I have Netflix, and this is both good and bad. A few days ago, I watched Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It, and I’m pretty glad I didn’t pay full rental price. Despite what you’re about to read, it wasn’t horrible. But by the second hour, I really wished I had rented something else. Of course, I kept watching it, but that’s more a testament to my indolence than to any qualities the movie might have had. And “might have” is an important phrase, here.
Maybe I’m getting old and finicky (OK, I am getting that way), but it was just… you know… it was like Shakespeare done by the Muzak corporation. No, I take that back. That’s too vicious, and it wasn’t quite so bad; but that’s the kind of bad it was. The acting was fine. No gaffes, no serious problems. A little histrionic (especially Rosalind), but no noticeable difficulties. Half an hour into the movie, I put my finger on what was bothering me: almost all the lines were being delivered with the precise, predictable nuance and interpretation that mediocre actors wish they could master, but amazing actors have moved far beyond. Kind of like some textbook, How to Act Shakespeare.
Now I’m going to sound seriously unpleasable and really really crotchety, but here it is: the lack of problems in the film was symptomatic of The Problem with it. It didn’t take any chances. It didn’t explore anything new, except in the most superficial way. Yes, everyone was falling over their own tongues, trying to squeeze out every last bit of meaning and emotion from that Shakespearean dialogue we all love (see previous paragraph), but that got old after a while, you know? It… something… was at 100% from start to finish, but it didn’t make it a great film. It was stuffed to the gills with rich, lush visuals; every Portentous or Deep or Moving Moment was backed by a perfectly smooth, perfectly rendered, perfectly mixed symphonic parallel (note: never a counterpoint, or even a harmony, really; mustn’t confuse the audience)… everything in this entire movie was rich, lush, sculpted, and polished, to its artistic detriment. I had the same reaction to Chocolat, by the way. The films share a feeling of putting huge amounts of effort into pleasing one’s central demographic — and the results are certainly a kind of pleasing — but little or no effort is made to say anything other than, “don’t you love this?” Of course you do. You’re the demographic. The creative consultants might have been a focus group of university-educated Northern California suburban soccer moms and Silicon Valley dads. The end result of this kind of process is that it’s appealing in the same way the professionally-manufactured plastic desserts are appealing when presented by your attentive Chili’s server.
One might argue that Branagh did take a chance by setting the play in feudal Japan, when the White People were hanging around acting like Japanese People. If one argued this, then one would be smoking something potent. First of all, attaching Western art to All Things Beautiful and Nipponese is about as daring as telling Republican jokes on Comedy Central. And it was supposedly set in Japan, but that meant that all Japanese people depicted were either (a) White people (lots of them), or (b) a couple of horrid stereotypes that make Gedde Watanabe’s character in Sixteen Candles look like JFK’s interracial dream. Okay, so maybe racism is daring, in a way.
And there was a lion. What. Yes. I said a lion. In postfeudal Japan. Not in a zoo; in a forest, attacking leading men for dramatic import. Moving on.
Rosalind was on some kind of amphetamines. Orlando and his brother were the ethnic minorities wallowing in their conflicted-then-superbondy Family-ness. the Exiled Duke Senior (Brian Blessed?) was an unstoppable tsunami of love and fatherly kindness… actually, he looked a little too blissed out sometimes; maybe he was on drugs, too; but definitely not the same ones as Rosalind. Everyone else (with noted exceptions) was some version of kind-of-annoying-to-watch. Even Kevin Kline — who can usually do no wrong with me — did wrong by saturating every moment of screen time with a Jungian archetype of Unhappy Yet Wise Person. As with the rest of the movie, it seems every actor was receiving strong admonitions between takes to be their characters, only more so.
It felt like a constant process of digging, mining every visual image and sentence, not for meaning or true beauty, but for prettiness and what we all think we know Shakespeare meant. Must confirm the audience’s view, at all costs.
The bright spots: Despite the super-brotheriness, Orlando and Oliver weren’t too bad. They seemed a little more fresh, perhaps, than the others, and I found the brother-reunion stuff moving. Duke Frederick (I think played by Brian Blessed also?) wasn’t too bad. He was interesting, to some extent (in strange contrast to the other Duke). The portrayal at least dodged the character’s implied stereotypes a few times. But Alfred Molina’s Touchstone (the fool) was the only role I truly enjoyed throughout the movie. It was a breath of fresh air. Molina can still do no wrong.
When, oh when will I learn my lesson, Kenneth Branagchkhlwght? Your Hamlet still haunts me like memories of food poisoning. This one, though not as bad as Hammy, will be like the memory of an annoying party, where nobody says anything offensive, and everyone’s dressed really nicely, and I go home with a sense of having wasted my night.
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