Bored With the Bard? No Way

If Shakespeare were alive, he might well boast Michael Ovitz as his manager, a three-picture first-look deal with Miramax, or his own production company on the lot of a major motion picture studio. From a pumped-up “Romeo + Juliet” to a fascist-era take on “Richard III,” new visions of the Bard keep appearing on screen.

The two latest film adaptations of his plays are currently in theaters. “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which opened Friday, is by Shakespeare-meister Kenneth Branagh, the Englishman who played a pivotal role in reviving Shakespeare on film, starting with a vigorous “Henry V” in 1989. “Hamlet,” which opened last month, is by Shakespeare novice Michael Almereyda, an American filmmaker whose claim to fame has been a handful of art-house films like “Nadja,” a comedy about vampires. Both directors have pressed their own visions upon the work--first through adapting the scripts, but also through adapting characters and context to suit a more contemporary sensibility.

“Shakespeare’s great gift is to stay popular partly through being treated in so many different ways, from such things as the full-length ‘Hamlet’ [1996] we did in what might be called a traditional manner to what Baz Luhrmann did in what may be called an MTV ‘Romeo + Juliet’ [1996],” Branagh says.

This time Branagh has plucked out one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known comedies, “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” and transformed it into a dream-world musical starring him, Alicia Silverstone, Nathan Lane, Alessandro Nivola and an assortment of international thespians singing and dancing a la Astaire and Rogers. Almereyda, meanwhile, created a hard-edged, Gen-X version of “Hamlet” featuring Ethan Hawke, whose confused young man finds himself amid the intrigue of the Corporation of Denmark, headquartered in a high-tech, high-rise Manhattan of today.

“Love’s” plot line is sweetly contrived, so Branagh relocated it to a time of relative innocence--just before the outbreak of World War II in Europe. “We by chance have moved closer and closer in time with each film we’ve done,” Branagh says. “ ‘Henry V’ [1989] was in period with significant cheats, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ [1993] was around 1800, and ‘Hamlet’ [1996] was 19th century.”

The new film opens with the King of Navarre (Nivola) making his three buddies swear to an upright and austere life, one element of which is to give up the ladies. But no sooner have they made their monastic vows than the Princess of France (Silverstone) and three of her lovely ladies-in-waiting show up to settle an affair of state. Naturally, it soon becomes an affair of the heart, and four couples pair off, crooning to poetry by Shakespeare and songs by the bubbly likes of Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern.

During two years of preparation, Branagh selected the 1930s and ‘40s songs that seemed the best fit for Shakespeare’s language. So when Berowne (Branagh) waxes rhapsodic about the power of love--”And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods/Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony,” he and his chums float into Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” which opens with the line, “Heaven, I’m in heaven. . . .” In fact, during this number, they also literally float into the rafters of a library.

A handful of the cast, like Lane, had musical training, but most had none to speak of, so Branagh set up a song-and-dance boot camp for three weeks before production began. In the end, everyone sang their own songs and then performed the numbers to taped versions.

“It wasn’t our ambition to achieve the slickness and the impossible perfection of [Fred] Astaire and Ginger Rogers,” Branagh says. “What we did want to see was abandonment to the enterprise, joy and commitment to the songs and the dancing.”

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While some critics have viewed Branagh’s use of big-name American stars as a commercial ploy (Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington in “Much Ado About Nothing,” Billy Crystal and a host of others in “Hamlet”), Branagh says he doesn’t believe celebrities necessarily bring audiences to the type of films they’re not generally associated with. His motivation is different, he says: As a director, he enjoys working with actors from different backgrounds.

“My casting has always been based on respect for talent and openness,” he says. “Alicia’s in the film because I think she’s a terrific actress and comedienne who retains a naturalism and a vitality.”

For Almereyda, humility but not intimidation is in order when faced with the weight of adapting Shakespeare. After all, his inspiration for becoming a filmmaker was actor and director Orson Welles, who fearlessly tackled several Shakespeare plays on film, including much admired versions of “Macbeth” (1948) and “Othello” (1952).

“I was struck by the fact that when I first read ‘Hamlet’ in high school how connected and immediate and emotional it was, and how I’d never seen a movie that showed Hamlet as a young man,” Almereyda recalls during a visit to Los Angeles.

Indeed, Laurence Olivier was around 40 when he did his famous take on the Dane haunted by the ghost of his father. More recent big-screen versions by Franco Zeffirelli (1990) and Branagh featured actors in their 30s--Mel Gibson and Branagh, respectively.

“The dilemma and the anguish of a young man trying to define who he is in a world that’s increasingly corrupt seemed to be the heart of it to me,” Almereyda says.

So he cast the roles with younger actors--Hawke is 29, and 19-year-old Julia Stiles plays Ophelia.

Hawke credits his own taste for Shakespeare to Branagh. “His production of ‘Henry V’ is really responsible for turning me on to Shakespeare,” he says, but he points out major differences between Branagh’s “Hamlet” and Almereyda’s.

“Our piece really succeeds at making the father a real man, and as a real man he’s much more threatening,” Hawke says. (In the film the vengeful ghost is played by a brooding Sam Shepard in a long, dark coat with a minimum of special effects.)

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Almereyda set out to address current reality through the vehicle of the play, and he reinvented scene after scene to accomplish that. Denmark becomes a corporation in New York; the palace is a high-rise luxury condo; Hamlet is a budding video artist who presents a video short to see if his usurping uncle gives himself away; and Ophelia flips through Polaroids of flowers and herbs when she does her mad speech: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. . . .”

And then there is the famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, in which the Prince questions himself on the relative merits of action versus inaction. A peroxided Branagh did his take by standing stock-still in front of a series of full-length palace mirrors, which divide and refract through camera movement. Almereyda’s version has the speech jerkily starting and stopping--first, with Hawke holding a gun to various parts of his head, then fragments of a recorded lecture by a Vietnamese monk talking about “inter-being,” and finally the main speech as Hawke strolls restlessly through the “Action” section of a Blockbuster video store.

“The challenge was to do a specifically American version,” Almereyda says. While some of his actors had classical theater backgrounds--Diane Venora (Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude), for example, has played both Ophelia and Hamlet onstage--others had television and movie resumes--Bill Murray does a turn as Ophelia’s foolish and unfortunate father, Polonius.

There is yet more Shakespeare in the cinematic offing. Later this year there’s “O,” a contemporary take on “Othello” set in high school. Another “Hamlet” is reportedly in production, this one directed by Campbell Scott and set during the American Civil War. And both Almereyda and Branagh are already planning future Shakespeare for themselves--Almereyda wants to keep his project secret; Branagh will follow his trajectory of Shakespeare films to its logical next step: a modern “Macbeth.”

Virtually any Shakespeare play can be adapted to the screen, Branagh believes, and money should not be the obstacle. “All our films have been done on a shoestring,” says the director who made “Hamlet” for $15 million. “Imagination is the key.”