Screen:

...Lucky types back into the rectories...

...Don Pedro can cer- the play's first half...

...This excess backfires because it keeps us from detached rather than lordly...

...But, unlike conditional hate...

...And down in the villa, the Keane's was "...all music and security of outline, news of the army's approach has caused a frenzy...

...The igniting lematic of all...

...in the do because they are dazzled by sunlight, exhilarated and exway most actresses do, like Vassar girls at a 1920s' mixer, but hausted by heat, blinded by the physical beauty of flowers and speaks as a woman who has been Benedick's lover already, flesh, and always at least a little pixilated from being young, been trifled with, and doesn't intend to be burned again...

...But though the maand that love is inescapable...

...note that not only no other performance in this movie Those readers who haven't instantly obeyed me will now be matches Thompson's (that would be too much to expect) punished with a lot of pro and contra concerning the rest of the but that, of the several male roles, only two are fulfilled, movie...

...This alive, and accepted...

...His use of the Tuscan villa And, in the play's most famous scene, when Benedick calls is often inventive, always appropriate: when the treacherous upon Beatrice to set him a task that will prove his love, Don John and his cronies conspire to destroy love, they are in Thompson's "Kill Claudio...

...This defini- of peace, male and female, are on, war breaks out again, the tive performance is on film...

...a pond and then suit up in formal attire...

...In those books, of no higher calling than the priesthood...

...Dogberry century (courtesy of Shakespeare), sensual apparition of ninecan be convincingly portrayed as quietly mad but not as open- teenth-century Italy (courtesy of this production), and heroine ly, dangerously crazy, for then why would the sane citizens of the 1990s...

...Branagh's Benedick is a fellow who has diminished himterly European work of art...

...warm for each other but dismayed by the disaster that has overAnd must you credit me when I state that the actress does taken the younger lovers, declare their hearts, it is in a chapel all of the above without sacrificing any of the lightness, speed, that is well lit but roofed against the heat...

...self by denying his feeling toward Beatrice...

...After all, no sneering note throughout and never shows us the villain's pleas- matter how captious he may be toward Beatrice, Benedick is ure in his own malice...

...but in all the drowsy, droning, bemusing sundiscovery now enables her to torment him...

...Keaton is often fascinating in his weirdness A great Shakespeare film...

...truly menacing when he chalpsychotic receiving his thoughts from some alien's spaceship lenges Claudio...

...Branagh makes this fact so BEATRICE FOREVER alive for us in the first ten minutes that everything else natuMUCH ADO ABOUT EMMA rally flows out of it...

...or fun of her role...

...in the heavens...

...not only the villains that the constable captures but his own And there's always Emma Thompson, wit of the sixteenth deputies...

...light with which Branagh fills the screen, everything seems to In her reply to Don Pedro's teasing "you have lost the heart proceed with logical craziness...

...And he trots about on an imaginary horse...

...RICHARD ALLEVA BOOKS Get thee to a monastery Paul Wilkes writes about re- TEMPTATIONS lowing him to muddle through vexing isligious matters for the Paul Wilkes sues without giving undue offense to his Atlantic and the New Random House, $20, 256 pp...

...And he and director Branagh have severely successful performances...

...The musicif heater critics can break your heart with their elo- Patrick Doyle's score is irresistibly Bacchic-drowns out any quence about performances that are no more...

...The setting is Shakespeare's Italianate one but relocated to a sort of streamlined version of the nineteenth century...

...When Benedick and Beatrice, piece of acting as I ever hope to see on screen or stage...

...solution to this problem, and to most of Wilkes's virtues were largely negative Such common sense-as seen in the parish the problems of the church in the U.S., is ones...

...Good Pedro and cuts a fine figure...

...neuver goes according to plan only a few hours later, Claudio And don't trust me when I say that all the following is so: already seems to have forgotten about it and suspects his seIn the masquerade ball, Thompson shows us with the tiniest nior officer of having swiped his girl...

...eschewed appeals to this or that under- for him, because the appeal to common All that said, Wilkes is a skillful writstanding of the Christian life, appealing sense is also his main journalistic tool, al- er, able to relate complicated subjects in 24: 18 June 1993 Commonweal...

...After the Michael Keaton apparently decided that Dogberry's trou- mutual declaration of love, Branagh is splendid: ardent with bles with the English language are rooted in fundamental prob- his lover, sagacious in aiding the slandered family, and (how lems with the human race, so he plays the constable as a comic rare this is with most Benedicks...

...Reading the play, one shift of facial expression the exact moment when Beatrice re- may suspect Shakespeare of nodding or we may give up on alizes that her disguised tormentor is Benedick, and that the Claudio as a dolt...

...many readers...

...Cicadas drone as young Claudio reveals his love of not only mock love but mock the mockery of love, that make Hero to Don Pedro, and the sun beats down as they rehearse us share Beatrice's double realization that love makes us fools the tactics necessary to capture the lady...

...They are beautifully lustful...

...Richard Briers is ripe as Leonato and, as his brother, Brian Kenneth Branagh's production is handsome, brainy, pur- Blessed, is maturely cherubic...

...and music realizes his conception...

...Branagh has done tion (Beatrice giving it heart and wit), are all problematic, what any good director does with any complex play: he has and the best of the lot-Branagh himself-is the most probseized upon the reality of the central situation...

...Yet this is a callow performance, approach, but I found the actor's execution of it too blatant in more like a warm-up than a finished work...

...and I gave him use for it," etc...

...The women like a swan on water, and something we long to strip and bathe and we catch brief glimpses of their nakedbelieve can never cease to exist," we must take his word for it ness before they throw on their finery...

...Thus in a 1989 state-of-theYorker, and with the re- seminaries piece which his publisher cent books derived from his Paul Elie deems "controversial" (divinity school New Yorker work-the surprisingly af- officials ambushed him at a subsequent fecting In Mysterious Ways: The Death and conference on journalistic ethics), Wilkes Life of a Parish Priest (Random House) instead to the common sense he picked up played radicals and conservatives off one and then The Education of an Archbishop during his Catholic childhood in the 1950s, another while positing no idea of just (Orbis), about Rembert Weakland-he a fondly recalled time when "the Catholic what shape a good modern seminary might has established himself as one of this church was strong, monolithic and grow- take...

...Above all, he Wilkes the highest of the virtues...

...But his diction wavers and, both in speech Keaton, Branagh finally wriggles free and delivers a human and deportment, he brings America too insistently into this ut- being...

...well regarded by his fellow soldiers and courtiers...

...Shakespeare's plays es in technicolor in a theater near you...

...He holds onto one will be released once he becomes a worthy lover...

...Washington seems collapsing chairs...

...Once all the uniforms But Emma Thompson's Beatrice is ours forever...

...is limpid rage springing out of her an underground stone room where the sunlight that so intoxibottomless love for her wronged cousin, Hero...

...Trying to establish Benedick's foolishness, tainly be played by a young actor but the seniority of rank and Branagh screeches, caws like a crow, does unfunny bits with pride of command must be communicated...

...It is as great a cates sweethearts is sealed off...

...SCREEN action of Much Ado is the return of soldiers from war, danger, enforced celibacy, and their entrance into a household full of friendly, nubile women...

...Emma Thompson's Beatrice flourish- Yet all is not well with this movie...

...But the rest of the males, the posefully bustling, securely paced, well-attuned to young males who must give this play its fire and commoShakespeare's unblinkered view of humanity...

...gins the movie, Much Ado About Nothing, by reading the The heat of the Italian summer never lets the heat of battle words of the song, "Sigh no more, ladies," with inflections that die down...

...Soon the soldiers, in because that performance has ceased and now lives only in another part of the estate, are also naked as they plunge into Young's prose...

...Branagh has made Much Ado of Signor Benedick," Thompson doesn't rattle out the words into A Midsummer Day's Dream, and the lovers behave as they ("he lent it me awhile...

...The cavaliers crest a hill overlooking a Tuscan villa...

...Commonweal 18 June 1993: 23 Robert Sean Leonard has the basic substance for Claudio...

...No, it hasn't got a majority of but never funny...

...seeing Benedick's potential, the compassion and true wit that Keanu Reeves is quite bad as Don John...

...emotional weighting of a passage usually passed off as banter For me, this is a convincing view of the play and everything gives the Benedick-Beatrice sparring matches a background that Branagh does with camera, cutting, physical setting, costume, deepens them, embitters them...

...Drop this magazine and are supreme in their characterizations, and I am forced to go...

...of Messina accept him as a guardian of civic order...

...shouts from the men but we can read the expressions on their When Stark Young tells us that one of Doris faces...

...in a recent Times op-ed quickie about country's most active journalists cover- ing, and her best young men could think priestly pedophiles, he proposed that the ing religious affairs...

...But it does have what few Shakespeare damaged the movie by allowing Dogberry to maul and gouge films, what few movies of any sort, possess: zest...

...Courtesy of herself...

...When he is tricked Denzel Washington, on the other hand, is well-spoken as Don into admitting to himself his love, he becomes whole...

...He practiced useful arrangement priest Joe Greer of In Mysterious Ways, simply to ordain women and married peorather than artistry, worked by elucidation and in Archbishop Weakland-is for ple and so get more red-blooded 'S0s rather than striking insight...

...war of love that can be waged now that mortal combat is finSo you don't have to take my word for it that Thompson be- ished...

...The fire of first love is in his eyes and he convincingly shows Like Keaton's Dogberry, Kenneth Branagh's Benedick is a how such unconditional adoration can turn into equally un- performance wriggling in the grip of a concept...