School for love

Kenneth Branagh gets an
A-plus for his Labour's

by Jeffrey Gantz

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. Adapted, from the play by William Shakespeare, and directed by Kenneth Branagh. With Kenneth Branagh, Natascha McElhone, Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Matthew Lillard, Carmen Ejogo, Adrian Lester, Emily Mortimer, Richard Clifford, Nathan Lane, Timothy Spall, Stefania Rocca, Richard Briers, Geraldine McEwan, Jimmy Yull, and Anthony O'Donnell. At the Avon and Jane Pickens.

Listen up, class, this is Kenneth Branagh's recipe for Romantic Musical Comedy Shakespeare. You take your basic Bard and trim it down to, oh, 30 percent of the original. Set it in Oxbridge in 1939, with Europe on the verge of war. Season with great songs by George Gershwin ("I'd Rather Charleston," "I've Got a Crush on You," "They Can't Take That Away from Me"), Cole Porter ("I Get a Kick out of You"), Jerome Kern ("I Won't Dance," "The Way You Look Tonight"), and Irving Berlin ("Fancy Free," "Cheek to Cheek," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," "There's No Business like Show Business") and include production-number salutes to Esther Williams and Fred & Ginger. Add a heaping measure of Movietone News parodies plus a Casablanca homage and a heroic World War II finale. Let it roll for 93 minutes and, voilà!, you have "There's No Shakespeare like Branagh's Shakespeare," a masterpiece that merges the Bard's bittersweet wisdom with the wit, style, and idealism of '30s Hollywood musicals.

No need for devotees of Bardic cuisine rise to up in protest. Shakespeare didn't deal in ground round, it's true, but Love's Labour's Lost isn't exactly châteaubriand, either -- call it flank steak. You wouldn't want to make this recipe with a denser, more mature work like Much Ado About Nothing -- and indeed when Branagh turned that play into a movie, he played it straight, though there too Shakespeare's text was severely trimmed.

I grant you can't take 70 percent away from even Love's Labour's Lost without losing something important. Gone is the resemblance between dark Rosaline and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets (those "two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes" didn't make the cut); and those of you who agonize over whether the "school of night" that the King of Navarre refers to is really Walter Raleigh's school of atheism can check your academic credentials at the door. Branagh focuses on the love story, wherein the King and his three lords woo the Princess of France and her three ladies; the principals' longer speeches are curtailed but the play retains its essential structure. Most of the "fat" that's been discarded is the comic byplay among the minor characters -- "fantastical Spaniard" Don Adriano, page Moth, clown Costard, country wench Jaquenetta, curate Sir Nathaniel, schoolmaster Holofernes, and constable Dull. This stuff is erudite (the earliest version of the play may have been intended for the court rather than the public theater) and, after 400 years, almost unintelligible without footnotes -- or subtitles. Only those who are writing doctoral dissertations on LLL will miss it.

Anyway, the black-and-white Navarre Cinetone News sequences are uproarious. "New Ideas in Navarre" introduces us to the King's notion that he, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine will shun the company of women and devote themselves to study for three years: the camera shows biker jackets being tossed on the floor, then cuts to the entrances of such edifying institutions as the School of Moral Science and the School of Natural Philosophy while the voiceover (Branagh himself, a dead ringer for the cheery deadpan of the Movietone originals) commiserates, "Sorry, ladies, but he is the king," then adds, "It's a tall order, by golly, but this audacious young king, one of Europe's most eligible royal bachelors, is determined to prove there's more to life than fun and partying." Subsequently, when the Princess of France and her entourage are denied entrance to the court: "It's an unexpected night out under canvas for the ladies" -- who, from the map we see, are practically back in Paris. And when our heroes fall in love: "Where Have All the Students Gone?": "Rumours abound of a gala party with singing and dancing -- was that included in the oath? Not much studying going on here [the camera pans empty student rooms], that's for sure."

With the death of John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh must be the finest Shakespearean actor alive. Rather than try to play the Bard's abstract characters, he lets them play him; the result is so natural, it hardly seems like Shakespeare, and if his Berowne comes off a lot like his Benedick in Much Ado, well, the two roles are cousins. (Besides, his Hamlet and Henry V are quite different.) Here his influence has rubbed off: his fellow actors -- including Natascha McElhone as Rosaline, Alessandro Nivola as the King, Alicia Silverstone as the Princess, Matthew Lillard as Longaville, Carmen Ejogo as Maria, Adrian Lester as Dumaine, and Emily Mortimer as Katherine, plus Richard Clifford as a David Nivenish Boyet, Nathan Lane as a Groucho-like Costard, Timothy Spall as a Dalí-look-alike Don Adriano, and Stefania Rocca as a Sophia Loren-esque Jaquenetta -- all treat the Bard's verse as if it were the script of Friends and not an embalmed episode of Masterpiece Theatre. In other words, it's living, breathing Shakespeare. If on top of that you're expecting vocal and terpsichorean pyrotechnics on the order of Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire (as, apparently, the New York Times' A.O. Scott was), you may be disappointed. I wasn't -- these troupers sing as well as Fred, dance as well as Frank, and are better actors than either.

In any case, the musical numbers are integrated ingeniously. At the outset, Berowne tells his oathmates "I'd Rather Charleston" than study. When he asks Rosaline whether they didn't dance in Brabant, the ladies all break into "I Won't Dance." Out in their tent, the pajama party wakes to "No Strings (Fancy Free)" as the Princess ditches her giant teddy bear and they all don gold lamé bathing suits for an Esther Williams pool number. Berowne's "And when Love speaks, the voice [Shakespeare means "voices"] of all the gods/Make heaven drowsy with the harmony" leads straight into the "Heaven . . . I'm in heaven" of "Cheek to Cheek" as the men appear in white tie and the ladies in evening gowns; then the ladies go hooker and the guys make like Stanley Kowalski for "Let's Face the Music and Dance." "The Way You Look Tonight" becomes a poignant pas de deux for the King's two tutors, Holofernia (Geraldine McEwan) and Nathaniel (Richard Briers). And in place of the Nine Worthies, we get the entire cast tapping to "There's No Business like Show Business." It all ends in abandoned martini glasses and empty tables as the big gala is disrupted by the death of the Princess's father and the dolls ask the guys to earn their love as everybody muses, "They Can't Take That Away from Me."

Or does it? Branagh was determined they wouldn't take his happy ending away from him -- and smart enough to know the lovers would have to deserve it. So after a misty airfield-departure scene that salutes Casablanca, he sends everybody off to war. Newsreel footage shows Boyet getting killed, the Princess and her ladies being led away by the Nazis, Jaquenetta and babe behind barbed wire, and the guys doing what England (forget Navarre) and Winston Churchill expect. At the end the newsreel goes post-war technicolor to celebrate the triumph of love.

By the standard of Citizen Kane or The Searchers or Persona, Love's Labour's Lost isn't a great film, but it's been almost 40 years (Charade, 1963) since I had this much fun at the movies. Branagh pours out his heart ("From women's eyes this doctrine I derive/They are the ground, the books, the academes/From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire") while giving the greatest playwright ever his due. That's why, even though the Phoenix's movie-rating scale tops off at four stars, I gave this one five.

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New ideas from Branagh

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