The Talkies / All Shook Up

...For there is much that is wrong with it...

...So, too, Three of Hearts teaches that it is dangerous to cross a pimp and that a man (William Baldwin again...

...Even making allowances for that necessary faux pas, however, the picture is too loud, too boisterous, and too hearty in its jollity, so that much of the play's nuance is lost...

...She has fallen in love with him sight unseen on account of his caring and sensitive notes left for her in an apartment that both are subletting on different days of the week—notes about art, literature, houseplants, and sophisticated cookery...

...That image is reinforced when Baldwin and his lesbian employer, Kelly Lynch, both of whom have found their long-sought ideal in Sherilyn Fenn and been dumped by her, walk off into the sunset arm in arm like best friends...

...You can tell because he drinks beer, smokes cigars, watches football on TV, leaves a mess for others to clear up, and doesn't like the ballet...

...And there are some good things about Branagh's movie—not least the performances of himself and his real-life wife, Emma Thompson, as Benedick and Beatrice...

...For the play to come off on stage, he needed Claudio himself to remain, as well as to marry, a Hero—something that Branagh instinctively recognizes...

...Perhaps it is...

...The dream factory has another version of the same fantasy on display in The Night We Never Met...

...Thus the real drives out the fanciful (even when the real is at that point fanciful too...

...Sliver teaches the scary lesson that even voyeurism can be unsafe sex, and Wide Sargasso Sea reveals why Charlotte Bronte's Mr...

...This film also reveals that Shakespeare knew, some 360 years before the song was written, the answer to the question: Why do fools fall in love...

...Likewise, Benedick will risk his own life to kill his best friend solely to please his lady, yet he continually takes his own seriousness too seriously, imagining for instance that somehow his decision to fall in love with Beatrice can be accounted for by the fact that "The world must be peopled...

...We're not supposed to laugh at the absurdity in this situation...

...Poor Miss Sciorra suffers...

...There is every reason to think him a thoroughly discredited character in any plausible modern reading of the play and at the same time to believe that Shakespeare didn't care about that, or want it to appear in performance...

...In Dave, Sigourney Weaver is not required by the plot to betray her marital vows, but only because the movie's creators thoughtfully provided a massive and ultimately fatal stroke to get rid of her husband, the president (Kevin Kline), whom they portray as corrupt, brutal, and power-hungry...

...M ix-ups in love are sometimes those of fictional characters, but these days they are more often, I think, those of their creators...

...Above all, Benedick, just like real people, has to unlearn the false and merely sentimental romanticism of the search for the ideal: his promise not to love "till all graces be in one woman" is immediately demolished by the information that the woman with whom he has just been finding so much fault is in love with him...

...Just two guys together...

...Somehow we knew that too, although it is not a piece of information ever likely to be of use to more than a very few of us...

...Partly the answer is that there is a lot to ruin in a Shakespeare play: it takes a really monumental level of incompetenceto spoil one completely...

...Of course the poetry is sacrificed to naturalistic acting, but that is pretty standard and one reason why Shakespeare rarely works on film...

...These are useful things to know if you move in certain social circles, but the film's main purpose is to teach another of Hollywood's favorite life lessons and the one that made it take The Crying Game to its corrupt little heart: that love is essentially unisex...

...Thanks to Will Shakespeare...

...That and a mildly twisted plot are about all there is to it, since the hot sex has had to be cooled for the R-rating...

...This is a Harlequin paperback view of romance, but it has always been a standard one in Tinseltown...

...For these reasons we are meant to think that she is entitled to an affair, but, by mistake, she sleeps with a jerk (Anderson) who is even worse than her hubby...

...Sliver, the new thriller with Sharon Stone, William Baldwin, and Tom Berenger, is a variant on the formula in that we are invited to speculate as to which of Miss Stone's two equally unpleasant suitors is actually a murderous psychopath—as if she needed this as an excuse to avoid either one...

...I also like the fact that it all but ignores the problem of Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard), the mercenary popinjay who deliberately and unjustly shames his bride, Hero (Kate Beckinsale), in public on their wedding day...

...For example, the politics in Dave (dealt with on the previous page by Victor Gold), are predictably infantile, but so is its more sympathetic love story...

...the soulful Broderick, a delicatessen attendant with the heart of a yuppie...

...If you are going to get mixed up in love these days, that is how it is most likely going to happen: by clinging to a chimerical ideal—an ideal that the movies would convince you it's only a mix-up if you haven't got...

...But I would be much more willing to believe that if it took itself less seriously—if the mix-ups and the absurdities and the indignities of love were more often seen, as they are in Shakespearean comedy, as a part of love's very nature...

...He gets a thrill from high-tech voyeurism for the paradoxical reason that what he picks up on his TV screens is "Real Life"—unlike his own, as Miss Stone says in her witty riposte to end the film: "Get a life...

...in at least one movie at your local multiplex...

...Neither the music nor the dancing seems to work here, being too overpowered with strings and rompery, respectively, to bear undamaged the delicate emotional skein of Shakespeare's plangent heynonneys...

...The country-house setting makes it looks as if Branagh couldn't stop remaking his precious and self-indulgent Peter's Friends, released here last winter...

...S ometimes, it is true, people really do find themselves in relationships with desperately unsuitable or even deadly partners, and this is another of Hollywood's favorite tropes, used or played off of in, among others, Gaslight, Suspicion, or Dial M for Murder...

...To see what I mean, have a look at Much Ado About Nothing, Branagh's filmed version of which is Movie of the Month—in a bad month...

...Having got rid of the bad Kevin Kline, they can then match her up with her dream man—a gentle, funny, and childlike Kevin Kline...

...The maiden in distress is Annabella Sciorra, a dentist's assistant who, like Sigourney Weaver in Dave, is linked for life to a lout (Mantell)—the kind of guy who takes a portable TV so he can watch the ballgame when she drags him off to a foreign film...

...First there is her husband's neglect, then her lover's piggish insensitivity, and finally her husband's boorish inability to understand why she had to have the affair...

...Add to all this the fact that he makes a complete mess of the DogberryVerges scenes, in which Michael Keaton is an appallingly bad Dogberry, and you begin to wonder if the picture can even be worth seeing...

...Under this increasingly common assumption, romance consists in getting the girl away from a Neanderthal type one and into the arms of some type-two girlie man who understands about "relationships...

...Rochester, to terror-stricken flight back to the more temperate climate and the more prudish women of the northern latitudes...

...Kevin Anderson and Michael Mantell are type ones and Matthew Broderick is the type two...

...And that is the moral of the story, children, that spying on other people may be too real or not real enough but it is not nice, even if we might all be tempted, like Sharon Stone, by the power that video cameras and computer enhancement are giving us to look...

...It is equally a fantasy and equally typical of the entertainment industry that love is about finding The One Right Person...

...He also shows his callous insensitivity by buying them a house in the suburbs without telling her...

...It is obvious that they will be very happy...

...who comes between two lesbians is likely to have trouble on both sides—as well as with his pimp...

...Branagh also—and this is his chief recommendation—recognizes that love is both serious and absurd, and he does right by the play's premiere image of that conjunction in Claudio's mourning for the supposedly dead Hero in preparation for marriage with her supposedly identical cousin (is this where "The Patty Duke Show" got its idea...

...Rochester must have been attracted to a little prig like Jane Eyre...

...After many vicissitudes she comes in the end to meet and hook up with her ideal, the man she thought she was trading for all along, viz...

...Audiences pick up the comedy in that line because its over-rationalization is so typical of head-in-the-clouds intellectuals, but it also leads them on to share Hero's wonderment at how, in general, "loving goes by haps" and thus at the apparent contradiction between love's arbitrariness and its power...

...This kind of husband-replacement fantasy is encouraged by the assumption that men are of two types: coarse, rough, and brutally insensitive to women or soft, gentle, and sensitive...

...In The Night We Never Met, a married woman falls in love with a man she has never seen and so gets the wrong man when she goes astray...

...And thanks to Kenneth Branagh for noticing...

...I don't know what I think of the homosexual project to persuade us that single-sexlove is just the same as the heterosexual kind, adjusted for mere anatomical variations...

...The trick is that the one who is not the killer turns out to be even more weird than the one who is...

...H ere, clearly, is a mix-up that insists that it is not mixed up at all...

...It is a fantasy, long beloved in Hollywood both on and off the screen, that just being really really nice is all a leader has to do to solve his and his country's political problems when in fact, as Jimmy Carter discovered, mere niceness is a positive disqualification for leadership...

...In Three of Hearts, a lesbian hires a gigolo to break the heart of her bisexual lover so that she will come back to her, but reckons without the consequence that any movie-goer could have told her was likely to ensue—the pretense of love becomes the real thing...

...Something similar happens, more than once, in Much Ado About Nothing, an old favorite redone by the dashing Kenneth Branagh...

...The idea that somewhere "out there" is to be found some ideal mate is likely to be destructive of real relationships and lead to promiscuity and infidelity on the one hand and futile attempts to remold our partners to our own specifications on the other...

...Likewise, Wide Sargasso Sea teaches that when sex is associated with the tropical sun, lush vegetation, drugs, and dusky maidens dancing to the beat of bongo drums, it is too powerful: it can kill you, or drive you mad, or put you, like Mr...