Love's Labour's Lost Review
by "Harvey S. Karten" (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)May 28th, 2000
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST
Reviewed by Harvey Karten
Miramax Films
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Writer: Kenneth Branagh from the play by William Shakespeare and the songs and dances of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Busby Berkeley and others
Cast: Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Natascha McElhone, Kenneth Branagh, Carmen Ejogo, Matthew Lillard, Adrian Lester, Emily Mortimer
We all know that Broadway does not produce new musicals as it used to. Gone forever are the delights of Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, E.Y. Harburg, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. Forget the classic dignity of Cole Porter's caustic wit, the mellifluous tunes of Irving Berlin and the songs and lyrics of the Gershwin Brothers. The work of the latter group is produced mostly in intimate cabaret rather than on the stage, but now Kenneth Branagh has found a way to attempt new life and meaning for the songs and to the dances made famous by Fred Astaire on the ballroom floor and Busby Berkeley's choreographed water ballets. The premise is an intriguing one: fit the music, however Procrustean one must be, into the compressed stanzas of one of Shakespeare's lightest and most insipid comedies, "Love's Labour's Lost." By doing this, Branagh hopes to honor some of the greats of the American musical theater and film while rekindling interest in a Shakespearean burlesque that's rarely required reading in any college.
The exertion is mostly for naught, principally because the delightful music and dance are contrivances, shoehorned into the mostly unfunny vaudevillian sketches whenever the slightest excuse presents itself. The filmmaker's choice of "Love's Labour's Lost" is an unfortunate one not because the caper is one of the Bard's weakest but because the simplistic rhyme schemes that inhabit songs like "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Cheek to Cheek" do not mesh with the metaphoric convolutions of Shakespeare's rhyming patterns. When we hear lyrics from the 1930's, we yearn for more of the same but are hit with the poetic layout in Shakespeare's play droned mostly by a crew of American actors whose voices bear little music, we are frustrated. Alicia Silverstone, who shoulders a Sean-Connery-style lisp which might be attractive to a teen audience for "Clueless" simply ravages the feeling of magic that Branagh relies on calling up.
This is an update to the 1930's of a Shakespearean comedy of love in which four nobles from Navarre vow to give up women for three years in order to devote their lives to the study of philosophy. To answer online critic Ian Waldron- Mantgani's query about the purpose of the contract we need look only at the opening lines of the play: "Our late edict shall strongly stand in force/ Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;/ Our court shall be a little Academe,/ Still and contemplative in living art." Thus exclaims the King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola) to his best pals Biron (Kenneth Branagh), Longaville (Matthew Lillard) and Dumain (Adrian Lester) "You three, Biron, Dumain, and Longaville,/ Have sworn for three years' term to live with me/ My fellow scholars, and to keep those statutes/ That are recorded in this schedule here."
The oaths are soon forgotten as a quartet of maidens paddle into town, namely the French princess (Alicia Silverstone) and her friends Rosaline (Natascha McElhone), Maria (Carmen Ejogo) and Katherine (Emily Mortimer). A good deal of the comedy comes from the manner in which each gentleman in turn breaks his pact, hoping to get away with his courtship outside the vision of the others. In the movie's most creative scene, which takes place in the institutions' library, each character in turn joyfully concedes his bliss unaware that the others are eavsdropping. The choreographed staging involves Fred Astaire-like climbing on chairs, tilting them gracefully over by pressing the left leg against the arm, and emerging without a pratfall on the floor below.
The goofy side characters are the most unfortunate segment on screen, as each tries to out high-camp the other but succeeds only in embarrassing himself and presumably a fidgety audience. Nathan Lane, so adept on the stage of New York's Manhattan Theatre Club and in films like "The Bird Cage," looks like little more than a babbling cretin while the pudgy Timothy Spall is merely obnoxious as the ribbon- bedecked Spanish nobleman crawling about the floor for no seeming purpose and bullying his Sancho-Panza-like cohort, Moth.
Given better casting, a longer dance rehearsal period than the three weeks purportedly allotted (only Adrian Lester's "Dumaine" comports himself credibly as a hoofer), and perhaps a scrapping of "Love's Labour's Lost" in favor of a 95-minute collage of the songs and dances of the thirties, this picture might have been saved.
Rated PG. Running time: 93 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, [email protected]
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