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.