Reviewed in Shakespeare Quarterly

By Mark Thornton Burnett

Samuel Crowl’s illuminating study offers a much-needed critical discussion of the revival of Shakespeare on film over the course of the 1990s. Crowl offers sensitively-turned appreciations of fifteen Shakespeare films made between 1989 and 2001. Pulling together the multiple strands of the argument is the figure of Kenneth Branagh, who is enlisted both as a material influence on filmmakers and as a conceptual template for the volume as a whole. Branagh’s endeavor to find a “congenial film style for Shakespeare” (12) has inspired a rush of related ventures in other media and genres. Elements such as international casting, for instance, which have done much to bring Shakespeare and the cineplex audience into a new proximity, are traced to Branagh’s generative effects. This is one context engagingly investigated by Crowl; another is Hollywood itself, understood less as an institutional mechanism than as a “stylistic mode” (7). Alert to Hollywood’s aesthetic requirements and production values, Crowl is also aware of issues such as financing and the involvement of particular corporate controls. Contextualization, indeed, is a notable feature of this work, with Crowl consistently providing historical—and theatrical—anchorage for his approach. In this sense Shakespeare at the Cineplex constitutes a major advance on another classic in the field—Jack Jorgen’s Shakespeare on Film (1977)—since it is always fully informed of pressures and influences, conversations and intersections. Crowl problematizes Jorgan’s tripartite categorization of Shakespeare films as “realistic,” “theatrical,” or “filmic,” proposing a more complex arrangement whereby all Shakespeare films are seen as responding both explicitly and implicitly to popular models and techniques.

Crowl is particularly strong when charting the ways in which Branagh combines and applies a multiplicity of filmic elements - from screwball comedy, as in the case of Much Ado About Nothing, to vaudeville and Broadway conventions, as in the case of Love’s Labor’s Lost. These observations are salutary in and of themselves; what gives Crowl’s perspective a distinctive edge, however, is his admirably supported claim that Branagh’s ouevre embraces contradictions without becoming incoherent. Crowl departs from the critical consensus in order to cleanly describe the interpretive reverberations set up in Branagh’s Henry V and to see his Hamlet as a controlled visual and verbal achievement. Throughout this discussion, Crowl locates continuities (for example, he identifies Branagh always as a type of soldier) and utilizes filmic methodologies, as when he comments insightfully on visual vocabularies, the emotional rhythms attached to unbroken shooting sequences, and the resonances of unusual camera angles.

As the Branagh chapters unfold, we are also given treatments of a host of related films, treatments that are characterized by a gimlet-eyed attention to detail and a shrewd sense of the general prospectus. Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet is scrutinized as a type of family romance that, indebted to opera, enlists vertical and horizontal structures along with brooding landscapes to communicate its theme. Similarly, the multiple meanings of the Cornish setting in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night receive enlightened analysis in a discussion that also discovers this film’s autumnal filmic economy. The careers of particular directors are expertly spotlighted, as in the chapter on Christine Edzard, which both detects countercultural elements in her As You Like It and interprets the audience’s role in her The Children’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The chapter on Julie Taymor’s Titus is a model of sophistication, since Crowl concentrates with a lively brio on such matters as materialist imagery and external/internal relations. The chapter on Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet is just as cogent, with Crowl revealing a fine sensitivity to the director’s versatility and manipulation of filmic parallels. But this is not to suggest that Shakespeare at the Cineplex ends with cinematic affirmation; on the contrary, Crowl is keen to observe instances of unsuccessful translation from stage to film. Hence, in a chapter on film versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Crowl identifies Adrian Noble’s puzzling elimination of female elements and Michael Hoffman’s failure to integrate a bewildering spectrum of cultural and historical allusions, which results in a series of “jarring discords rather than unexpected harmonies” (181). Likewise, while Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s “Romeo + Juliet” is recognized as alternating between church, corporation, and street, the film is also criticized for unresolved constructions of contemporary ethnicity.

In this sense, a welcome contribution of Shakespeare at the Cineplex is its genuinely critical involvement with its material. No chapter is condemnatory; instead, each is gauged to acknowledge the merits and demerits of particular filmic utterances. For example, Crowl appreciates Iago/Branagh’s treatment of the camera “as the mirror that feeds his narcissism” (100) in Oliver Parker’s Othello; yet at the same time, Crowl faults the director for an inability to “find a coherent pattern for his bright visual ideas” (93). Typical, too, is the chapter on Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine’s Richard III , which is judged to possess much value, despite being overwhelmed by “visual details” and “dissipated by décor” (109). Shakespeare at the Cineplex is not an openly theoretical work; it is, however, imbued with a theoretical agenda that incorporates postmodernism, homoeroticism, postcolonialism, Mikhail Bakhtin, and ideas of translation. The book’s theoretical grounding is matched by its knowledge of theatrical history. A cardinal virtue of Shakespeare at the Cineplex is its capacity for linking cinematic work with stage analogues or origins, demonstrating that such connections are neither neat nor predictable. The book also includes interviews with three leading theatrical/cinematic practitioners—Kenneth Branagh, Christine Edzard, and Adrian Noble. To such impressive features one must add Crowl’s willingness to seize on unexpected correspondences and his seasoned reflections on filmmaking in general, all of which serve to confirm that Shakespeare at the Cineplex will stand as an unparalleled disquistion on the subject.

Shakespeare Quarterly
Vol. 56, No. 1
Spring 2005