As you like it
HBO/The Movie Network
the national post

Kenneth Branagh's film of As You Like It tells the story very well. The problem is, in this play there isn't much story to tell. Once past the first act, it's mainly mood and wit and bitter-sweet philosophizing about love, and here--partly through casting, partly through a wide sentimental streak -- the show falls short.

Branagh takes the privilege of film to fill in the parts that Shakespeare left out; whenever possible, he substitutes action for exposition which, given the medium, is a good thing. Indeed, he starts before the play does, showing us Rosalind and her father the duke, pre-banishment, surrounded by friends, family and entourage, happily watching a Kabuki show. The reason they're doing this is that they're members of the English colony in Japan, living in a comfortable enclave of their own, following the host country's "opening up" to foreign commerce at the end of the 19th century. All this has to be explained in the opening titles, which is suspicious in itself; a relocation idea that worked wouldn't need so much nervous justification. Anyway, the performance is interrupted and the domestic peace shattered when hostile warriors, having gained entrance underwater, swarm in and dispossess the good duke in favour of his not-good brother. Rosalind has to watch her father brutally struck to the ground, before he gets up and makes his escape to the Forest of Arden. Apart from that, my lady, how did you enjoy the play?

Well, conceivably the Kabuki cross-dressing convention gave her the inspiration for her own male disguise when she, too, is kicked out of court. But nothing is made of the connection; nor is the tension between Asian and European used to point up the play's own contrast of court and forest. When we get to the woods, we find them peopled, apparently indiscriminately, with representatives of both hemispheres. Corin and Audrey are of the West, Phebe, Silvius and William of the East; they're all well acted, Phebe in particular, but there doesn't seem to be any pattern at work. If Branagh wanted to do a multicultural production, he should surely have just gone ahead and done it, rather than setting up a rarefied historical setting that was bound to get us asking specific questions. By the end of the play, the Japanese element has been pretty much forgotten, while all it has yielded en route are a few pretty pictures, and the casting of Charles the wrestler as a sumo champ. He's a silent mountain of a man, whose lines have all been reassigned to someone else. This makes the report on his condition after his defeat by Orlando ("he cannot speak, my lord" -- but he never has) funny in ways that may not have been intended.

After all that build-up, the actual wrestling match proves disappointingly perfunctory. On the other hand, we do get (very briefly) to see Orlando fight the lioness that's about to devour his brother Oliver, and that's a lot more fun than hearing the repentant Oliver tell us about it afterwards. As a textual editor, Branagh earns full marks, cutting and rearranging the text to maximum effect and obviously understanding the bits that are left. He gives his actors chances and some of them respond in kind. Brian Blessed, playing both dukes, takes the two-sides- of-the-same-personality shtick to the limit, serene and genial in one frame, a neurotic tyrant in the next, while Alfred Molina makes a splendidly snobbish Touchstone, a bottom-pincher in town and a determined seducer in the country. He is also able, something I've never seen before, to reduce the friendly shepherd Corin to a state of terror, turning their discussion on manners into an interrogation.

The de Boys boys are black, and excellent: David Oyelowo gets more vigour and humour out of Orlando than most actors manage, and Adrian Lester (on familiar green turf, since he was once a highly- praised Rosalind in an all-male As You) does as well by the even sorrier role of Oliver. Their squabbling is powerful, and so is their making-up. There the compliments have to stop. Kevin Kline obviously has some idea of the melancholy Jaques, but his chances of communicating it are ruined by his own habit of breaking up each of his lines three ways, and by his director's bright idea of keeping the camera roaming around him during his big speech; all the world may be a stage, but we don't have to circumnavigate it. He's also the one character who's harmed by the cuts; there seems in the end no reason for him to have been in the play. A Rosalind would have to be truly appalling to make you reach the same conclusion, but Bryce Dallas Howard barely scratches the surface either of the heroine's passionate abandon or of iced-water good sense. I also wondered why, since she's American, she's speaking nasal estuary English (that's cockney minus the flavour), but maybe she's trying to fit in with Romola Garai's Celia. It's a flat sound anyway, and it drains the mock-wooing scenes -- which are the heart of the play -- of much of their richness. The music department tries to compensate with slurpy underscoring, but that just cheapens the play. The final reconciliations raise the customary goose-bumps, so the play still works, but the glow is far fainter than it should be.