Beautiful words, delightful music, great acting! What could ruin such a mix. The answer, the ego of Kenneth Branagh. He is much too old for the part of a young student. His direction is absurdly literal. For example: probably the best use of the song "Heaven, I'm in heaven..." is sung by Angel Islington in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Here the song is ruined by literally yanking the singers up on wires to a ceiling painted to resemble heaven. If a song mentions a hat, the director shows us a hat, and so on. The camera is always doing things that are distracting and annoying. The choreography is nothing but a string of literal quotes, from Busby Berkley to Fred Astaire to Gene Kelly to Bob Fosse. It never flows, just jerks from quote to quote. And while the older actors are superb, there does not seem to be an actor under 25 who can do Shakespeare...they all sound as if they are mouthing words that are not a part of their vocabulary. And the slapstick -- 'taint funny Magee. After all this, I still recommend watching the film. It is much kinder to the clowns than most productions of LLL. Branagh's great speech in praise of love is worth the price of admission. He acts sincerity so well it is almost enough to make us forget what he did to Emma Thompson. And the music is ... heaven.
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ricknorwood27 April 2004
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jerichobrawler21 December 2005Boy, Kenneth Branagh will try anything, won't he? Even infusing Shakespeare's comedy with a string of Gershwin-era songs and dances. But while his Much Ado About Nothing was a frothy, wonderful gem, Love's Labour's Lost . . . just didn't quite work. It's a noble try, though.
Whether the concept itself is flawed is up for debate. (Surely some Shakespeare purists were up in arms when this came out!) What cannot be argued, however, is that Branagh's cast is unable to pull this off. They simply are trying to hard at what should come naturally, and the audience can't help but notice. His direction also sinks the film at various points, and as a result, the film jerks from scene to scene, from song to song, ultimately culminating in a collection of bits that never gel into a unified whole.
That's not to say that the movie doesn't have its strengths. There is a sense of fun that pervades the film which is quite pleasant. The costumes and art direction are appropriately light and beautiful, and some of the comedy moments are quite fun. Each actor also has his or her strength. Alessandro Nivola (Laurel Canyon, Mansfield Park) is the best singer, Adrian Lester (Primary Colors) the best dancer, Branagh the best actor, and Matthew Lillard (Scooby-Doo) . . . sure is tall. The supporting cast (Nathan Lane, Alicia Silverstone, Emily Mortimer, et. al.) each do their best to rise above the film's shortcomings, as well.
Ultimately, the audience ends up really trying to like this movie, but the flaws are too great to dismiss. 6/10 stars. -
wmantzel28 May 2005This movie should be taken for what it is... experimental Shakespeare. Those expecting a loyal and painstaking presentation of the bard's work will likely be disappointed. Then again, so would someone searching for intelligence in Zoolander or Dumb and Dumber (both of which, I enjoyed after adjusting my expectations). To make a fair comparison, one must consider this movie against other experimental Shakespeare productions. I would say that it is on par with the adapted Romeo and Juliet from the 90's to give a rough idea. Certainly I have seen worse. For example, an adapted Hamlet (at our local Shakespeare in the park) with shameless pop culture references gratuitously inserted, including a spoofed scene of The Matrix. Anyway, I enjoyed the musical selection and dance routines (especially Adrian Lester's) of LLL very much with only a few exceptions, and would recommend this as a "date" movie.
"Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve" -
sschwa21 July 2001I'm ashamed to admit it. Critics steered me away from this movie, despite the fact that every Branagh film of Shakespeare I've seen had been wonderful. I waited for the video, but my local chain store never got it in. I finally found it in a little hole-in-the-wall store. What a charmer! It's true that there's only one real dancer in the film and only one real singer, but all of these folks know how to put over a number. Nathan Lane shines as the clown (he may be the funniest Shakespearean clown I've seen, mostly because he's more Borscht Belt than RADA), but the eight principals pull off the difficult feat of being fatuous and winning at the same time. Branagh did what he had to do: devise a new context for this decidedly second-run Shakespeare comedy and yet convince us of a kind of fairy tale. The context (that of Thirties movie musicals) suits the material down to the ground, and the music throughout is superb, drawing most effectively on the great songs, not all of them well known, of the Twenties and Thirties. Love's Labours Lost can go on and on, but Branagh gives it to us in easy bits, breaking things up with an hilarious parody of Thirties newsreels and imaginatively staged numbers. There is the sombre thread of imminent war in Europe throughout, and it provides the necessary casus for the final transformation of character in the play, which normally seems a little abrupt. All in all, terrific.
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Andyman-313 July 1999To begin with, I must say that the version of Love's Labour's Lost that I saw had not been fully edited and the soundtrack comprised mostly of incidental music from Much Ado. Therefore I would surmise that the finished version will look better and slicker and, well, more finished.
Branagh has taken a play which is fairly long, quite banal and filled with complex yet beautiful language and by cutting it down to 93 minutes, adding 5 or 6 song and dance routines and eliminating much of the original Shakespeare, he has managed to produce a very likeable farce.
Traditionalists who hold Shakespeare in holy awe will find this film to be quite blasphemous. However, I feel that Branagh has captured the feeling of the piece extremely well. It is after all a slightly bawdy farce with lots of terrible jokes and a plot as shallow as a puddle in the drought season. Shakey raises it with many great and moving speeches (most by Berowne / Branagh surprisingly enough) and these have been lovingly restored in Branagh's film.
My main gripe about the film is the ending. Not wishing to give anything away, I shall just say that Mr S intentionally left the ending of the play
very open - even quite pessimistic(?) Branagh doesn't. Even this is not crushing in itself and is thoroughly understandable in order to appeal to a bland, formulaic-loving Hollywood audience. But Branagh puts us through 3 separate endings to go along with this.
The first, a usual musical device is used - to end on a spirited chorus song and dance. Branagh treats us to this - even to the extent of bringing on all of the cast for their bows. Then however he lets the momentum down for Ending No. 2 (the end of Shakey's play) which is slow, poignant and moving. Finally, he revs us up once again to give us a 3rd ending which the play did not contain and in my mind was superfluous to the piece as a whole.
So what do I think? I would recommend it highly for the song and dance routines, the colours, the sets, the clever use of Shakespeare and actors getting pretty damned close to the bard (Alicia Silverstone really surprised me), but if you wanted your Shakey 'as is' this isn't the one for you. -
FilmSnobby8 August 2004This self-indulgent mess may have put the kibosh on Mr. Branagh's career as an adapter of Shakespeare for the cinema. (Released 4 years ago; not a peep of an adaptation since.) I just finished watching this on cable -- holy God, it's terrible.
I agree with the sentiment of a reviewer below who said that reviewing something so obviously and sadly awful is an ungenerous act that comes across as shrill. That being said, I'll take the risk, if only because *Love's Labour's Lost* is the perfect reward for those who overrated Mr. Branagh's directorial abilities in the past. Branagh has always been a pretty lousy director: grindingly literal-minded; star-struck; unforgivably ungenerous to his fellow actors (he loves his American stars, but loves himself more, making damn sure that he gets all the good lines).
Along those lines, the sad fact remains that *Love's Labour's Lost* is scarcely worse than the interminable, ghastly, bloated *Hamlet* from 1996. In fact, this film may be preferable, if only because it's about 1/3 the length. Branagh decided it would be a good idea to update this bad early work of Shakespeare's to the milieu of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Fred Astaire, yada yada. So he sets the thing in 1939, leaves about an eighth of the text intact in favor of egregious interpretations of Thirties' standards (wait till you see the actors heaved up on wires toward the ceiling during "I'm In Heaven"), and casts actors not known for their dancing or singing (himself included). The result is a disaster so surreal that one is left dumbfounded that they just didn't call a horrified stop to the whole thing after looking at the first dailies. I don't even blame the cast. To paraphrase Hamlet, "The screenplay's the thing!" NO ONE could possibly come off well in this hodge-podge: the illustrious RSC alumni fare no better than Alicia Silverstone. Who could possibly act in this thing?
Branagh's first mistake was in thinking that *Love's Labour's Lost* was a play worth filming. Trust me, it isn't. It's an anomaly in the Bard's canon, written expressly for an educated coterie of courtiers -- NOT the usual audience for which he wrote. Hence, there's a lot of precious (and TEDIOUS!) word-play, references to contemporary scholastic nonsense, parodies of Lyly's *Euphues* . . . in other words, hardly the sort of material to appeal to a broad audience. Hell, it doesn't appeal to an audience already predisposed to Shakespearean comedy. The play cannot be staged without drastically cutting the text and desperately "updating" it with any gimmick that comes to hand. Which begs the question, Why bother?
Branagh's second mistake was in thinking that Shakespeare's cream-pie of a play could be served with a side-order of Gershwin's marmalade. Clearly the idea, or hope, was to make an unintelligible Elizabethan exercise palatable for modern audiences by administering nostalgic American pop culture down their throats at the same time. But again, this begs the question, Why bother? -
arbarnes22 April 2016"Dancing With Shakespeare" is the direct translation of the title this film was given in Norway, and it is quite an apt description not only of the film's content, but the fundamental, gnawing weakness of the film: a play that above all plays with language seems ill at ease in a jacket marked "dancing". When you dance with Shakespeare you don't want to get out of step, and Love's Labour's Lost doesn't QUITE come together. And it's very sad because it's a film you so much WANT to work, because its heart is in the right place, and its intentions are good and creative and exciting and bold. Yes, it's enjoyable and frothy, silly and sincere in equal measures, beautifully shot with a camera that plays a part in the best Hollywood-golden-age manner, and sometimes it's very funny and works beautifully. But frequently the novelty of turning one of Shakespeare's most language-reliant comedies into a nostalgic romantic musical simply works against itself, and the result is then flat rather than uplifting. And this is not because people don't TRY –everyone involved in the film really gives it a good go, and clearly wants to try to make it come off. It very nearly does, but not quite –there is an unevenness about it that keeps us from getting fully engrossed in what we see, and this is the sort of film that needs that to work.
I was lucky enough to see this film originally at a special screening introduced by Kenneth Branagh and Alicia Silverstone, which boosted the preview audience into a higher gear of excitement and expectation than would be usual, so the experience was a little like the prospect of drinking lots of champagne –delightful, but somehow never as good as the idea of it!
Upon re-watching the film recently, I think the film in fact rather MORE resembles one of those very fancy, colourful cocktails you order when on holiday, with tiny umbrellas and exotic fruit and flowers sticking out and looking enormously tempting on the menu and when brought to you, but always somewhat impractical to drink and with ingredients that don't quite mix together satisfyingly enough. With Love's Labour's Lost the conceit of transforming Shakespeare's rich ideas into classic Hollywood musical numbers to bring across certain moods and emotional moments is a fun recipe, but it seems to me to clash too often with the actual text the film is based on. Now, admittedly much of Shakespeare's play is very obscure and difficult to understand compared to other plays he wrote, and severe editing was going to be inevitable; but putting in musical number after musical number as a replacement seems more a way of padding the film to arrive at a decent length rather than really moving the story along. In fact, many of the musical numbers –skillfully and cheekily staged though some of them are– just get in the way of things, and frequently I found myself wishing that Branagh had been even more faithful to Shakespeare and instead kept in more of the actual play itself. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of deleted scenes on the DVD of the film that sadly never made it to the final cut. I think these should have been kept in because they help make more sense of the story.
The diversity of performers that comprise the cast is quite interesting and there are some magnificent individual performances, though again the range of different styles doesn't always gel on screen. To a certain extent this was also true of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. Everyone is doing their own little film, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Timothy Spall's Don Armado is perhaps one of the most outrageous performances ever seen on screen, but it is totally in keeping with the character as written. And both he and Nathan Lane (as Costard the clown) bring an essential element of sadness to their otherwise comic roles that is very moving. But the double quartet of lovers that form the central romantic story of the film is a very mixed bag indeed. Branagh understandably gives the plum role of Berowne to himself and sells his Shakespeare with that admirable deftness that is uniquely his, but he is really too old for the part and this works against him here. I also feel at times he should have directed himself more astutely or had better assistance at doing so, for it is largely the scenes in which he does not appear that work best –simply because at such times he, as director, is able to concentrate fully on the other performances. The film also seems unable to break itself totally free from its staginess to become the truly filmic musical it aspires to be.
So, I am quite ambivalent about this film. I DO like and enjoy it, and applaud Branagh for tackling a lesser-known Shakespeare comedy, and with such gusto, but I SO wish I were able to like it more and be fully satisfied by it –and by the greater film that is in its heart.. -
wjfickling20 July 2001This ill-advised venture should have been abandoned in the planning stages. Although not usually regarded as one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, LLL is a work of youthful exuberance and probably presents Shakespeare's illustration of his astonishing verbal abilities. None of that is evident here. The text of the play is severely cut, and what is left is interspersed with truly wretched song and dance numbers. Moreover, the acting is atrocious, with the exception of the always reliable Nathan Lane, who has a minor role. Some of the actors, Alicia Silverstone for example, don't even attempt to hide their American accents, which are, needless to say, ill-suited for Shakespeare. Best to read the play instead.
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Cinemasitter5 April 2000Thanks heaven for Kenneth Branagh; without him, cinema would be far less interesting and rewarding. His adaptations of Shakespeare will undoubtedly be his lasting contribution to the history of film, and this is no exception.
Having never read the play, I was quite pleased that Love's Labour's Lost was as easy to follow as it was. This has a fair amount in common with Branagh's earlier Much Ado About Nothing; mainly the highs, lows and plain ridiculousness of love. That film also featured Hollywood star casting (Keanu Reeves among others), but like that film, does not suffer from it. Indeed, it only seems to boost the feel-good nature of this film, as the actors joyfully get their collective teeth stuck into some of Shakespeare's wonderful dialogue.
What really makes this a must-see though is how the text is broken up into easily digestible chunks, interspersed with classic musical numbers from the 1930s. I wasn't prepared for how much of a joy it was to see some wonderfully romantic songs (sung pretty well actually) being put to some great dance numbers - Adrian Lester in particular was good. If, like me, you're too young to feel particularly nostalgic towards a time and genre of film that has long since gone, then I urge you to watch this and learn. And if you are old enough to yearn for those days, then do yourself a favour and go see! -
jhsteel29 March 2004I was entertained and that was all I had hoped for with this. In terms of presenting Shakespeare to the masses, it would make you interested enough to go to the text and find out what was supposed to happen. In terms of entertainment value, it was wonderful. I love the classic songs from the musicals and they were performed in a fun way. I thought the singing and dancing was great, better than in Woody Allen's "Everybody says I Love You", which had the same sort of idea but featured people who couldn't sing. This lot were good singers for the most part, they looked great and the costumes, etc were also great to look at. I think Ken has taken a brave approach and got away with it, and LLL is the sort of play that needs a radical treatment. The idea is to get people interested in Shakespeare by whatever means possible. Worth seeing if you need something to cheer you up, not too demanding!
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tenor123 August 2003I usually count on Kenneth Branagh to make sense of Shakespeare, but this adaptation just doesn't do it for me. In the first place, KB makes a big mistake by casting himself. Passing himself off as a school boy when he's in his forties is the first unbelievable notion. Secondly, the casting of Alicia Silverstone is another misfortune. I hate to say it, but most of the time she is totally clueless as to what she is talking about. I guess KB didn't have time to explain it to her. She memorized the lines for sure, but there is nothing behind them. Finally, these great songs from the 30's and 40's just don't work in the context of Shakespeare. You have all this fluid 17th century language and poetry, then suddenly they're singing about doing the Charleston! One of the first rules of musical theater is that the lyrics of the songs have to match the style of the book, otherwise the mismatch is too jarring to the ear, as it was in this case. I did enjoy the choreography, especially the flying sequence in "Cheek to Cheek" and Nathan Lane can do no wrong wherever he turns up.
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artzau18 October 2003Interesting reading the reviews herein. The reviewers either loved or hated it. Some witty shots taken at Branagh's effort to make one of The Bard's weakest comedies into something enjoyable. I mean, c'mon. The play is a story of young men swearing off of love and being made to eat their vows by clever women through little games and switched clues. Hardly a deep plot with potentially tragic twists like Much Ado About Nothing, or confusion reigning during a lover in love with love as in Twelfth Night, or a knee slapper like Midsummer's Night Dream. So, Branagh, ever the innovator and risk-taker, makes it into a gishy late 30s musical with all the trappings (make that 'tappings') from lead into song and dance routines to coordinated smiling shapely swimmers peeling off like a deck of cards into a swimming pool. Busby Berkeley would have loved it, as would those guys like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Vincent Youmans who wrote those songs back in the 30s. OK, so the ending sucks but how else can you wind up this comedy? It's not Branagh's fault this play is Much Ado About Nothing; blame it on the Bard. He wrote it.
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zetes17 December 2001I applaud Kenneth Branagh for attempting this film. He's going for Shakespeare + Astaire and Rogers. Unfortunately, he doesn't succeed. Therefore, on the other hand, I must castigate Branagh for not planning it all out more carefully. The film has great potential, and is often a lot of fun. But where the tremendous energy goes slack, it simply becomes grating. In fact, it feels like the whole project was tossed together in as short a time as possible. Here are my complaints and suggestions:
1) Branagh clearly wanted to make a surreal, visually inventive film, but that inventiveness stops dead in its tracks every time it gets going. He'll be playing with the colors, dressing his characters in beautiful and vibrant shades, but then he won't compose his shots so that the color is at its maximum effectiveness. He just throws everything up on screen. The intent with the sets seems to be to make the film more theatrical. I think this is a mistake, especially when, at first, he was going for the visual inventiveness. Something neat will happen, like, for instance, when the men start floating in the air during "Cheek to Cheek". I was hoping for a ceiling dance or something, a midair dance, perhaps. Nope. They just float their in the air like Charlie and Grampa Joe, and flailing like a possessed character in the Evil Dead movies. And during the "No Business Like Show Business" scene, the camera is positioned straight above, ready for the Busby Berkeley number. But no. That shot lasts less than a second.
2) Which leads me to the second complaint: The editing is far too quick. It's headache-inducing at times. Not that the editing shouldn't be quick. It would work if it were paced a little better.
3) Branagh never really utilizes the potential of the older musicals he seems to want to be parodying. He's not bad in segueing into the songs; I was rather impressed on that account. Sometimes he blends the Shakespeare and the Gershwin, especially in the "They Can't Take That Away From Me," which may represent Ira Gershwin's best lyrics. But Branagh never does it for any reason other than a gimmick. He sets the story in 1939 Europe, with WWII breaking out across the continent. The Astaire-Rogers team went on hiatus at that point. It would have been so easy to follow the logical loss of innocence of that age. Instead, the musical stuff feels gimmicky and the WWII stuff feels terribly clunky (especially the climactic montage of the entire war).
4) What's with Alicia Silverstone? I almost want to leave her alone, because it's too easy to criticize. To tell you the truth, she's not as bad as I had envisioned, but she's definitely not up to it. I would say as much about Matthew Lillard, too, but his role is so incidental that it's not bothersome. He is actually in the movie all the time, but has little dialogue. Lillard does have one particularly embarrassing scene - although the embarrassment of its creation belongs to Branagh - where he humps his top hat. But, wait, what am I talking about? This is the guy who cast Keanu Reeves in a Shakespearian movie, not to mention the fact that he was playing Denzel Washington's brother.
But I don't want to tear into Branagh. In fact, I was serious when I wrote that I applaud him for attempting Love's Labours Lost. It's worth a look. Few more interesting movies have been made in the past few years, and I can think of no more interesting failure. 6/10. -
TheNorthernMonkee3 January 2004SPOILERS All too often, Hollywood's Shakespeare adaptations entertaining pieces of cinema. Beautifully shot they are well performed and faithful to the text. Films including Branagh's "Henry V" and 1993's "Much Ado About Nothing" are powerful pieces of work. Watching "Love's Labour's Lost" therefore, it's such a huge disappointment for expectation to be so hideously thrown to waste. Sadly "Love's Labour's Lost" is awful! The King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola) and his friends have forsaken drink and women for three years to focus on their studies. Plans begin to fall apart however when the enigmatic Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) and her entourage arrive. Soon love is in the air and philosophy is off the Prince's mind.
From the start, you realise that this film is not quite Shakespeare. Cleverly relocated into a 1930s musical by Ken Branagh, the plot is still there and the script remains, but now it has been sacrificed in favour of dire musical taste. Classics like "The Way You Look Tonight", "Let's Face The Music and Dance", "I'm in Heaven" are all destroyed by weak singing and a strong feel that they just don't belong here.
Aside from weak singing, we are also treated to an increasingly large number of awkward performances by regular stars. Ken Branagh and friends might enjoy making this film, but they provide us with a stomach turning collection of roles.
The main eight actors (four men & four women) are all equally dire, and the only positive on their behalf is a vast improvement on the truly dreadful Timothy Spall.
In fact, only one individual leaves the film worthy of any praise and that's the consistently magnificent Nathan Lane. Lane has proved over the years that he is a comedy genius and in this feature he once again adds an air of humour to the jester Costard.
There's little else to be said really. "Love's Labour's Lost" deserves mild praise for Branagh's original take on an old tale. Unfortunately though, that's where the positives end. Weakly acted, performed, sang and constructed, "Love's Labour's Lost" is perhaps the weakest Shakespeare adaptation of the last forty years. It should be avoided like the plague and should never have been made. A poor, disappointing choice by Branagh and here's hoping his next effort is better. -
agoodair24 November 2002And yet again Kenneth Branagh does the unthinkable with Shakespeare, and gets away with it! People are far too ready to show undue reverence to Shakespeare's plays, and to deride any attempt to make them more accessible; what they forget is that Shakespeare was writing for the people (not a small cultural elite), thankfully Branagh has understood this. Compare his version of Henry V to the Olivier original, both have their merits, but I feel the Bard would identify more with the more recent version - let's face it, if he was alive now, he'd probably be writing scripts for Eastenders!
In "Love's Labours Lost" Branagh has captured the fun of the play; the updating works (although just barely), and the choice of music is inspirational (kind of a Bard version of "Singing in the Rain", if you can forgive the pun)! Yes, many of the actors had never done this sort of thing before, but you can see they had fun trying!
It seems invidious to single out any performances, but there were a few that stood out; every review I have ever read heaps unstinting praise on Adrian Lester, and they are right to do so. However, let us not forget the incomparable talents of Nathan Lane, the joy of seeing Timothy Spall have a chance to go completely over the top (makes a change from all the Mike Leigh films!) and the sheer radiance of Natascha McElhone, with whom I am now totally besotted! And a special mention for another fine performance from Richard Briers, as Kenneth Branagh helps him prove (yet again) that he is so much more than Tom Good.
Kenneth Branagh is often accused of being a 'luvvy' (an image which he lampooned so well in the recent Harry Potter film, well done Ken!); he's much more than that, he's a genuine original, somebody with a passion for film and theatre and the ability to share that passion with the rest of us. This film is (along with "Amelie") one of my never-failing pick-me-ups; I look forward to whatever he has next in store for us!!! -
Bologna King3 January 2001It's not such a bad idea to put musical numbers in a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare himself put songs into virtually all of his plays, even the tragedies. And the comedies usually ended with a song and a dance. If you're going to do that, why not make it songs from a classic period of twentieth-century songwriting?
Kenneth Branagh knows this. He used a song as a recurring theme in Much Ado, and as a climax in Henry V, and they were both awesomely effective. But they were just one song; they complemented the action and didn't try to substitute themselves for it.
The problems with song in drama is that unless it's some kind of recitativo sequence like they have in opera (where they have no choice but to sing the drama) the song doesn't move the plot forward any. This is apparent in the musical genre; dialogue sets up the situation which the characters comment on in song. The song serves to underline the emotional states of the characters which have been revealed by the dialogue and action.
Obviously, if you want a lot of songs, you'd better have a very simple plot and a few shallow characters. There isn't time to deal with anything more complex. Conversely, If you have a complex plot and a multitude of characters (as in a Shakespeare play) you'd better go easy on the songs.
Unfortunately Branagh didn't.
If he had picked the three most effective songs and stopped there, this would have been a much better movie. Certainly, "They Can't Take That Away From Me" brilliantly underlined the emotions at the end of the play. The segué from Berowne's speech into "Cheek to Cheek" was also smooth and effective.
The problem is that so many musical numbers are jammed in here that large chunks of the play have been removed, leaving gaping voids which musical numbers, being unable to advance the plot, are powerless to fill. Nevertheless KB tries. So we get a scene anticipating the visit of the men to the women, disguised as Russians, a totally irrelevant dance routine, and a scene resolving the difficulties that arose when the men came disguised as Russians. It's like the projectionist put on reel 3 instead of reel 2. The same thing happens when we are promised "The Pageant of the Nine Worthies", we see the preparation for it, the audience arriving, then suddenly everyone's singing "There's No Business Like Show Business", and after, Berowne says, "Worthies, away." What Worthies? What time warp did they disappear into?
Shakespeare knew full well that the romantic plot was light and that the lovers were virtually indistinguishable from each other, so he wrote in a half dozen stock comedy characters from the Commédia dell'arte to provide some relief. Here the musical numbers have caused the dialogue to be cut away to practically nothing, and we get no sense of the nature of the characters. Moth, for example is a wisecracking servant who can get away with it because his boss, Armado, is so stupid. Every single one of Moth's lines is cut and he remains as some sort of convenient victim for slapstick jokes.
Replacing the comedy relief with yet more musical numbers makes the viewer wonder what the heck he bothered even casting these parts for. Presumably so he could get Richard Briers in the cast somewhere.
What's even more irksome is that, while Branagh's singing voice is pretty good for a guy who's not supposed to be a singer, and some of the dance routines are quite good for people who aren't supposed to be dancers, some of them, such as the attempt to imitate Busby Berkeley or the scene with Holofernia and Nathaniel are so bad as to be painful. (Indeed this latter is so awful one suspects irony, but why? What would be the point?) It would have been so much easier just to tell Geraldine McEwan she doesn't have to dance.
To me, had the song-and dance numbers been cut back, this would have been a first-rate film. Nathan Lane did a good job of what was left of Costard's part. Branagh is effective as always with the Shakespearean speeches (all the speeches except Berowne's are cut to make room for the music). Making Nathaniel and Holofernes of opposite sexes works. Nor is it improper to my mind to suggest that the men do grow up as a result of this encounter, face reality, and get the girls. The Pathé-style newsreels (so necessary to explain what's going on since you can't figure it out otherwise) and the whole 30's feel worked very well with the theme of the unreality of the men's attitudes as opposed to the grim reality of death which intrudes at the end. The contrast between the Astaire-Rogers world and the world of the Depression and impending war mirrors this very well.
Either go into this prepared with a summary of the plot or forget about trying to make sense of it and bathe in the Hollywood froth. -
rosian5 August 2007I do get irritated with modern adaptations of Shakespeare when the director can't make his mind up whether to use the original or to update it. If it's using the original words in an updated setting, that's particularly tricky if set in the 20th or 21st century although it can work OK in period styles, eg the Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night set late Victorian very effectively. It could work with the 30's setting if only there had been far less of the song and dance and far more of Shakespeare's text. Unfortunately, it just ends up being a pretty trivial though very pleasant show.
Another problem is Branagh himself. I agree he's far too old to play one of the students but more important, he's such an experienced Shakespearean actor that in spite of all his efforts to be just another student, his strength of acting shows all the time. Of course he should have played the King - no problem in having a mature student King surrounded by younger students. Instead we had a pleasant but unimposing actor for the King, thus an unimposing so-called King with no Kingly attributes.
The amount of song and dance, which I found tedious in spite of the nice songs and pleasant enough dancing, unfortunately meant the great Shakespearean dialogue had to be cut down drastically. So the whole thing ends up a trivial and mild confection, and I got very bored, including with the comic turns, and was glad when it ended. Branagh has not done Shakespeare justice in this production.
Accolades however to Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan, absolutely splendid as the older couple. -
howard.schumann28 November 2005There have been successful musicals based on Shakespeare plays such as Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story. In Love's Labour's Lost, however, Kenneth Branagh's attempt to marry Shakespeare to the romantic musical genre of the 30s and 40s, though it has an appealing innocence and charm, doesn't quite come off. The musical numbers such as Just The Way You Look Tonight, I've Got a Crush on You, There's No Business Like Show Business and others from Berlin, Porter, Kern, and Gershwin are timeless of course, yet the songs and dance routines are inserted randomly throughout the film, often without connection to the story. To accommodate the tunes and the elaborate dance routines, two-thirds of the original Shakespearean text has been cut and the result is much good music but Shakespeare in name only.
The story itself is slight and the influence of the Italian commedia dell' arte is apparent. The setting is the fictional kingdom of Navarre but Branagh updates it to pre-war Europe in the 30s using parodies of Movietone newsreels to frame the action. The young King (Alessandro Nivola) and his three friends, Longaville (Matthew Lillard), Dumaine (Adrian Lester) and the courtly Berowne (Kenneth Branagh) take an oath that they will devote themselves to an ascetic regimen of study for three years, renouncing the pleasures of women, sleeping only three hours a night, and fasting once a week. Berowne is "the merry madcap lord" whose " eye begets occasion for his wit; For every object that the one doth catch, The other turns into a moving jest." Of course, the three friends quickly yield to temptation as the Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) arrives with three women, Maria (Carmen Ejogo), Katherine (Emily Mortimer) and Rosaline (Natascha McElhone). The men fall in love and spend most of the time breaking their oath of abstinence. The theme of oath breaking so prominent in the play may be a gentle ribbing of Queen Elizabeth who, when lodging at Cambridge for five nights in 1564, violated her 1561 proclamation that no woman would ever be permitted to stay overnight at an English university or abbey.
As usual, there are clowns inserted for comic relief: the swashbuckling Spanish soldier Don Adriano de Armado, played by Timothy Spall, and Costard, played by Nathan Lane. As Armado confesses that he is in love with Jaquenetta (Stefania Rocca), "a base wench", and Berowne is smitten with Rosaline, an interchange of letters is delivered to the wrong parties and the comic relief soon turns into camp. Love's Labour's Lost is an early work, probably written in the 1580s, that seems to mock the affected style of writing known as Euphuism that flourished in that period. Most scholars agree, however, that touches were added that may date to the early 1590s. Interestingly, the play is not recognized as one of Shakespeare's best and was not performed for two hundred years after its opening. The Branagh film is its first cinematic version.
Although the play contains some colorful characters, there is not enough time to allow us to feel invested in any of them and the acting, particularly that of Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Lillard, does not measure up to the standards set by Branagh in his other Shakespeare adaptations. The greatness of the thirties musicals lay in the superior acting and dancing of people like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Without professional singing and dancing, and actors worthy of the bard, updating the genre to the present day is an interesting bit of nostalgia but ends up being more of a spoof than an homage. -
neshura17 May 2002My roommate and I sat down to watch this movie expecting Good Things(TM) from Kenneth Branagh, Nathan Lane, the Weinstein brothers, and the array of talented artists retained to create this movie.
It opens in a fresh and original manner -- the retro newsreel draws one in, seeming to promise a clever interpretation of a Shakespearean comedy. After enjoying "Clueless" and "10 Things I Hate About You", which are charming (and admittedly fluffy) interpretations of classic literature, I was looking forward to Kenneth Branagh's take on this play. The play was, in fact, not an interpretation, but a literal recitation of the lines of play. I hesitate to call it a performance. A train wreck of taste would be more appropriate.
Aspects of this movie that were good include the costumes and the sets, and the performances by the upper tier actors. I do not include Matthew Lillard in this tier. In my mental construction of these tiers, Matthew Lillard is wandering somewhere in the basement wondering out loud to himself why he always seems to have a stuffy nose.
And while I am on the topic of actors whose grasp of delivery is tenuous at best, Alicia Silverstone (in the lead actress role as a French princess) southern-california's her way through her lines in a way that will make you shudder or cry or possibly fall to your knees and beg Ol Willy's forgiveness for the stomach-turning butchery of his poetry. It seemed at times as if the king would have to be surreptitiously wiping his face at regular intervals, since Ms. Silverstone started spraying her lines whenever the read rate leaped above "really slow".
The attempts at farce, e.g. a stuffed sheep falling over suddenly, rubber chickens, and a mortifying and incomprehensible performance of Don Something-schmermen-vermen-moustache, were in most cases just flat. One out of five caused me to make a hiccupy noise that might have been taken for a chuckle, though I wouldn't have wanted to lay odds either way.
I watched the DVD through the first eight chapters, but could not bear to finish watching this movie. It was ponderous and embarrassing -- taking something beautiful and human and elegant and worth the effort to understand (Shakespeare) and slathering heavy makeup and clown shoes on it in order to "relate" to a modern audience. It is dismaying to be a part of this modern audience and to be thought of in such an ungenerous fashion. Intelligence and soul in a story shine right through the screen, but call for a light touch. This movie could have been really good. It just plain wasn't. -
ruby_fff10 July 2000So it is, right at the first frame next to the title, "a romantic musical comedy" is the tagline -- up front with no misconception whatsoever for everyone to see. The entrance is grand in Patrick Doyle's scoring style, along with the credit treatment on red satin and all. What an invitation! 'Like it already. Shakespeare would approve and applaud.
It's truly "there's no business like show business like no business I know." Here Shakespeare and his comedy of errors, a-mixing and a-matching love signals at play again. This common "love bug" (literally so) theme is ever present: in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", in "Much Ado About Nothing", it's all love wires a-blindly and mistaken assumptions a-crisscrossing. 'Tis all seeds of "Love's Labour's Lost."
The outstanding ensemble cast, the charming pairings of the lovers, the song and dance numbers (including a sizzling "Let's face the music and dance"), the costumes and sets, Branagh's script and the "Cinetone News" segments, his impeccable direction, and Patrick Doyle, a vital collaborator who provided the attractive score -- collectively made this romantic musical comedy most entertaining.
Branagh's passion in showing off Shakespeare in film media for all to enjoy is beyond evident. It all seem so facile, yet obviously there's plenty of love in nourishing this dream, lots of labour unrelenting from all involved in this production, and the lost would be Branagh's total steadfast lost in realizing this project -- love, labour, 'lost' shiningly shows. He's out done himself!
If you like musicals, romantic comedies, light-hearted Shakespeare -- go for it. The only special effect here is Branagh's magic. -
bardlover15 November 2007I love Shakespeare. I really do. I also am also a huge fan of Kenneth Branagh. His Henry V, Hamlet, Much Ado About You, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night are all excellent. I feel the problem here is that he tried far too hard to make Shakespeare marketable. I love musicals, especially old ones, as well, but I find something lacking in the combination. And, as much as I adore Kenneth, he cannot dance. This is not Shakespeare's best comedy in the first place, but even Branagh's ambition couldn't save this disaster. The ending is happier than the play's cliffhanger-like promises, which I like. That is about all I like.
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WendyOh!8 October 2002I really really wanted to like this film, having read the play not too long before, but I just didn't enjoy it. There are many many cuts from the play, which isn't bad- but the cuts are replaced with songs that are poorly sung and danced. The one exception being Adrian Lester, who shines brighter than all the other actors who are game and bouyant, but for the most part miscast. It felt a bit like watching my college production- well meaning, and it so wants to be liked that it's hard not to, but still- it's just not very good. Stick with Richard III or Branaghs own Henry V if you want a good film of a Shakespeare film.
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niteman16 June 2000Something about Love's Labour's Lost is causing critics to sniff and huff and puff like never before. The dance numbers aren't perfectly in sync and the music isn't perfectly performed, they sneer. Shakespeare and Gershwin don't mix. It's sheer fluff. It's bizarre.
Thus saith the critics. The forest that they're missing with their shrubs of discontentment is the overwhelming charm and infectuous fun of this silly little film. Yes, when Branagh and his cronies do a dance number it isn't lock-step choreography (one arm a little high, perhaps, one foot off the beat a bit). When Alicia Silverstone and her ladies-in-waiting cavort and giggle in a pool, they're not quite Esther Williams and company. Instead of picture-perfect Fred & Ginger, they look like real people dancing and singing because dancing and singing are fun. And unless you're Ebenezer Scrooge, The Grinch, or a movie critic, you'll have fun, too.
That's not to say the movie is just sloppy silliness. Branagh stages some gorgeous set pieces, including gondolas lit by Japanese lanterns, a prop-plane goodbye straight out of Casablanca, and a production number in which the film's silliest character kicks the moon like a big silver soccer ball. It's about a third Shakespeare, a third 30's musical, and a third Looney Tunes. What's odd is that the styles mix so well under Branagh's direction.
If you want a picture-perfect musical, rent "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" or some other dull thing. If you want perfect Shakespeare, rent Branagh's "Hamlet." If, however, you want a movie to make you believe in movies again -- if you want to kick up your heels, laugh out loud, and float out of a movie theater humming Cole Porter -- see this movie. -
sddavis634 July 2001An updated telling of one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays has some wonderful moments, but overall falls a bit short of the mark.
I have never been convinced that Shakespeare should ever be updated. Written at a particular time within a specific historical context, to update Shakespeare is to force his work to fit into what is, for all intents and purposes, an alien world. This particular attempt is at times extremely confusing. The movie is set in September of 1939, yet much of the language used remains Shakespearian. There is a general war about to break out in Europe, but it is a fictionalized conflict and not the Second World War of history. The France of 1939 in this movie has a king; the real France of 1939 was a republic. Question: why update the play and then completely re-invent history to accommodate the update? I have to say also that the background music was also a problem to me. I found it rather loud and distracting, sometimes drowning out the dialogue (particularly problematic when the dialogue is offered in an unfamiliar dialect.)
I can't come up with an answer for the second problem, but there is one excellent reason for the update: the song and dance numbers! This may be Shakespeare updated, but it is also very much a retro-type movie, hearkening viewers back to the charming musicals of a bygone era. The dance scenes (and especially a solo performance by Adrian Lester as Dumaine, expressing his love for the lady of his dreams) are wonderful and worth watching in themselves. The movie also features very funny performances from Nathan Lane as Costard - essentially the king's fool - and, in a more limited role, from Timothy Spall as Don Armado, the Spanish count. Both demonstrate that they have great talent in the area of slapstick comedy.
Overall, there are many charming features to this movie, and it is definitely worth a look. I would give this one a 6/10. -
MoneyMagnet18 April 2006When I first heard Kenneth Branagh was going to make this play as a 30s musical, I was thrilled. As strange as it may sound, it's a terrific concept - the idea of Shakespeare's language and bursting into song not being mutually exclusive. And in fact, I was given the soundtrack (with dialog) of this movie before it came out, and it all seemed to work well and sound quite charming. Well, the music works, mostly. But it's about the only thing in the movie that does work.
I like Branagh's work in general very much despite its rough edges, but this movie is an inexplicable failure -- not due to the concept or music or even the slightness of the play itself, but wholly due to Branagh's strangely uninspired direction. The indifferent acting from a few of the leads is forgivable; the bad singing even more so; although the bad dancing is sometimes quite hard to forgive. But what really kills this movie is that it seems to totally lack Branagh's usual gusto as a filmmaker. The concept may be audacious, but the staging is completely undercooked. Right from the opening credits, which are just weirdly static -- headshots against red satin?? -- where is the Ken Branagh who gave us those fantastic opening credit sequences from DEAD AGAIN and MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?? (Another early warning signal of this movie's inertness is an early scene where a guy is riding a bicycle so slowly that it's a wonder he doesn't fall over.) The camera work is boring, the atmosphere of the settings extremely artificial and static, giving the whole movie a stilted, deadened air that doesn't remind one of a 30s screwball comedy so much as it reminds one of a... bad movie from any era. None of the actors (Branagh included) seem to know why they're there; nobody seems to be having any FUN (except maybe Adrian Lester). Plus, the movie looks as if it were made on a painfully low budget - it probably had a higher budget than actually seems to appear on the screen. Only rarely do we get the slightest glint of the old Ken Branagh - the beginning of the final musical number is very nice and has real feeling.
This is probably the one movie I've seen where, when it was over, I desperately wished for a DO-OVER... although those don't happen in Hollywood and certainly not for quirky little Shakespeare movies. What a lovely and unusual concept for a Shakespeare movie, down the drain because of weirdly bad direction by a guy who, even if he's not Orson Welles, usually has a mastery of the basics. Come back to us, Ken...