Love's Labour's Lost is a 2000 adaptation of the comic play of the same name by William Shakespeare, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh. It was the first feature film to be made of this lesser-known comedy. Branagh's fourth film of a Shakespeare play (he did not direct the 1995 Othello, although he did play Iago), it was a box-office and critical disappointment.[citation needed]
Branagh's film turns Love's Labour's Lost into a romantic Hollywood musical. Set and costume design evoke the Europe of 1939; the music (classic Broadway songs of the 1930s) and newsreel-style footage are also chief period details. The cast includes Shakespearean veterans such as Timothy Spall, Richard Briers and Geraldine McEwan, alongside Hollywood actors Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Lillard and Broadway and West End stars such as Nathan Lane.
Critics and audiences responded coolly to Branagh's attempt to combine a rarely-produced play with the long-moribund genre of musical film. As a result of its poor commercial performance, Miramax shelved its three-picture deal with Branagh, who subsequently returned to Shakespeare with As You Like It in 2006.
Synopsis
The King of Navarre has vowed to avoid romantic entanglements in order to spend three years in study and contemplation. His chief courtiers agree to follow him in this vow, though one (Berowne) argues that they will not be able to fulfill this plan.
Berowne's claim is proven correct almost instantly. The Princess of France comes to Navarre to discuss the status of the province of Aquitaine. Though the King does not grant them access to his palace (they are forced to camp outside), each of the courtiers falls in love with one of her handmaidens, and the King falls in love with the Princess herself.
The men attempt to hide their own loves and expose those of their fellows. At the end, after a masked ball in which the pairs of lovers are comically mismatched, all the amours are revealed. However, before the expected nuptial consummation, the women demand that the men prove they are serious by waiting for them.
The comic underplot, in which Costard and others attempt to stage a play (rather like that of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, though with more pretensions to learning) is severely curtailed, as is the boasting of the Spaniard, Don Armado.
Production
Branagh became interested in the play during his 1984 season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, when he had played the King of Navarre. From that period, he was familiar with Harley Granville-Barker's famous essay arguing that Love's Labour's Lost could be treated as highly stylized, with the dialogue and action treated with an almost musical sense of rhythm. Branagh took this insight a step further and turned the play into a musical, going much further in his adaptation of the play than he had ever done in his Shakespeare films, and risking the alienation of both audiences and serious critics. This decision also allowed him to revisit the Hollywood film musicals he had loved in his youth.
Branagh cast the film without much regard for singing or dancing ability; as in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, the film was meant to highlight energy and enthusiasm rather than smooth competence. Of the cast, only Nathan Lane was known primarily for musical work. Preproduction was dominated by rigorous dancing and singing coaching.
As the film would run barely over ninety minutes, Branagh reversed the philosophy he had used with Hamlet (that is, to keep every word), and instead made major cuts in the playtext. The released version retains only about a quarter of Shakespeare's lines; although Branagh managed to include all seventeen of the original speaking roles, some (most notably among the lower-class characters) are cut almost to nothing.
Reception
The movie received generally unfavorable reviews. Few went as far as David Edelstein, who called the movie "unfathomably awful". Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the critical consensus as "Interesting idea, poor execution."
Roger Ebert called the film "winsome, charming, sweet and slight" and ultimately as "light and winning, and yet somehow empty." Kenneth Turan complained that the film "should be fun but isn't . . . . worst of all perhaps is its smug air of pleasure at how clever it thinks it's being," an opinion also delivered in a more muted way by A. O. Scott. More commonly, critics complained about the casting. Nathan Lane as Costard received favorable notice, as did Adrian Lester. But the leads (Silverstone and Nivola) were generally panned; Stanley Kauffmann, who had been highly complimentary of Branagh's four-hour film version of Hamlet, called them "inadequate in every way." John Simon complained as well of cutting that left the film's best actors (he mentions McEwan and Briers) with little to do.
But the least-liked aspect of the film was also its most notable. The song-and-dance routines received scattered positive notices: Scott, for instance, praised the last one, "They Can't Take That Away from Me", as almost rescuing the entire movie. Other reviewers applauded the energy and enthusiasm of the performers. For the most part, however, critics viewed the musical aspects as poorly executed and unenjoyable. The amateur nature of the performances harmed the movie; more, the marked contrast between Shakespeare's language and the style of the songs damaged its coherence.
Kauffmann and Simon both noted that the film's ending, in which newsreel footage shows the men going off to fight in World War II, was grotesquely at odds with the frothy tone of the movie it concluded. While most reviewers reserved judgment on the direction of Branagh's art, Richard Corliss suggested that the disaster indicated that the director was creatively spent.
Cast
Some of the characters in the film adaptation are not in the original script. Gaston, Isabelle, Eugene, Jaques, Beatrice, Hyppolyte, Celimene, and Sophie are not mentioned in the play.
Starring
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