Much Ado About Nothing (2012)

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I have a long list of I-shoulds -  “I should take up handicrafts! I should devote myself to writing! I should learn to skate!” And every year as September rolls around, “This year, I should watch a movie at TIFF!” This year, I finally bit the bullet and bought tickets to a TIFF movie – specifically, Joss Whedon’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I watched it at the Elgin Theatre (crappy cellphone photos below) along with a huge crowd. The internet informs me that the Elgin seats upto 3,559 people and the auditorium looked pretty full to me, not to mention the line to get in circled all the way around the block. Most of those 3,000+ people were clearly Joss Whedon fans, judging from the snippets of conversation one heard in line and the massive cheers during the movie.

Whedon filmed this movie right after he’d finished filming The Avengers;  he assembled a cast of actors, most of whom he’d worked it on previous Whedonverse projects, and shot this movie in twelve days, at his own California home. The movie is funny, engaging and - probably because all the action is set in and around one house - oddly intimate. I thoroughly enjoyed the film – gushed about it on twitter –and rushed home to write a glowing review. That was a week ago. I’d started writing, mind – I described the movie, the environs, etc – and then I was stuck.  I was shtum where I should have been gushing. Why? Writer’s Block? Possible, even probable; but why? And then it occurred to me: perhaps I couldn’t write a glowing review because I no longer felt the film deserved it.

I should mention that the first adaptation of Shakespeare I ever watched was Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. Now, I’d watched that movie in high school (a rather long time ago) mostly for Keanu Reeves who played Don John, but a lot of it stuck with me, in particular the iron in Emma Thompson’s voice as she says, “Kill Claudio.” It sent chills down my spine. When Amy Acker, who is otherwise fantastic as Beatrice, said it, the audience laughed. Now, this was an audience of Whedon-fen, clearly primed to laugh at anything, but still. No one would have laughed at, or with, Thompson in that moment. 

Whedon’s adaptation differs from Branagh’s firstly by being filmed in black-and-white, rather than colour and then by being set in modern-day California rather than Ye Olde Italy. In addition, Whedon adds a prologue: it begins in the aftermath of a sexual encounter. A man puts on his clothes, and looking back at a woman, leaves an apartment. No words are spoken. This works on two levels; first, it saves Whedon the trouble of writing a morning-after scene in Shakespearean prose; and secondly, it makes sense that Beatrice and Benedick, who ceaselessly engage in verbal combat, would resort to a silent cease-fire. Yet I can’t help but wonder if this really makes sense in the context of a play in which a character’s supposed lack of chastity is cause for her being jeered at and jilted. Besides, Benedic k and Beatrice are one of the prime examples of UNrequited sexual tension; once you find out they’ve been, er, requiting all over the place, the sexual tension becomes a little less tense.

I think though, the biggest problem with Much Ado About Nothing is the fact that in cinematic terms, it’s a meringue: fluffy, sweet and light and completely lacking in substance and any real sense of tension. I enjoyed the movie, but it left no strong impressions past funny and pleasant. Maybe it’s because Whedon made this film as a sort of cinematic palate-cleanser post The Avengers, but that film left more of an impression on me than this one, what with all the Sturm and Drang. (Yes, I preferred the comic book movie to the Shakespeare adaptation. Sue me.)

On balance, despite all the aforementioned caveats, I’d still recommend this movie; it makes a lovely introduction to Shakespeare, it’s well-directed and the acting is wonderful. (A quick aside – Nathan Fillion, aka my Imaginary Boyfriend No 5, was hilarious, and the crowd loved him. I couldn’t hear some of his lines for the cheering!) If you do watch the film, you’ll leave smiling – we did.