The opening shows Don Pedro and Claudio Reed Diamond and Fran Kranz , both excellent returning from abroad, complete with security detail and a motorcade of gleaming cars. They stop off at the beautiful home of Leonato Clark Gregg , to celebrate with relatives and friends, all of whom have nothing else to do besides hang out in the house, drink wine, gossip, and make mischief with one another's love lives. Claudio confesses to Don Pedro that he has fallen in instant-love with Leonato's beautiful young daughter Hero Jillian Morgese.
Don Pedro immediately begins scheming on a way to bring the romance to fruition. A masked ball thrown that night gives him the opportunity he is looking for. Hero's cousin Beatrice played by Amy Acker tells anyone who will listen and even those who tune her out that love is not for her, and marriage is for the birds. She especially wants everyone to know that Benedick is a jerk, and he doesn't matter to her at all! Benedick returns her insults, to her face and behind her back.
Of course if the two were as indifferent towards one another as they declared, then why do they keep talking incessantly about each other? Hero and her maids, along with the menfolk in the house, conspire to bring the arguing two together. All of this love-making could have gone forward without a hitch if Don John had not been in the house. Don John is disturbed by other people's happiness. He has no purpose beyond making trouble for others.
He figures out a way to make it seem as if Hero had been unfaithful to Claudio, on the night before the two were to be wed. Claudio reacts ferociously. Hero faints. Leonato screams that his daughter has besmirched his family name. Don John smiles happily. Beatrice and Benedick find themselves unlikely allies in untangling the web of intrigue and malice.
In actual television, this can still sometimes produce artful moments, the kind built up through accumulation over time of bright spots in writing and acting. In film, this aesthetic is death. Shakespeare's play is something of an ur-text for the modern romantic comedy.
It revolves around two couples: Benedick and Beatrice Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker , the heart of the piece, who proclaim disdain for one another via delicious verbal sparring; and Claudio and Hero Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese , a younger couple dumbly in love and arranged to be married.
Each couple is torn apart and brought together again by various episodes of deception and deceit, many of which feature the comically absurd Shakespearean trope of people masquerading as one another and successfully conning their loved ones. This trope is not merely an Elizabethan leftover, some anachronistic glitch that must be apologized for or papered over in a modern production.
The frothy nonsense of his characters' behavior is an essential part of Shakespeare's art; his vision of the world is one in which no reason need be given for absurdity beyond the bizarre fluctuations of the human heart.
This vision seems to prove too strange for Whedon, who more than once has pointed out to audiences the prevalence of alcohol on screen and joked, "There are certain things in this movie that just don't make sense unless the characters are super-drunk. The scenes in Much Ado seem staged by someone terrified of being misunderstood, who bends over backwards to avoid ambiguity or confusion. To offer up perhaps the most egregious example: Whedon has decided to tack on a silent prologue to the play depicting Benedick sneaking away from Beatrice's bedroom after a night of passion, a scene designed to eradicate any possible ambiguity from her later statement that Benedick had "once before" won her heart "of false dice.
The multiple cameras in use by cinematographer Jay Hunter who, unsurprisingly, normally works in reality television are concerned merely with following the actors around and making sure we see them say their lines. The shots and edits are purely functional, designed to transmit verbal and intellectual information, but failing to provide what really matters: the unexpected rhythms and tonal shifts that communicate deeper ideas about new ways of being, seeing, and feeling.
A close look at the trailer for the film serves as an excellent stylistic contrast, as it is so remarkably well-edited that the shots all seem more powerful than they play in the film. Paul M.
Meston Friar Francis as Friar Francis. Joss Whedon. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. In the days leading up to the ceremony, Don Pedro, with the help of Leonato, Claudio and Hero, attempts to sport with Benedick and Beatrice in an effort to trick the two into falling in love.
Meanwhile, the villainous Don John, with the help of his allies Conrade Riki Lindhome and Borachio Spencer Treat Clark , plots against the happy couple, using his own form of trickery to try to destroy the marriage before it begins. A series of comic and tragic events may continue to keep the two couples from truly finding happiness, but then again perhaps love may prevail. Shakespeare knows how to throw a party. Rated PG for some sexuality and brief drug use. Did you know Edit.
Cole suggested Whedon make it in lieu of going on vacation for their 20th anniversary because it had long been his passion project. Quotes Dogberry : Well , masters good night. Connections Featured in At the Movies: Episode User reviews Review. Top review. A Flirtatious Battle of Wits. Greetings again from the darkness. This modernized, much simpler version is directed by Joss Whedon, who also directed The Avengers last year.
It's difficult to imagine a more oddball movie symmetry than that! I had talked about doing Much Ado for years, because Amy [Acker, who plays Beatrice] and Alexis [Denisof, who plays Benedick] had done it at the house, and I thought I'd love to film them doing that.
My wife Kai and I had a little bit of vacation time, and I'd been gone for a while, and Kai sort of acted like a producer: "C'mon, do it. Do it, do it, do it. What are you, chicken? So, from the beginning you knew that you wanted to do Much Ado? It wasn't that you wanted to do a Shakespeare play and it just turned out to be Much Ado? I've wanted to do a Shakespeare play on film for years, decades in fact.
But it was Much Ado because, you know, Amy and Alexis--they're kind of my guys. Also, very practically, I was thinking, it's light, it all takes place in one location, it feels like the sort of thing you can do with a breezy air.
It's not that ponderous " We Are Doing Shakespeare. It's so modern. I hadn't read the play since high school, and I remember back when I saw the Kenneth Branagh adaptation, there were a number of lines that felt as though they must have been inserted into the film--for example, the Benedick line where he refers to Don Pedro and Claudio as "the prince and Monsieur Love " My favorite moment in that movie!
My wife and I quote it to one another. And then there's the fact--I don't know if you agree--that Beatrice seems very much a Whedonesque heroine. I like her pretty well, I'm not going to lie. Knowing that, it still astonished me, when I went back to the text, how that one scene, "Oh, that I were a man"--how bald it is, how unapologetic it is.
It's one of the most important things Shakespeare ever wrote, particularly in this play in which libertines treat women not just appallingly, but publicly. I don't know whether this was in the back of your mind, but the film also offered you a chance to give Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof the happy ending that you denied them not once but twice on Angel. It wasn't initially what I was thinking about.
I threw those two together because they've got extraordinary chemistry. But it did occur to me later on. It is sort of the last chapter of their trilogy.
Hopefully, not the last, but it does feel like a grace note for Wes and Fred. Did you have any concerns about there being a relatively recent and well-known cinematic adaptation in the Branagh film, and how did that movie inform your vision of what you wanted to do with yours?
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