Much Ado About Nothing

The best and last moment of Joss Whedon's Shakespeare adaptation.

I have no doubt that everyone involved in making Much Ado About Nothing thoroughly enjoyed themselves.  The story behind its production belies this.  Directed by Joss Whedon, the mind behind beloved cult television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly as well as box office behemoth The Avengers, shot it over the course of twelve days on and around his San Diego estate with actors who have become his friends using whatever money they could find underneath their couch cushions.  The performers mug broadly for the camera, Whedon slips in his own self-written songs, and the film is shot with the cozy intimacy of a home video.  Perhaps that’s what it should have stayed.

Like any Shakespeare adaptation, this film version of one of the Bard’s more well-known comedies lives and dies by its performances.  With a few exceptions, the performances here do not do it proud.  Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof, both members of Whedon’s regular television ensembles, play Beatrice and Benedick, the verbal sparring partners at the center of the story.  They get their lines right, all of which are lifted directly from the play’s original text without alternations for modern audiences, but do little to convince us of the motivation behind them.  I have never seen a stage adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, but I assume that with the proper buildup Beatrice and Benedick’s shift from embittered adversaries to fawning lovers can be convincing.  Here it is not.

More successful are Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese as Claudio and Hero, the film’s other will-they-or-won’t-they tent-pole couple.  Claudio and Hero fall in love at first sight, are driven apart by trickery on the part the sinister Don John (Sean Maher), and are reunited by movie’s end.  Their journey works, likely because Fran Kranz shows an earnest believability that makes one feel for him when, say, he is tricked into believing that Hero has been unfaithful.  Acker and Denifsof rattle off their lines and are satisfied that they have just said something very clever- with Shakespeare as your writer, perhaps they figured that reading the words would be enough- Kranz seems to actually believe what he’s saying, and that makes all the difference.

The blame for the movie’s unevenness belongs to Whedon.  He cast people unfit for their parts because they were his friends and did not take the time to pull convincing performances from them because the whole project was just a fun lark anyway.  Such a lark, indeed, that doing something so aggrandized as leveling blame seems pretty fruitless.  And yet here the movie is, showing in theaters across the country to be paid for and picked apart and digested.  I have a lot of respect for Whedon as a writer and director and have no right to begrudge him his hobbies, but Much Ado About Nothing proves that thoroughly enjoying yourselves while making a movie is not enough to make a movie thoroughly enjoyable.

Grade

C