The Talkies: All That Jazz

...Branagb has these words traced on the sky in sky-writing, and their import is scarcely less evanescent...

...They can't keep us here," she says confidently...

...It is a magnificent moment in which love and loss are equally balanced-indeed, depend upon each other-and in both we feel the sting of inl~ansigent reality...

...The best movies do not allow us to forget this fundamental reality-principle...

...But to extract the intellectual comedy while leaving only the broad and sexually suggestive kind is to vulgarize Shakespeare as surely as Almereyda's Hamlet does...

...So accustomed have we become to this process of coarsening and cheapening in the movies that we scarcely notice it anymore...

...This is what we might call a blackbox movie, for instead of just one McGuffin (as Hitchcock called it)--that is, the briefcase full of cash, the vial of radioactive material, the secret formula whose sole function is to set the plot in motion everything is McGuffinized...

...Oh yes they can...

...Branagh is not so crass as to try to sell us on a pair ofsexualized lovers out of "Sex and the City" because that is what they would be today, but his presentation of Shakespeare's Court of Navarre as the scene of Jazz Age flirtations and sexual suggestiveness and the Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) and her attendant ladies (Natascha McElhone, Carmen Ejogo, and Emily Mortimer) as latter-day flappers will not do either...

...Not only is there a killer-virus developed by scientists in Australia that can wipe out humanity at a stroke, there is also a killer-virus antidote that, if taken within 2o hours of infection, will make everyone right as rain again...

...Both Hunt and Ambrose are given Instead of saving the comedy from vulgarity, the presentation of the war is itself vulgarized...

...Most of them are arrested as soon as the ship docks...

...Shakespeare can be fun, but he is not always fun in this democratic, lowest-common-denominator way, as if he were no more than a writer of gags for a TV sitcom--or a vaudeville performer like Costard, as the latter appears here in Nathan Lane's performance...

...For Shakespeare is not our contemporary, nor even that of our fathers or grandfathers, and to pretend that he is is to deprive ourselves of the pleasure and excitement of encountering a mind and sensibility quite different from our own...

...Matching every dramatic problem the moment it arises with an equally dramatic solution might seem to cancel out the sense of suspense entirely, but the reason is not far to seek...

...Such a one is the Movie of the Month, East-West, a Franco-Russian film directed by R6gis Wargnier about a Russian doctor (Oleg Menchikov) living in exile at the end of the Second World War who returns to the Soviet Union with his French wife (Sandrine Bonnaire) and their small son when Stalin invites all Russians living in the West to come back and help "rebuild the motherland...

...This month Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost rips out the guts of the play--its rather creaky and over-learned Elizabethan w i t - and replaces them with popular songs of the 193o's and 194o's...

...The doctor is sent to Kiev, where the family's life is so bleak that his wife wants desperately to go back to France and, unable to grasp that she is no longer in a country with any law or decency or respect for the individual, comes to believe that it is only her husband's perversity and refusal to admit he's wrong which prevents their return...

...Branagh tries to overcome the Shakespearean's inevitable sense that this is a cheapened and degraded version of the play by setting it in the shadow of the Second World War, but the device does not work...

...the music comes up and there is a rapid segue, picking up on "heaven," to the beginning of Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek": "H-e-a-yen...

...You that way, we this way...

...This may not be exactly what the Greeks had in mind when they spoke of the dramatic peripeteia, or reversal, but you've got to admire its sheer, machine-like efficiency...

...One exciting visual episode must follow another in rapid succession, and no one minds if the thread of connection between them--what Hitchcock would have recognized as the plot-is attenuated to the vanishing point...

...In fact, we seem to prefer it, perhaps in a spirit of Schadenfreude at the consequent discomfiture of those old verities and standards that we have learned to find inconvenient in so many ways...

...In the scene in which the King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola) and his three courtiers, Biron (Mr...

...I'm in heaven...

...In fact, though less obnoxious than Almereyda's Hamlet, it is like it in having little or nothing to do with Shakespeare...

...Yet for all the millions that must have been spent to achieve this impression of kaleidoscopic variety and roller-coaster speed, the cumulative effect to my eye is one of cheapness...

...After a five-minute visual synopsis of the slaughter ofso million men, women, and children, the happy lovers are reunited again on VE clay as if they had scarcely been apart...

...Not that many people are likely to care...

...It may be that such an argument is too difficult for a modern audience to follow, just as it is certainly true that the paradox of Biron's conclusion (as opposed to Branagh's), "Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves...

...There's nothing cheap about that...

...L ittle as we may like it, however, all of us know at some level that the world sometimes does say to us: "You that way, we this way...

...Instead of saving the comedy from vulgarity, the presentation of the war is itself vulgarized...

...the ability to transform reality at will, even to the point of becoming each other (as in Woo's earlier film, Face~Off...

...It is merely vulgar and stupid to present him, as Almereyda does, as an exponent of the late twentieth century's youth culture, but implicit in Branagh's treatment of LLL is the almost equally dubious assumption that romantic love remained essentially the same at least from the ~59o's to the JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...can only fall flat in an age like our own, in which oath-breaking for love has become a matter of routine...

...Ambrose exults in his conquest, insults his fallen foe, injures him further and finally kills him, whereupon Hugh pulls off his mask to reveal himself as the very-much-alive Hunt, while the mask of the lifeless Hunt is pulled off to reveal that it is really Hugh...

...It is only on the point of learning that her escape has been arranged but that her husband must stay behind and serve his own term in the Gulag for arranging it (You that way, we this way) that she is finally able to understand how much he has always loved her...

...The speech out of which Branagh can extract nothing more subtle or original than that his love makes him feel like walking on air is actually a mock-philosophical meditation on the relationship of art and reality, intellect and emotion, study and engagement with life, whose conclusion in favor of love is very much in the "metaphysical" style...

...This line he pronounces with an exaggerated iambic beat (ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM, ti-TUM) as he slow tap-dances to the same rhythm...

...It is not a hopelessly bad idea, but the result is not in a class with Miss Taymore's Titus...

...This is a disposable movie about disposable realities which are meant to trouble us no more than the obstacles-whether the king's oath or World War II--in the path of the lovers of Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost...

...Just look at the huge popularity of M:I-=, written by Robert Towne and directed by John Woo...

...On more than one occasion, Ambrose simply turns himself into his adversary, becoming completely indistinguishable from him-- until he pulls off his elaborate latex mask to reveal his true identity...

...Lester, is much of a dancer...

...Last month, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (see June's TAS), presented the Prince of Denmark as Holden Caulfield or James Dean...

...First-run movie audiences these days, dominated as they are by young teenagers, have little interest in suspense and less in narrative complications that require them to follow a chain of reasoning, or even a chain of events...

...It is surely an achievement of a sort to convert Shakespeare into a bit of sentimental fluff from the 193o's--like making an origami rose out of a Rembrandt drawing--but it shows a certain lack of discrimination...

...Absurdly, he crams the whole story of the war into one of his very clever and amusing pastiche newsreels of the 80 July/August 20 o o _9 The American Spectator period because neither he nor his audience (one suspects) can bear the ending of Biron's "old play" in which "Jack hath not Jill...

...z93o's...

...The choreography that follows has the four men floating on air (if not quite cheekto-cheek) against the domed ceiling of the king's library--a not inauthentic 193o's touch which has the added value of ternporarily disguising the fact that neither Branagh nor any of the other lords, except possibly Mr...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at ua~v.spectator.org...

...The doctor, in full recognition of what it will cost him, promises to get her and their son out, and, after patiently biding his time for many yearsyears in which he rises in the party hierarchy, his marriage breaks up and his wife is exiled to Siberia for helping her lover escape to the West-he is finally as good as his word...

...So too, whenever the hero, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), encounters an obstacle in his pursuit of the would-be bio-terrorist, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), he extracts from his inexhaustible tool-kit some wonderful machine whose workings we are not meant to understand but which magically dissolves--or explodes-the difficulty...

...James Brahman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...

...The American Spectator _9 July~August 2000 81...

...The absurdity of this method of storytelling is to be seen in the shape-shifting motif...

...The final words of that play are pronounced by the melancholy Don Armado: "You that way, we this way...

...Early in the year, we had Julie Taymore's Titus (see February's TAS), which almost persuaded us that Shakespeare was a postmodernist 4oo years before anyone else imagined such a thing...

...For the third time in five months a trendy film director has attempted to tart up Shakespeare in order to make him, in the phrase of the loathsome Jan Kott, "our contemporary...

...Like other aspects of the film, this strikes us as being clever without being interesting...

...The film is summed up for me in the scene in which Ambrose's henchman, Hugh Stamp (Richard Roxburgh), apparently drags into his presence the defeated and unconscious body of poor Hunt...

...As the speech builds to a climax in the lines And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony...

...Branagh), Dumaine (Adrian Lester), and Longueville (Matthew Lillard), who have sworn to abstain from female company, realize that they have all violated their oath, Biron sums up their situation in a considerably abridged version of the speech from the play which begins, "Have at you, then, affection's men-at-arms...

...Life4hreatening, even world-threatening crises have been bought in by the gross, only to be thrown away the moment they arise...

...It has to do with pace...