On Screen
BROMWICH, Davrd
On Screen LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND RUTHLESS BY DAVID BROMWICH "SIGH no more, ladies" (a Shake-speare song that says: expect nothing from men) is being recited by a voice that turns out to...
...Her Beatrice is a creature of mental weather—sharp, discreet, fearfully harassing—her wit a sail that can drag and collapse, then shoot her ahead of the others who skim the surface unequipped...
...An aimless easy heartiness, a sort of debonair mist suffuses Leonard and Washington, a transparent disguise of embarrassment...
...I have sometimes sat through a conversation in a language I half understood, and know the look of good-humored engagement that fixes the facial muscles on such occasions, and the accompanying feeling of positive asininity...
...The easy rush of wasted shots has less to do with narrative conventions than with in-flight showings, and the plot grows terminally snarled when the audience can bear it, between after-lunch coffee and immigration cards...
...Cruise's strategy, elaborately refined, is to play off the firm's inside security unit against an outside investigative agency, and he carries it through with broken-field assurance and unqualified success...
...Swell of the music with a percussive crash...
...But it is all one story that implies words are as final as actions and reputation is more than a mask...
...Benedick, to satisfy Beatrice, challenges Claudio to a duel, but before a death is required, Hero's honor is restored...
...But the production is peopled with Americans, and oh, the Americans...
...All of the alternations of Beatrice are at home in Thompson's portrayal, from her first blustering challenge of Benedick?Iprayyou, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars...
...In a swank movie like this, the real stars are the decor, the music and the sound-mixing...
...One is prepared to deny nothing to the actor who could seem for a second to have earned Emma Thompson's love...
...A hair's breadth of intent divides the pandering Don Pedro from the slandering Don John...
...The joke lying in wait here, which the director, Sydney Pollack, never properly tags, is that Bendini, Lambert &Locke of Memphis differs only in degree from countless other firms...
...The credits begin to roll, and here they come...
...Life is digestible, the music says—see how easy it goes down...
...Branagh plays Benedick with the lively self-regard of a proud man not beyond seeing how his pride will look to others...
...Against the wishes of so many, who is he to deny his amiability...
...Any threat of unscheduled emotion would lose its edge in the Dave Grusin score, a nonstop upbeat cocktail-lounge blues for acoustic piano...
...The rumor-mongers confess themselves agents of Don John (the bastard brother of Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon...
...Both couples marry in an instant, and there will be time for much forgetting...
...The rest of the English cast is excellent...
...Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Tom Cruise accepts an every-wish-is-granted offer as an associate with a firm in Memphis, and glows with rewarded merit while his wife grows puzzled at certain signs...
...When Claudio credits the malicious rumor about her, he can remember seeing something unpleasant earlier...
...Sydney Pollack directed Three Days of the Condor, one of the best conspiracy-thrillers of the '70s, but his style has slackened cooperatively with the times...
...But how many hath he killed...
...The hint of flirtation between Don Pedro and Hero as he courts her on Claudio's behalf has likewise been toned down, even though it contributes a substantial moment of doubt that carries through the original text...
...Someone said about Hemingway that his descriptions were so exact you could keep alive as a hunter if you read them carefully...
...At the very least, it is a land "of ilk and money,'' and the tubs, if not hot, are everywhere...
...You literally do not leave it alive...
...In Much Ado About Nothing the performances by Branagh and Thompson are brilliant, and the hilarity always well-drilled, even if it misses a touch of spontaneity...
...Beatrice and Benedick are each tricked into believing the other is truly smitten...
...Even their modesty cannot screen them...
...They show that sex is on everyone's mind—the women no less than the men —and that it has a risky edge...
...Immensely plush and glossy, the Kenneth Branagh Much A do A bout Nothing is under way...
...Two partners die mysteriously in a swimming accident...
...The company wives are kept in the dark about the business, encouraged to have many children, and, what is more unusual and disconcerting, "No one's divorced in the firm...
...But once his Benedick hears of Beatrice's love, he is a solid substance melting...
...Revels of mutual congratulation at intervals display the mellow lifestyle of the people...
...The chaotic irritants at work in this play have not been more than remotely pondered...
...An acrid comedy that barely ends up a comedy, Shakespeare's Much A do is a battle to the death—to the marriage?of two impenitent wits, Beatrice and Benedick...
...When, at his change of heart, he says with a shrug, "No, the world must be peopled," he bears himself with the humility of a genuine egotist...
...Her susceptible nature dwells in a medium of pure intelligence: ready, almost radiant, to draw the next insult and give it back twice-over...
...Reeves hones the whisper and whine of his Don John into palpable nonentity...
...Their jousting is stopped by what looks like a side issue: the young love of Claudio and Hero, broken when Hero's honor is slandered and Claudio renounces her...
...the woman who brings the news is observed to be "not sad, but scared—there's a difference...
...After that, he flows: not a halt, not a quip, not a distorted action or sentiment, yet he appears to be the same man...
...Robert Sean Leonard (Claudio), Den-zel Washington (Don Pedro) and Keanu Reeves (Don John) plainly felt something of the kind as they walked through their parts on what they hoped was a cloud...
...Yet Dogberry, with his fumbling skill, extracts the confession that solves the plot...
...a whole host of them riding abreast, punching their fists in the air—a gesture doubtless of ancient provenance, which also recalls the heroes of the summer Olympics shouting and punching "Yes...
...and ready (if such a world could be) for a world without insults...
...He is the most punctilious gentleman of the piece, and the only source of geniality...
...Michael Keaton's Dogberry (the only American effort that ventures something) is a shaggy paranoid wreck, his brains cooked on drugs, eyes asquint and lips curled in a snarl, speaking guttural unintelligibilities before he gallops off on two legs on a pretend-horse—a Monty Python touch that seems wildly out of keeping with the production...
...Athletic, whether solemn or clowning, he deploys a resourceful energy that can make you forget his oddly recessive face: thin lips (hidden here by a beard...
...On Screen LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND RUTHLESS BY DAVID BROMWICH "SIGH no more, ladies" (a Shake-speare song that says: expect nothing from men) is being recited by a voice that turns out to belong to Emma Thompson...
...Lolling in a tree, she shuts her book now and smiles delightedly at the festive crowd below, who await the return of their gentlemen-warriors...
...The premise of The Firm is that lawyers are specialists in running the world...
...His Henry V in the opening scenes was as vivid as Cagney in White Heat, but for the rest of that film the Machiavellian note was lost, and in battles of careful splendor and brutality it was never clear what note was meant to replace it...
...Gene Hackman, as a senior partner "decent and corrupt and ruined," rises alone from the mass of youthful pretense and mobile attitudes...
...This confident actor with his good eye for projects is still, on large tracts of his chosen materials, a weak and unthinking director...
...The suggestion in Shakespeare is that their loves are as rigged as their hates...
...Deep cuts have lightened this version (as fluent as it is commercially prudent), and the omitted passages make a point Branagh preferred to leave untouched...
...Given the demand for local stars to back a British production in America, why did Branagh choose so poorly, or, having chosen, exert so little control...
...The suggestion of the film is that the love of the two couples is real, though fortuitous...
...You've earned a good dinner and a night out," he tells Cruise once man-to-man, with a mocking shake of his hips cha cha cha, and the coarseness and the delicacy of his touch seem inseparably human...
...A well-placed source informs him that no partner has ever left the firm alive...
...It is doubtful that anyone watching The Firm could learn to make a multiple Xerox...
...Leonard, weeping because he thinks Hero has died of grief, is a young actor desperate to experience an emotion, not a young man overwhelmed by one...
...She is often close to melancholy, but never visibly so, and her jests make a diversion as exquisite as it is natural...
...The self-satisfaction is made to look generous because in saving his skin he is also saving his marriage...
...Studying for the bar in a greasy-spoon restaurant, Cruise is hectored knowingly by a detective with a shaved head...
...But the undefended compromises with the text and supporting cast betray a failure of nerve...
...riding into the zoom lens in slow motion...
...and each discovers that to believe yourself loved may create an actual welcome for love...
...To eke out the hour-long chase, morsels are spliced together from a great many undernourished plotlines, the average scene length holding steady at 15 to 45 seconds: the span of a TV commercial...
...For indeed, I promised to eat all of his killing"—to the chaffing of her weary heart: "Poor fool, it keeps on the windy side of care...
...When Don Pedro says to Beatrice "Your silence most offends me"—since as long as she talks he is happy, and her silence is a refusal of marriage—Washington puts the stress on "most" as if she were generally offensive...
...The screenplay of The Firm is 50 bite-size lumps, the dialogue rigorously held to four exchanges per bite...
...Though a good deal about the court of Messina remains baffling—the cause of the resentments that move the story to the brink of catastrophe, a perpetual erotic give-and-take that is often darkened by bitterness?one is left with no doubt that this is a place where one would like to live...
...eyes unrelaxing and seldom lit by warmth—a hard face for comedy, one would have said...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 10
