I never can see him but I am heart-burned an hour after

[sovay]

I do not like the trailer for Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing. Partly it's that I am not a Whedon person: I didn't fall in love with any of his shows (The Avengers surprised me), so the prospect of a cast stocked entirely from his regular company does not fill me with anticipation of old home week/the best crossover ever (Wesley and Fred and Mal Reynolds and Phil Coulson and Topher and Simon Tam and I had to look most of these people up) so much as a slight distrust, because the only actor in that parenthesis who ever really caught my eye was Clark Gregg and I don't consider him a Jossverse discovery. Mostly it's that five seconds into the trailer I was trying to figure out why the swing-themed black-and-white contemporary house porn and ten seconds after that I was ranting at derspatchel about the dialogue. I am hoping it's a function of the pull quotes, but everyone in the cast seems to have exactly one register of voice. I can't hear any resonance, any range. It's all the same dry kind of flat. And the wit and cut of the language is instantly lost. You can make a case for Much Ado About Nothing as the prototype of the screwball comedy, with unexpectedly sharp outcroppings of cruelty and loss. (Look closely at the Hero/Claudio plotline, honestly, and it starts edging out of romance into problem play.) It has verbal fireworks, it has whip-smart repartee, it has characters who are identifiable instantly by their speech patterns and I'm not talking only about Dogberry's malaprops. It has fantastic flyting and chilling seriousness. The actors have to be in tune with all of that. I don't mean that you can't play it naturalistically, but you cannot play it monotone—"By this day, she's a fair lady" cannot read the same as "By this hand, I love thee." And that's all I hear in the trailer. It's my hope I am mistaken, or it's a not very good trailer for a perfectly reasonable film. But right now I want either to rewatch scenes from the 1993 version (which I don't own) or get someone from the Anarchist Society of Shakespeareans to direct one. Other recommendations are welcome.

(As a form of self-medication, I am catching up on Tumblr. A couple of days ago, when I was distracted, handful_ofdust posted me a succession of Leslie Howard gifs from The Stand-In (1937), a wonderful meta-joke of a film I love (and wrote about clumsily, but sometimes that happens). I will never cease to appreciate his willingness to look like a total nerd—I like him in horn-rims, but they do him no favors. Henry Higgins has an even worse pair. I will never cease to be faintly amazed that all sorts of people who weren't me thought he was beautiful.)

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thank you for putting your finger on why the trailer didn't hook me. I thought it was just that I am passionately attached to the 1993 version, and will automatically compare every other performance to that one, but yes -- the trailer made it seem all monotone. Possibly it's a bad trailer, or possibly that tone is meant to somehow be part of the setting, but either way, it doesn't work for me, and I hope the movie's better. Because I do like a lot of the Whedon company, and am interested to see them tackle one of my favorite plays.

Re: Hero/Claudio -- one of the great strengths of the 1993 version, at least for me, is that it convinces me to roll with that entire set of events. I credit this to Robert Sean Leonard, who sells me on Claudio as being precisely that kind of idiot, who is incapable of feeling any emotion at a volume less than eleventy billion. When I saw an inferior stage production, one which failed to drag me along willy-nilly, I found myself Very Annoyed Indeed by the entire affair. (This was not helped by the atrocity of playing Beatrice as a woman who is trying too hard and is not nearly as funny as she thinks she is.) Done right, though, I accept that part of the story, because it's the necessary weight that makes the comedy funnier to me: I am less entertained by straight-up laughs than by laughs with a darker foundation underneath. The way Emma Thompson delivers the line "Kill Claudio," and the way Kenneth Branagh responds, are just brilliant, and those are a vital component to all the lighter parts of the play.

[sovay]

Because I do like a lot of the Whedon company, and am interested to see them tackle one of my favorite plays.

I want a full report when you do!

I credit this to Robert Sean Leonard, who sells me on Claudio as being precisely that kind of idiot, who is incapable of feeling any emotion at a volume less than eleventy billion.

It's kind of amazing Brian Blessed is in that movie and he's not related to him at all.

because it's the necessary weight that makes the comedy funnier to me: I am less entertained by straight-up laughs than by laughs with a darker foundation underneath.

Agreed. Because this is one of the plays I keep writing about, I referred to that element once as "the way it presents love as a high-wire act over the very real possibility of getting hurt (and sooner or later, everyone who takes the risk must take a spill)"; Hero/Claudio is its darkest form. They're the sweet, shy, ardent innamorati who seem impossibly more innocent than Beatrice or Benedick ever could have been, but they're also the danger of that kind of unexamined love that flips from the sweetest lady that ever I looked on to an approved wanton with even scanter grounds for suspicion than the whole of Othello. There is no way to play that so it's nice and I don't think a production should. (I think it's just very hard to salvage the audience not wanting to kill Claudio afterward, too.)