Much Ado About Nothing
In its best moments, Joss Whedon’s modern-dress movie version of Much Ado About Nothing seems most like what it is: a house-party lark among old friends who have decided to perform Shakespeare rather than dust off the Twister or find the croquet mallets.
That’s pretty much how it seems in its worst moments, too.
Shot in 12 days just after principal photography wrapped on Whedon’s The Avengers, it might have benefited from a framing device that emphasized the performance — something like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, which shows us the actors arrive, slip into their roles, and gradually envelop us within the play. As it stands, the contemporary garb and gadgets are affectations that work against the play’s archaic language and plotting.
That problem is partly with Shakespeare’s jarring shifts from comedy to melodrama. Much Ado sets up the kind of exasperating farcical complications that could be cleared up instantly with direct communication — with, say, an iPhone, which everyone here seems to have. Yet the results of Much Ado‘s confusion are too ugly and potentially lethal for the film’s happy ending to be completely enjoyable.
The uneven acting fluctuates from wholly at ease (Clark Gregg’s Leonato and Reed Diamond’s Don Pedro are particularly good) to “Hey, I went to this house, and somebody handed me some lines to read” — sometimes in the same scene. The on-the-fly staging, which keeps treading on the illusion of the world within the play, also doesn’t help, though the black-and-white digital camerawork adds a jolt of you-are-there verisimilitude.
Those issues notwithstanding, the movie’s let’s-put-on-a-show spirit is infectious. And for Whedonites, the casting of veteran players and fan favorites supplies extra layers. Longtime Buffy and Angel fans aren’t just watching Amy Acker’s Beatrice and Alexis Denisof’s Benedick bicker and woo; they’re seeing the reunion (and romance) of Fred Burkle and Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. If nothing else, Whedon’s adaptation is likely to send some viewers to the original text to see what has been added or snipped. Would that every filmmaker put his superhero-blockbuster proceeds to such noble ends.
