COVER STORY : FILM COMMENTARY : Shakespeare, the Exultant Screenwriter

When Kenneth Branagh’s movie version of “Much Ado About Nothing” opens May 14, it is sure to revive that most hallowed of gripes.

To wit: “Why don’t filmmakers leave Shakespeare to the theater?”

The most cogent rebuttal is probably that if Shakespeare were alive right now he’d probably be a filmmaker. Certainly his plays are a great deal more “cinematic” than most movies--witness the grand panoramas, the appeals to our senses, the mellifluous shifts in time and place, the ardent pictorialism of the language, as if Shakespeare were creating a kind of phantom screen on which to project his visions.

The theater is supposed to be anti-cinema: word-based instead of image-based. But if the history of Shakespearean films proves anything it’s that the visual and the verbal can exalt each other.

On the stage, a great performance of Shakespeare always seems too much--too rich and various to be contained behind footlights. The movies are in a position to make that very overflow its subject. And they can just as easily bring us shudderingly close to the drama, as though the film director were our own personal spyglass.

Shakespeare often gets a bad rap in the movies (and TV) for the same wrongful reasons as on the stage: Lots of pointless stentorian bustle, lots of straining and horsing around. (Are we supposed to think, hey, this Shakespeare is really a fun dude?) Wooden actors of the hoariest grain--Master Thespians all--strut and fret their hour upon the soundstage, substituting diction for inspiration. An evening with one of those overupholstered Zeffirelli-Taylor-Burton jobs like “The Taming of the Shrew” can really take its toll, and so can “respectable” television adaptations that flaunt their pedigree by being as boring as possible, or “experimental” productions that recast Romeo and Juliet as octogenarian lovebirds, or lesbian endomorphs.

These follies belong to the filmmakers alone, not to Shakespeare or to anything “intrinsic” to movies. Yet there are still people out there who seriously think that film and theater can only cross swords. But some of the greatest Shakespeare films have been those, like Orson Welles’ or Laurence Olivier’s, that provide a banquet for the eye and the ear. The illuminated manuscript colorations in Olivier’s “Henry V” give the raging drama a delicate resplendency; we enter into a heightened way of seeing and feeling--we might have walked into a medieval triptych. Welles’ finest Shakespearean films, “Othello” and “Chimes at Midnight,” suffer from bad lip-syncing, but when language and image come together, as in, say, Desdemona’s death-bed scene in “Othello,” we mainline the play’s ferocious essence. Welles adds a touch not described in the text: He has Othello smother Desdemona in her own bridal bedsheet so that her face becomes a silken death mask, and it’s as if at that moment Shakespeare’s muse had passed to Welles.

Actually, one often feels that passage even when Welles is just shooting the works. The Battle of Shrewsbury in “Chimes at Midnight” is essentially wordless, and yet its imagery has the clangorous lyricism of Shakespeare’s most tragic battle poetry; with its chilly mud-caked bottom-of-the-world barbarism, the battle has such propulsion that it seems to go on forever, each new sickening spasm of violence prolonging the fated agony. We are watching the accumulation of all wars.

Shakespeare on the page is, in a sense, Shakespeare unrealized. He turns us all into filmmakers as we read his plays; we yearn to see fulfilled the visions he has provoked. We can respond to what a director like Kurosawa does in his “Throne of Blood” (based on “Macbeth”) or “Ran” (“King Lear”) because, even though both movies dispense with Shakespeare’s dialogue, they are triumphant evocations of what one artist inspired in another. This may not satisfy an academic’s notions of adaptation, but a movie like “Throne of Blood” is closer to the emotions “Macbeth” invokes in us when we read it than a drearily literal adaptation could ever be.

What the academics don’t understand is that, in any lasting sense, there can be no “definitive” production of a great Shakespeare play. This is what is so intoxicating about the attempt to be definitive. The Shakespearean universe is so protean that it sustains the most disparate approaches--like, most recently, the paraphrasing of portions of the “Henry IV” plays in “My Own Private Idaho,” or Peter Greenaway’s “Tempest”-tossed “Prospero’s Books”--and survives even the worst of them.

There was Welles’ barbarous and brooding “Macbeth” and then there was Polanski’s straightforwardly horrific version. Olivier’s “Henry V,” with its bright, decorous heroism, is followed almost five decades later by Kenneth Branagh’s anti-heroic knell. Olivier’s “Hamlet” has a Freudian cast--it begins by telling us (rather too helpfully) that we are about to witness a drama about a man “who could not make up his mind.” Tony Richardson’s “Hamlet,” starring Nicol Williamson, is about a man who could not escape his snit. We have Welles’ glowering portentous Othello and then we have Olivier’s in the film directed by Stuart Burge--it’s not much more than a filmed record of Olivier’s famous National Theatre stage production.

And yet this “Othello” may be the greatest Shakespearean film of them all because it delivers a performance so breathtakingly audacious that it leaves you humbled and even a bit saddened--how can it be possible for anybody to give a greater performance in anything? Olivier is as great an actor in “Othello” as Shakespeare is a poet, and so the commingling of genius seems almost demonic. This is true of Olivier’s Richard III too, in the film he directed. There’s a Faustian bargain being played out in the actor’s sulfurous sneers and lecheries. He’s made his pact with his master’s muse.

You need no more justification for Shakespeare on film than these performances--or any of the dozens of other extraordinary ones in Shakespeare films. (How much poorer we are that movies were never made to capture the Broadway performances of Katharine Hepburn’s Juliet, Lillian Gish’s Ophelia or Robert Ryan’s Coriolanus, to name a precious few.) And who can help but imagine what amazements might be ours if the planets collide and we are one day graced with, say, a Caliban by Nick Nolte, a Prospero by Gene Hackman, an Othello by Morgan Freeman, a Lady Macbeth by Judy Davis. Hell, a Hamlet by Judy Davis.

‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.