Impressions of Joss Whedon's Adaptation of "Much Ado About Nothing"

Attempting to review Shakespeare is in many ways a useless proposition.  By this point anyone with any interest in the bard's body of work has read the all plays as well as read analyses and critiques written by people much smarter and better informed than myself.  People have devoted their lives to the man's works.  Most think Shakespeare was a genius.  Some think he was the greatest writer to ever have lived.  I personally think he has been somewhat overrated.

Now before you begin calling for my head on a pike, allow me to clarify that statement a little bit.  I do think Shakespeare was wonderfully ahead of his time.  (If you don't believe me, try to read the works of his contemporaries.)  But his stories, while solid, rarely capture my imagination.  Using "Much Ado" as an example many plot devices seem a bit too shoehorned in to feel truly authentic.  (It's either poor storytelling, or Claudio is the most bi-polar bastard ever.)  In my opinion Shakespeare's works are only so fondly remembered because the man did two things really, really well; he created strong memorable characters and he crafted some of the best dialogue ever put to page.  Think about it for a moment.  When you think of Shakespeare what comes to mind first?  The characters?  The dialogue?  Or the story?  I'm willing to bet most of you would have chose one of the first two options.

Does this mean I dislike Shakespeare's work?  Not at all.  I'm a big believer in focusing on your strengths, and letting those strengths carry the bulk of the work.  Need further proof?  Alright, how about this.  Joss Whedon is one of my favorite writer directors working today.  I say this with no reservations what so ever, and yet...  Every single critique I just lay against Shakespeare I could just as easily lay against Whedon as well.  Like Shakespeare, Whedon's talents are in creating and understanding strong memorable characters and giving them fantastic things to say.  As such I feel that Whedon is perhaps one of the best currently working directors to attempt to bring Shakespeare's work to the big screen.

Now that I've gotten all that out of the way, I can say that "Much Ado About Nothing" is the best film representation of Shakespeare I've ever seen.  It may be the best Shakespeare I've ever seen, period.

A big part of that proclamation comes directly from Whedon's third major talent.  Casting.  I don't know how the man casts his actors, but whatever he does works really, really well.  Everyone of his projects has featured amazingly talented ensemble casts.  And Much Ado's cast list reads like a "best of" list of Whedon's previous works.  Never before have I seen a cast of actors feel so utterly comfortable with the language.  Every time I've every seen Shakespeare performed before this, there has always been the sense that the actor is simply trying to force out the line so that s/he can get to the next line.  Either that or actors often feel the need to make the language feel "big" and "grand" and "dramatic" even though often times the actual scene is fairly mundane.  Not so here.  In fact there was a magical moment for me about 10 minutes into the film where I simply stopped noticing the language.  It stopped being a conceit of the script and simply became the world and the language of the characters.  This is an amazing achievement.

As good as the entire cast is, I feel the need to point out two actors for being absolute stand outs.  Amy Acker as Beatrice and Fran Kranz as Claudio.  If I co(uld gush like a total fan boy for a second let me just say that Amy Acker deserves to be far more famous than she actually is.  The woman has been absolutely rock solid in everything I've ever seen her in, and here she absolutely takes to Shakespeare's dialogue like a duck to water.  She absolutely nails it.  And Kranz, well Kranz almost made me forget what a horrible twit Claudio is.  He almost made Claudio a compelling character.  This might sound like a back-handed compliment, but I assure you it is not.  Claudio is a horrible person that we are supposed to somehow be cheering for.  I have always hated Claudio, so it is much to Kranz's credit that I actually found myself liking the character despite myself.

There is a lot to like in this film.  However it is not perfect.  As I mentioned before I don't always feel that Shakespeare is the best storyteller, and in this like his other comedies everything just ends a bit too perfectly a bit too easily for my tastes.  The dialogue also sometimes comes at odds with the modern day setting.  (A prince and a duke at a southern California dinner party?  Really?)  Also Whedon occasionally gets a bit too artistic for his own good.  (Why does that scene on the poster happen in the lake?)

In the end I feel that Much Ado About Nothing is much like my earlier descriptions of it's creators Shakespeare and Whedon.  There are flaws, but the strengths are so strong that you probably won't even notice them.

On My Way to See "Much Ado About Nothing"

I have been living in California for almost three and a half years now.  In that time, I haven't gotten out much. Actually, that's not entirely fair.  I go to movies, I go out to eat, I go out to buy other random shit.  What I don't typically do is go anywhere that requires me to drive more than 30 minutes.  The problem is that I really don't like driving all that much.  The idea of spending more time in the car than doing whatever is at the destination makes me frustrated on the best days.  On the worst days it leaves me bitter and angry.  This unfortunate outlook on life often leaves me with an incredibly narrow view of what California has to offer.  With this in mind, you can imagine my irritation at the discovery that the only showing of Joss Whedon's adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" that I could find in the area was about an hour and a half away in Hollywood.  Was a movie, even a movie by one of my favorite directors and cast full of favored actors, really worth that amount of time from my day?  In the end, I felt that that it was worth my time.  Everything that followed really helps to illustrate the pros and cons of venturing out of my little comfort zone, and into the areas that most others think of when they hear the word California.

The first order of business was to decide on a route to take to the theater.  Most navigation programs would suggest taking I-15 (my closest interstate) to the 91.  This is the point that I give these programs the middle finger, and a few choice expletives, while immediately looking for alternate routes.  This reaction probably confuses some of you, so allow me to explain.

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the author very vividly described 9 levels of hell and the unique tortures and horrors that called each individual level home.  None were what you might describe as "pleasant" and they kept getting progressively worse with each descending level, with the 9th level being the worst.  I maintain that had Dante Alighieri lived in the modern day, California state road 91 would have been the 10th level of hell.

I have NEVER had a good experience with this road.  This stretch of asphalt seems to exist in a state of perpetual gridlock.  Every time I have been on it, at least an extra hour has been added to my time on the road.  I am actually convinced that this road is some kind of sadistic experiment on the effects of road rage on the average driver.  I hate this road.

Lucky for me there was another route.

After a pretty uneventful drive (because I didn't take the 91 no doubt) and some mild confusion as to where to park, I finally arrived at the theater.  The name of the theater was the "ArcLight Hollywood".  I only mention this because it is seriously one of the nicest/weirdest movie theaters I've ever been in.

Let me give you some examples of what I mean starting with the location.  The theater is located on Sunset Blvd across the street from a film school. (Probably why they got the film in the first place, teachers are going to love dissecting it.) That's not really that odd, and is probably quite convenient.  What I did find odd however was what shared the same physical building as the theater; a gym and a freaking culinary cooking school.  The gym I understand.  Gyms show up everywhere.  People love their weights and spandex.  But a culinary cooking school?  That's new for me.  I have to wonder if these four businesses ever do some kind of crazy cross promotion extravaganza.  If they do I bet it's amazing.

After I got done puzzling over the bizarre juxtaposition of businesses I finally entered the theater proper and was met with a few more oddities that I never seen/associated with a movie theater.  Directly in front of me was the normal ticket counter.  Okay nothing odd there.  Looking to my left there was a coffee shop.  I have to admit, that while I've never seen a coffee shop in a theater before, the idea is fantastic.  Seriously, an cool dark theater with a warm cup of joe sounds like an amazing combination to me.  (And I hate coffee!)  So I found the coffee shop be odd but strangely welcome.  I can't exactly say the same for what was next to the coffee shop.

Directly to the right of the coffee shop was a gift shop.  At first I thought this was another stroke of genius.  After all with the sheer amount of movie tie-in related bullshit out there, what better place to buy that stuff than right where you saw the film.  Not gonna lie, if I saw some really badass scifi action film and then they had really good toys for sale as I left the theater...  Well let's just say my bank account is really glad they don't do this.  That's right, other than one James Bond related book I didn't see a single other item in the gift shop that related to film in any way, shape, or form.  Okay...  Looking around just confused me even more.  It seemed almost as if someone with rather eclectic tastes decided to max out their Barnes and Noble credit card, put it all of their spoils on display, and called it a gift shop.  Here are some examples of what I found in there.  The previously mentioned James Bond book, several art books, a photo book of Paris, a box of pin up girl themed postcards, an amazingly well drawn (French?) anatomy book, and a hardback copy of the third collected volume of the comic book Preacher.  Huh?  Am I the only one confused why all of this would be located in a movie theater?  Is this a California thing?

Compared to the gift shop everything else was rather mundane, if not a little unusual.  It seems as though the movie theater was trying to capture the aesthetic of a stage production.  For example the seats were assigned when you bought the ticket, (I was in seat L24 for those curious.) the auditorium was huge, and before the show an usher came out to lay down the house rules and introduce the film.  I kept getting weird flashbacks to my time in the theatre department at college the entire time I was there.

And then of course there was the movie.  I'll go into my thoughts on the movie in another post, but here's a hint.  It's very good and well worth your time to go see.

All and all it was an outing I was very pleased with.  Nothing really special, or amazing.  But plenty of slightly odd.  And slightly odd makes me smile ear to ear.  Shame I still had to drive home.

Which brings me back to my initial problem with going out into California proper, it took me almost 3 hours to get back to my apartment.  That was about twice as long as it took me to get out there in the first place.  That means that in total today I spent about four and a half hours on the road so I could see a less than two hour long movie.  That's a lot of time to spend it your car worried that some impatient asshole is going to rear end you because traffic keeps alternating between 15 and 0 mph on the freaking interstate.  By the time I got back home most of my good feelings from the outing had been replaced with loathing for the roadways of California.

So in the end was it worth it?  In this case?  Yes.  Yes it was.  But sadly I'm not sure what will convince me that it is worth that kind of time in the car again.