process. The catching up in terms of practice, of actually saying this stuff, is something they're prepared to do. |
I also like the dash, if you like, of accents and sounds, so that we don't try to homogenize the sound of Shakespeare, which again, in its cliched form, is equated with some kind of overblown theatrical delivery, usually English in accent. That actually can be very seductive and I think as actors we can all be rather vain and enjoy hearing the sound of our own voices, in a kind of mythic connection with some old actor-laddy tradition. Somehow it feels proper and sometimes it's hard to shake one out of that. In casting different groups of people, however, you start to do that, you start to create a more level playing field. I think it's true that sometimes for the British classical tradition there's a nervousness about filmmaking, about the ability to simply be in front of the camera. It's been my experience sometimes that it's harder for some of those actors to take advantage of a moment given to them where they may not speak, but where there's a chance to say something about the character. Often they're much more comfortable with lots of lines. For me this approach helps to keep things exciting in the rehearsal process, it means that questions are asked from quite different cultural viewpoints, and the performances and the whole execution of it is debated from all sorts of angles, from interior character reasons to apparently superficial technical questions about whether a line or a phrase needs to be said in one breath. For some people that's enough to somehow, in the process of experiencing it, to lead them towards the emotional connection with that thought. So we try to approach it from every possible angle, given, as the sociologists say, the current state of knowledge. Having many different views involved makes the rehearsal process exciting and it also means that each time you do it, there is not an attempt to find a style that one would create throughout more of these films, but to find what works now, at the moment when you're doing it. International casting helps keep that alive and exciting and different.
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Working with Accents in Shakespeare |
In another interview, which was actually done the year before, Branagh had this to say:
MEIER: So I wanted to ask what you bring to your creation of Shakespeare roles with regard to the verse and how that intersects with what we might call the "acting." How do you think about that mesh?
BRANAGH: Well, it's an ever-changing thing. Particular plays, particular circumstances, particular actors, and the particular time in your life--bearing in mind that experience gives you different information about different things. I've always felt that there must be some form of balance between a scrupulous observation of the text and a truly imaginative engagement with the character. |
I encourage actors to understand that Shakespearean characters think more quickly than we do and probably speak more quickly, and that, well done, is an unusual and rather effective dramatic device. It is exciting when swiftness of thought is conveyed in the theatre with utter clarity. It lifts the audience. Makes the experience special. And to do that there has to be a very strong technical basis. I make a great play of consonants. The consonant bite. Not to overenunciate but, `nevertheless, to give final consonants their due. To do so, often in rehearsal, I'll make actors exaggerate that side of a speech in order to taste the speech, to taste whatever definition Shakespeare has deliberately put in there. So that the bite or the edge, the structure, the sort of aural scaffolding--we try and get a sense of what that is, how that relates to the vowels, how lyrical it is, or how biting the text is. They must have complete control over that and then decide to just change the degree of force that they apply there. But if they don't have that, they will never be flexible inside it. They have to be prepared to look at that in a technical way--accept that it need not deny imagination and, indeed, must not. |
So all of that goes on alongside an observation of every speech and every sentence. Here we have rhymes; here there are half-lines; there the meter is longer; here there is need to follow one long thought through to the end of a line. At another place we decide whether one takes all the subclauses on one breath, if there's any point to that. Sometimes to do that work just technically will inform the actor's imagination because it certainly feeds back the other way. Nothing is done in isolation. A sense of the music and of the structure of the verse, the kinds of words used, an observation of each character's vocabulary, whether they tend to repeat particular words, all of that detective work I ask them to employ.
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Rhythm and Meter |
MEIER: How much of a stickler for rhythmic and metrical analysis are you?
BRANAGH: Well, because I don't consider myself remotely an expert on it I find there can often be a stress on this, often an uninformed emphasis on this. It's a great sort of bogus mystery about verse-speaking if it is studied in isolation, if it's ever disconnected. I've seen very prominent actors who, in the way that they deliver speeches--often at memorial services where people deliver purple passages from Shakespeare--who will, as if pointing to a blackboard, have very pronounced rising inflections that absolutely mark in the end of the line, and as a result make it just as meaningless as someone who brings to it just a wodge of feeling. I would almost always prefer the wodge of feeling. Of course that's no good either. I try to make the exploration of verse as concretely practical as I can.
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Branagh on his Cuts |
Branagh re cuts in the plays: as a result of that, I will be led to understand that I perhaps cut too deeply or that I need to restore a line or two that continues an idea inside the language that I had underestimated in terms of its importance for the actor. And for those interested, and they usually always are, there is a lot of talk about the meaning, or the change in meaning, of particular words, especially in anything where Shakespeare is punning or being satirical. That can lead into more general conversations about the Elizabethan world picture, the use of language and conceits, and the whole Elizabethan cosmos, which can sometimes be useful to bring into rehearsal.
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Getting the Academic Point of View |
Branagh often works with Russell Jackson, PhD, Director and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Binghampton (England). Specifically, he has worked as text adviser with Branagh on stage and radio productions, and on all his Shakespeare films, and also on films by Oliver Parker ( Othello, An Ideal Husband ) and John Madden ( Shakespeare in Love ). His diary of the filming of Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet accompanies the published screenplay. He has served on the boards of the Oxford Stage Company and Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and is co-coordinating editor of Theatre Notebook, the journal of the Society for Theatre Research. |
He was asked: In light of the fact that you write the screenplays for your Shakespearean films, as well as direct and act in them, would you talk a bit about the roles played by Russell Jackson and Hugh Crutwell [who will be introduced in his answer]? |
Branagh: Russell is someone with a very rich understanding of the textual history of Shakespeare's plays and an immense knowledge of Shakespearean performance, so he's a useful bridge between academia and his own knowledge of the ways in which, somehow, the play simply works, or how this difficult bit that the actor is having trouble understanding, and that no amount of textual analysis will clarify, works. So Russell is a reference point for actors in rehearsal who, for instance, may have an issue with having to perform a much shorter version of a speech or a piece of prose. Often they'll go to him and talk about the whole speech and sometimes, as a result of that, I will be led to understand that I perhaps cut too deeply or that I need to restore a line or two that continues an idea inside the language that I had under-estimated in terms of its importance for the actor. |
Hugh Crutwell is there not only for me but also for those who wish to partake of his extensive knowledge of the plays. He was a principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for about twenty years, so, apart from his own professional theater going, he has had huge exposure to all the Shakespeare plays many times over during that period. He's also seen, at many stages of their careers, a whole generation of experienced Shakespearean actors that includes Jonathan Pryce, Ralph Fiennes, Mark Rylance, and Juliet Stevenson. They'd probably all agree with me that he's a ruthless and savage seeker of the truth in acting, particularly in Shakespeare, and he has many now tested and challenged and pretty passionately held views on some of the plays and the motivations of the characters. He's by no means the oracle, and he freely confesses that he doesn't sit in some guru-like position, but he is a lively debater, an erudite man who certainly, from my point of view as director, will challenge anything that he feels is gratuitous or that steps outside what might be legitimately involved in the overall interpretation.
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Sources
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Collins, Michael J. "Sleepless in Messina : Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing," Shakespeare Bulletin 15, no. 2 (spring 1997): 38-9.
Corliss, Richard, "Much Ado About Nothing," Time, May 10, 1993 v141 n19 p65(1).
Crowdus, Gary Crowdus. "Sharing an enthusiasm for Shakespeare: an interview with Kenneth Branagh," Cineaste, Winter 1998 v24 i1 p34(8).
Kauffmann, Stanley, "Much Ado About Nothing," The New Republic, May 10, 1993 v208 n19 p38(2).
Meier, Paul. "Kenneth Branagh: with utter clarity," TDR ( Cambridge, Mass. ), Summer 1997 v41 n2 p82(8).
Rothenberg, Robert S. "Much Ado About Nothing," USA Today (Magazine), May 1994 v122 n2588 p96(2).
Ryan, Richard, "Much Ado About Nothing," Commentary, Oct 1993 v96 n4 p52(4).
Simon, John, "Much Ado About Nothing," National Review, June 7, 1993 v45 n11 p60(2). |
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