Much Ado About Twelfth Night

*****                                                                            ***

With romantic comedies filling the theatres every year, it is rare for these films to be Shakespeare adaptations. Within a few years two adaptations came out of two of Shakespeare’s comedies, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night. The first was directed by Shakespeare regular Kenneth Branagh and the other by not-so-famous Trevor Nunn. Both films are extremely similar to one another in terms of filmmaking. The cast, the landscapes and sets, and the music are all similarities and not very many differences (except in the plot details). Between these two film it is Much Ado About Nothing that truly stands on its own as a film and the other falters and tries too hard to be like a Branagh film rather than being a Nunn film.

Something that all of Kenneth Branagh films have is an A-list cast. Twelfth Night is filled with these actors, many of whom Branagh has worked with, one of whom was in Much Ado About Nothing (Imelda Staunton). Helena Bonham Carter appears in this film, an actress who even had an affair with Kenneth Branagh when they worked on Frankenstein. Toby Stephens appears as well, son of Maggie Smith who Branagh has worked with frequently, not in his films but on the stage. Nicholas Farrell, Antonio, also appears in Branagh’s Hamlet (granted, the film came only a few months after Twelfth Night). Other A-list actors who were cast in the film are Nigel Hawthorne, Ben Kingsley (a really nice performance by an actor who I had yet seen do Shakespeare), and Richard E. Grant. With a cast like this, it is not too far-fetched to believe this could be a Kenneth Branagh cast. This may be a stretched point, after all, to make a great Shakespeare film you need great actors, but the fact that most of these people have an association with Branagh concretes my point.

The cast for Branagh’s film is Emma Thompson, Imelda Staunton, Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton, and Robert Sean Leonard. A similarity is this cast of great big name actors; the difference is that most of the actors are American. Other Branagh films are filled with British actors, such as his Henry V or As You Like It. This small difference between a largely British cast and largely American cast is only for these two films, but Branagh’s other films are largely British-filled actors more than American.

The other similarity of the films is how the director filmed the pastoral elements. The pastoral setting is a conceit in almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies. Both Branagh and Nunn used this in their film and both of the films use the landscapes of the area and the natural elements of the set feature as another character. In Much Ado, a major scene where Benedict is “overhearing” the men discussing Beatrice’s love for him, he hides in the courtyard behind a wall of hedges. In the scene where Malvolio reads the letter that Maria has written to trick him in Twelfth Night, Antonio and Sir Toby all hide behind a wall of hedges in a courtyard of sorts, moving around, trying to hide away from Malvolio while the plot unfolds.

Then there is the setting of the two plays. Much Ado appears in a country villa surrounded by a beautiful Spanish countryside. On the other hand, the castle of Duke Orsino is on a beautiful island in the Mediterranean with some Prussian style architecture. These are differences, but how they film it are the same. It is always filmed from a distance if we ever see the whole set. Whenever the full set is being filmed, it is being shot at a distance away. Also, save for the opening sequence for Twelfth Night, never does the director place any scene outside other than in the actual setting. All exterior scenes are always in the villa or in the castle grounds (save for the beginning of Twelfth Night with the establishment of the ship wreck). The cinematography of each film uses the lighting and the distance and the use of the establishing shot all in very similar ways.

The other similarity between these two films is the music. Both films use a song that is sung in the actual play text and use it as a main musical theme. This is the major similarity between these two films more than the other two. Almost any Shakespearean adaptation would have a major cast of British and American actors. Almost every Shakespeare comedy film that I have seen uses the camerawork for the pastoral elements in similar ways, but the music sounds too much like what Patrick Doyle would have done for his score if he did this film with Branagh, only Patrick Doyle could have done a better job than what Shaun Davey did with this one. Patrick Doyle uses the song “Hey Nonny Nonny” for the main theme in the film, which connects all of the film’s themes together in the Overture of the film. He does this with Henry V and As You Like It and Hamlet. Every Shakespeare film, not just his comedies, Doyle makes a musical theme from a song in the play text. Shaun Davey’s music for Twelfth Night uses the song “The Wind and the Rain” as his main theme. It is a good song and the lyrics are set very well to his composition, but it feels too hard to be like Doyle’s music, almost like he is copying him.

Any differences that these two films have do not void the fact that there are too many similarities between them, very much like it is a copy of the formula that makes Branagh so successful. Nunn tries really hard to do a film that redoes the work Branagh did on Much Ado About Nothing. Instead of trying to make his film be a Nunn film, he tries to make a film like Branagh with a similar cast, similar cinematography, and similar music.