Some of the appeal of Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing comes from the story of its making.
Exhausted from writing and directing the blockbuster capstone of the first wave
of The Avengers movies, Whedon
gathered up a group of his actor friends and threw what amounted to a
Shakespeare party at his house. In modern dress, they acted out Much Ado and had such a fun time doing
it, they've now invited the whole world to watch. It obviously didn't come
together quite so simply or spontaneously, but it might as well have looking at
the finished product, which feels so breezy and simple with undemanding black
and white digital cinematography, a homey backdrop, and sense of actorly
camaraderie. All involved are on a clear labor of love, and to that extent it’s
a fun bubbly reenactment.
I think of Whedon as a writer first, director second. In
everything from teen vampire slayers to superheroes to the Bard himself, every
bit of his career reveals him to be a man in love with words, how and why
people say them and what those choices can reveal and dramatize. It makes
sense, then, that every choice he makes here is geared towards showing off the
original language of the play. As near as I could tell, aside from some
abridgment, he keeps the original text of the play, his actors' additional
glances and gestures entirely nonverbal. The black and white look and
matter-of-fact approach to setting - Whedon's camera regards the setting as one
would one's own home, disinterested and familiar - strip away any interest in
focusing on the mise-en-scene. Here it's all about the words, loud, clear, and
classic.
Plucking the play out of its Elizabethan context
and placing it largely unedited in modern day California is a process not
without wrinkles. Little details like characters gesturing with a smart phone
when talking about a letter or referring to a holster as a scabbard are easily
self-explanatory, but the plot itself is an awkward fit in modernity. After
all, the delicate social comedy of Shakespeare's plotting in Much Ado rests on notions of patriarchal
honor, arranged marriages, and a dispute over the nature of a female
character's virginity, concerns which I assume are of much less of an issue in
today's society. This is where I found it easiest to think of the adaptation as
the exercise that it is. Viewed through a three-sided prism - Shakespeare, and
cinematic comedy both screwball and romantic - the film becomes a three-ring
salute to silliness at its most literate and lovely. If the film plays like a
sunny party that flirts with darkness before turning out fine in the end,
that's because it's precisely the soufflé the play is already baked into. The
characters move through the play flitting to and fro trailing quotable bon mots
behind them.
A main reason
we, or at least I, don't mind returning to see a new staging of old material is
to see how new players approach the old characters. Here the material seems, if
not fresh, then at least tricky and invigorating. As Leonato, the host of this
party, Clark Gregg, lately Agent Coulson in the Avengers franchise, brings a charm and gravity to the proceedings,
inviting his guests to stay, sup, and woo under his roof. As the couple whose
hate just might turn to love, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof bring broadness to their
performances as Beatrice and Benedick, a big play-to-the-balcony prickliness
that's pleasing. As Claudio and Hero, the couple who are negotiated together
after some trickery, Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese bring a dewy glamour.
They're fine poles around which the film rotates.
All, from Sean Maher's Don John and Riki Lindhome's Conrade
to Ashley Johnson's Margaret and Spencer Treat Clark's Borachio, are fine, but
let me single out Nathan Fillion's delightfully underplayed work as the
constable Dogberry. He's the only actor in the whole production who made me
snicker consistently with each line, helped, of course, by linguistic
contortions provided him in the source material. Fillion takes a typical
Shakespearian clown and gives him the beautiful dignity he might deserve, which
makes him all the funnier in the process. It's a fine bit of interpretation and
a standout performance in a film of nice interpretations. Dogberry, indeed, may
be the most important character in the play. He comes along to keep things
funny at precisely the moment the main storylines have begun to veer into
territory that seems, for the moment, irretrievably dark. As scholar Anne
Barton writes in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, the constable "reassures
the...audience that comedy remains in control of the action, even when the
potential for tragedy seems greatest."
The deliberate slightness of Whedon’s filmmaking heightens
the "nothing" of the title. The whole thing is a froth that's not
entirely helped by the indifferent approach to modernizing a dusty set of
social norms. Still, Shakespeare is an awfully hard playwright to mess up. Even
if one were to spend time burdening his work with post-modern curlicues from a
stylistic bag of tricks, the sturdiness of the material would surely hold to
some extent. There's a sparkle of genuine affection - for the material, for the
production, and amongst the cast and crew - that lights up the screen here. The
beautiful smallness of Whedon's Much Ado
About Nothing simply allows it to
feel most fully like the after-superhero mint it was for him and now to a
mid-summer audience that I suspect may receive this feature most gratefully.
