Richard III, Nazi
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Movies Richard III, Nazi By John Podhoretz The new movie version of Shakespeare's Richard III is remarkable for several reasons. The actor Ian McKellen and the director Richard Loncraine, who...
...Most remarkable, it is the first film version of Shakespeare that does in cinematic terms what Shakespearean directors have been doing to the Bard on stage for three decades now, largely inspired by Jan Kott's extraordinary book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary...
...Richard's ironic opening soliloquy about his brother's rise to power-"Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by the son of York"-is played as a sycophantish toast at a swank party celebrating the York victory over the Lancasters...
...Other recent Shakespeare films have taken the plays out of the putative time and place in which they are set-I think particularly of Kenneth Branagh's sickeningly high-spirited Much Ado About Nothing, in which a cast of overacting weirdos spend two hours jumping around an Italian villa, singing and dancing and gamboling about like psychotics bereft of Xanax...
...Richard's eventual demise finds him falling into a hellish inferno at a building site straight out of a Futurist painting, to the strains of Al Jolson's "I'm Sittin' on Top of the World...
...This effort to find the themes in Shakespeare that speak most clearly to a modern-day audience is a worthy one, and Kott's book is a brilliant examination of the ways in which Shakespeare explored most of the existential concerns of modern theater four centuries ago...
...Richard speaks into an old-timey microphone, which whistles as he speaks...
...The actor Ian McKellen and the director Richard Loncraine, who adapted it for the screen, have managed to distill a complex three-hour play into a successful, fast-moving film that isn't quite two hours long...
...All's Well That Ends Well set during the Italian Risorgimento in 1870...
...But Richard III is a thoroughgoing reinvention, and in that regard it is very much of a piece with the contemporary stage treatment of Shakespeare...
...Then we follow him alone into a men's room, at which point the soliloquy turns bitter, raging, as Richard realizes that there is no clear reason why his brother should sit on the throne when he, Richard, won the battles that restored his family...
...In careful and loving hands, these plays can indeed reach audiences when they are intelligently transposed...
...Measure for Measure in Weimar Germany...
...Those who are not completely versed in the story of the Wars of the Roses can find the play heavy sledding-Shakespeare was writing about events familiar to his audiences and is inclined to use shorthand that is indecipherable today...
...The movie of Richard III threatens to overwhelm the play with its own mannered take on the 1930s, but I think McKellen and Loncraine have done a wonderful job for the most part...
...Too often, however, the transposition of Shakespeare is simply a way for directors to indulge a passion for interesting set decoration and eye-popping costumes...
...The conceit is beautifully and meticulously rendered...
...It records for posterity one of the celebrated Shakespearean performances of our time, Mc-Kellen's Richard-a figure straight out of Nietzsche, a cold-blooded general with perfect self-knowledge, a post-Christian man who knows full well that his will to power sets him outside conventional moral boundaries...
...rather, it has been lifted out of its time and placed squarely in mid-1930s England...
...Like fashion designers run amok, they reduce these great and profound works to the stature of an anorexic model whose greatest virtue is that clothes hang beautifully on her...
...and Love's Labour's Lost at Yale University in the 1910s...
...Richard's slow and steady ascension to power is depicted as a Nazi takeover of a glamorous jazz-age constitutional monarchy...
...Richard III is not set during the Wars of the Roses...
...In the past few years alone, I have seen a production of Troilus and Cressida, about the Trojan War, set in a British army outpost in northern Africa during World War II...
...By stripping the play down and focusing on Richard and his tyrannies, they have taken a hidebound work of genius out of mothballs and given it new and glorious life...
...And on it goes...
...Richard's notorious seduction of the previous queen over the corpse of the husband leads her to take up heroin...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 25
