Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Kenneth Branagh's 1993 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing arrives as a sun-drenched Tuscan idyll, all linen and lute music, and it remains one of the more agreeable Shakespeare films ever assembled. Branagh trims the text for pace, keeps the prose light on the ear, and lets his cast romp through the gardens of Villa Vignamaggio with an exuberance that critics at the time found contagious. The picture is a romantic comedy about courtship, honor, and mistaken identity. It has no other business on its mind.

The production's most visible concession to modern sensibilities is its casting. Denzel Washington plays Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, a Black actor in a role written for an Elizabethan company, and the choice is made without comment or fuss. The film proceeds as though this were unremarkable, which in 1993 it was not, and the effect is a quiet representational charge rather than a statement. Emma Thompson's Beatrice supplies the other mild jolt. She is sharp-tongued and quick, out-witting the men around her at every turn, though this is Shakespeare's own 1598 invention and not an agenda smuggled in by the director. The romantic plotting is entirely heterosexual. There is no economic critique, no environmental concern, no meditation on the body or the mind's varied wiring. Michael Keaton's Dogberry bumbles through his malapropisms for laughs alone.

What remains is a film that trusts its source and its audience in equal measure. The pleasures here are Elizabethan, delivered with Italian sunshine and a composer's score. Branagh wants us to enjoy ourselves, and mostly we do. Any instruction the play offers is Shakespeare's, four centuries old and gently worn. The movie has the good sense not to lecture, and the wedding dances at the end ask nothing of us but a smile. It is a rare thing: a literary adaptation with no sermon in its pocket and no ledger to balance. The couples pair off, the villain is marched away, and Don Pedro stands alone, content. The camera pulls back. Nobody has been taught anything, and that is the point.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}