Love's Labour's Lost
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Movie Reviews of Love's Labour's Lost
Movie Review: Delightfully silly
Summary: 4 Stars
Although this production leaves the ground (literally in one scene) of the text it is a beautiful and delighfully silly film. Love's Labour Lost is a play of wit which delighted Elizabeth's court but demands much of a modern reader/playgoer... but rewards are there for the persistant. Branagh offers a sweetener if you haven't read it.Movie Review: Shakespeare Swings
Summary: 4 Stars
Kenneth Branagh introduces his audience to a fresh and sexy side of Shakespeare. He has turned a rather obscure and rarely performed play into a 30's style musical. The melding of song and dance, with the Bard's poetic style is a natural. A rare treat, even if you are not a fan of Shakespeare, you'll love this one.Movie Review: Reconciling the Poles of Opinion: An Honest "C"
Summary: 3 Stars
Give Kenneth Branagh credit for his gallant inventiveness and his desire to broaden the contemporary audience for Shakespeare. (He deserves someone's lifetime achievement award for his filmed Shakespeare oeuvre.) Sometimes this Love's Labour's Lost clicks beautifully, other times it misses woefully. In spirit, however, it is wholly consonant with the Bard's light, light-speed, merry-mocking, yet ultimately serious intentions. Serious, yes, because love always has a serious subtext, but Shakespeare also knows better than any who has ever lived how ridiculous love may make both lover and beloved. The broad, broad style of this production perfectly suits the material.Moreover, Branagh + Shakespeare is always worth it. Absolutely no one has so effortlessly natural a way with any line in Shakespeare than Branagh. Ian McKellan is his match in the tragedies or the history plays, but McKellan is difficult to imagine as Benedick or Biron or Petruccio or any of Shakespeare's wiseguy comic heroes. If this were opera, Branagh would be the greatest bel canto tenor of all time. His masterful voice is on good display here, and particularly so with Biron's great speech on "love, first learnèd in a lady's eyes" from act 4.
I am troubled hardly at all by the singing and dancing inadequacies of the cast: the ensemble numbers reminded me of high school plays - utterly amateurish but overflowing with enthusiasm. And not all lovers are singers and dancers of professional caliber. Although the cast members here are all accomplished actors, when they sing and dance, they're just you, or me, in love, hoofing for their lives and trilling their hearts out - which I count as one of the charms of the picture.
And I am also untroubled by the performances of the crowd-pleasing kids, in particular Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Illiard. Again, their broad comic approach is fine, they did what Branagh directed them to do, and they intoned the lines clearly, and in plain American (part of Branagh's charm as a director is his recognition that Shakespeare doesn't have to be declaimed by figures of marble all draped in togas: the words accept a full range of accents). Even so, not all the cast makes the cut: I thought Timothy Spall's Armado, for example, was close to grotesque - not quite appalling but, perhaps worse, unintelligible: an amusing part utterly wasted. Nathan Lane's Costard, however, amply made up for this - plus he's perfectly at home on the musical (sound)stage.
For all its splendors and creative flights, this production has difficulties that begin with Branagh's savage cut of a play that is undeservedly treated by most critics as "minor": it is early Shakespeare, but in its poetic abundance it is dazzlingly beautiful, filled with verbal delights and the poet's own romantic exuberance. For some odd reason, Branagh has chosen to preserve less of this than the play warrants. He could have given us a great deal more by adding a mere 15 minutes to a very brief (90 minute) film. And whither the rhetorical fencing between Biron and Rosaline? She is the great proto-Rosalind/Beatrice, and here she simply disappears along with much of Shakespeare's words.
And I also have a problem with the almost total breakdown of Branagh's original concept: the timeless examples of the Great American Songbook deployed throughout the film are simply not very well integrated into the narrative flow: they do little to advance the tale, they pop up, they recede, they're gone, they leave no trace. They could have been neatly excised, unlike the poetry and songs they replace, which I missed.
So: on balance, an honestly earned three stars for being game and entertaining, however uneven - and, frankly, for being Shakespeare on film, for which we must all be grateful. (And I must add that, over the past two months at Washington D.C.'s Folger Theater, we've had Aaron Posner's absolutely stunning production of Twelfth Night, which with vastly greater success melds a rock score to a production that uses almost all the words - and makes me think Posner got the idea from Branagh. If that's the case, those who were fortunate to experience the Folger production have additional reason to be grateful to the Great Irishman.)
Movie Review: Is this a joke?
Summary: 3 Stars
I was excited to see this movie because I love Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare movies. Unlike his others, though, I haven't read this Shakespeare play. So maybe I should have done that before I watched the movie. Oh, well, too late. The movie started out ok; a ton of dialogue about the vow the four men have taken and how serious it is. But then all of a sudden, they broke into SONG! When I realized that he turned it into a musical, I couldn't decide how I felt about it. I think it might work if the idea was really SOLD - in other words, the actors could sing and dance really well, instead of just ok singing and dances that were obviously choreographed for people who aren't dancers. This was not convincing. I still can't figure out whether Branagh was trying to pay homage to a great film genre (1930s/40s movie musical) or poking gentle fun at it. The dancing is weak, with the exception of Adrian Lester, who both sings and dances well in this film - unfortunately that just seems to emphasize how mediocre the singing and dancing of the others is. And I have no idea why a scene from "Chicago" took over the movie when the song "Let's Face the Music and Dance" came on. It really made no sense; the rest of the film wasn't that sensual at all, and there certainly wouldn't have been dancing like that in the 1940s musicals. To be frank, the musical numbers and dances just didn't flow naturally in each scene - they were awkward and not enjoyable enough to be excused for that awkwardness. Perhaps it is because generally the 1930s/40s musicals paired cheesy songs with cheesy lovey-dovey dialogue, so it flowed. Or, failing that, they used a show-within-a-show vehicle to feature the songs (think White Christmas). Maybe this could have been successful if Boublil & Schonberg (Les Miserables) had composed more serious music for it, rather than Branagh choosing to use old standards.
I watched the film to the end, because I didn't know what actually happened in the play and wanted to know. I'm still not sure I do know. We got a bunch of fake news reels throughout the movie and a whole bunch at the end, which somehow were supposed to help, I am sure, but I think they fell flat and the ending was way too rushed and abrupt. The ladies say, "oh, we have to go so the princess can be queen now that her's father's dead - wait a year for us," then there's a war, the men all fight/ladies help with the war's cause; then it's over and they are together, yippee! I don't feel like we had enough time to see the characters fall in love for real, so I didn't really care whether they got together in the end or not. And I'm sorry, but Alicia just didn't work in that princess role. She was the Keanu Reeves of the production (although not as bad as he was in Much Ado - shudder). It was very hard to get over her pronunciation and "acting". I also couldn't figure out what the point was of the following characters: the Spaniard, the country lass, Nathan Lane's character, the constable, the professor, and the reverend. I know they are in the play; but they didn't seem to have a connection to the other characters here, and I certainly couldn't understand what was going on between them. The funniest scene (at least I hope it was supposed to be funny) was when the country lass, the prof., the reverend, the constable, etc. were "dancing" - I put it in quotes because I'm not sure I'd call it that. What I did like: the costumes, the scenery. A little bit of the acting, maybe some of Branagh's lines. But even Branagh has a speech in the library which seems acted/spoken in an identical way to his soliloquy in Much Ado where he's describing the kind of woman he wants, which I found disappointing and it made me think less of him as an actor.
Watch this movie if you want to see how strange it is. I gave it three stars because it's not as though the source material is bad, and I won't throw up if I have to watch it again. It's worth a once-through if you like Shakespeare and musicals. It probably could have been so much better, though.
Movie Review: A musical set in World War II?
Summary: 3 Stars
First of all, I usually hate musicals and adaptations of Shakespeare's' plays, not because I don't like them but because they're often done so poorly. Movie musicals too often veer towards the outright goofy and become embarrassing to watch. Shakespeare adaptations, such as the recent Hamlet, are overacted and seem to put no thought into creating a believable social and political context for the characters (the sets often look like soundstages). I do think Moulin Rouge! and She's the Man (Widescreen Edition) are examples of each of these genres done right (the former an entrancing musical, the latter a modernized adaptation of Twelfth Night).
Love's Labour's Lost avoids the worst of these pitfalls. The acting was overall good, if sometimes overdone (fortunately, never anywhere near as bad as David Tenant in Hamlet). The sets, costumes, and characters were all well done. The film is colorful and more visually than most Shakespeare adaptations. I particularly liked how it tried to situate the film in the 1940s with the fake newsreels and "technocolor" opening credits. I really does look like one of those old 1940s musical movies.
Unfortunately, setting the movie during World War II also undermined some of this hard work. The movie is filled with anachronisms, which were necessary in the Shakespeare play but merely stick out like a sore thumb in the pre-war context. For example, France did not have a king; it was a republic, and had been for 70 years. Italy was on the side of the Axis, so a French city would probably not have allowed an Italian soldier (Don Armando) to wander around. Also, the Flashdance would have been totally out of place in a 1940s dance sequence.
I could forgive the anachronisms if the rest of the movie was captivating. But it wasn't. The musical scenes were reminiscent of the worst of the 1930s/40s musicals. And these took up half the movie! If you fast-forward them, the movie is watchable (indeed, you don't lose much of the plot by doing so). The rest is actually a decent movie, but there's simply not enough to make it worthwhile.
The dance and music almost seemed more appropriate for kids, but the Shakespearean dialogue certainly wasn't. I think that combination leaves Love's Labour's Lost without a comfortable fan bas - too much complicated dialogue for kids, too many dance and music numbers for adults. It's a shame, because it had a lot more potential than other Shakespeare adaptations.