Much Ado About Nothing

Josh Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is distinguished by the cast’s superb delivery of Shakespeare’s lines, the speed and imagination of its staging and shooting, and the resonance of its surprises.

For example, it’s a Technicolour movie shot entirely in black and white. Whatever its intentions, its effects include a form of distancing for an audience as accustomed to colour photography as it is unaccustomed to Elizabethan English.  Also, the lack of colour in the image allows us to invest more attention to the colour in the language. It also reminds us that the play’s moral landscape is in lifelike black and white, however we may rationalize our lapses from sense and virtue. 

Consistent with the draining of colour is the relative lack of individuation in the cast. A more naturalistic production would make Hero’s old uncle an older man. It would have put the returning soldiers in bemedaled uniforms and the constables in cop suits. Instead the court and the respectable citizenry look the same. The police play the visual colloquialism of a TV series detective team. Only two actors stand apart, the priest and the obligatory Ethiope (whose sole function is to expose even the reformed Claudio’s insensitivity when he atones for his gullibility).

The play shares with Othello and so much other Shakespeare the comedy and the tragedy of our essential inability to apprehend truth. Our very instruments of understanding are our points of vulnerability. After all, Claudio and governor Leonato are given (Othello’s) “ocular proof” of the virtuous woman’s infidelity. Their perception betrays them because they see a falsehood they believe to be reality. Our senses mislead us. Our confidence undermines us.  

Our vulnerability in perception is redoubled by our vulnerability in language.  The malapropism-prone constable Dogberry embodies the theme of confusion. His every statement is the reverse of what he intends to say. When the suspect calls him an ass he wants it recorded that he is an ass. That is, he posits her statement as the truth -- which, as it happens, is true in this instance if not in the larger ones. But because his flaw is at the heart of the human condition the play’s justice and redemption stumble out despite his misunderstanding. 

Whedon pushes this point when he explicitly implicates us in the drama. All these  points serve to complicate our reading of the film. We are often confused or uncertain. At several points the blonde court photographer aims her large black lensed camera out at us. (A black lens is unlikely to enlighten.) We’re as much a helpless, misled witness as each major character in the fiction, whether in the triangle of Hero’s betrayal or in the self-discovery to which the tricks upon Benedick and Beatrice fortunately lead them. 

In Elizabethan English pronunciation the title would also have been read as Much Ado About Noting. Much of the action involves overhearing, but that device for stolen knowledge is here turned to deception, negative in Claudio’s case, positive in Beatrice and Benedick’s. The advantage of overhearing -- or spying -- proves a disadvantage. Claudio is a special clod for being tricked twice into believing Don John’s poison, once in the snorkel scene, then outside Hero’s window. Of course we as the audience are eavesdropping on the film. We’re outside witnesses so Whedon plays on us all the deception and confusion the play imposes on its characters.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this is Beatrice’s lovemaking. The pre-title scene shows a lover leaving her bedroom at dawn. Later a montage of sex scenes flash through her mind. If we read these shots as evidence of her sexual activity then we commit the very folly for which we readily condemn Claudio. However worldlier and wittier, Beatrice is no less pure than the virginal Hero. Perhaps like Jimmy Carter she has experienced lust in her mind -- dutifully visualized in the film -- but we can infer nothing more serious than that. 

Except that we’re human. So we’re always ready to accepts the worst, the most salacious, so we so often make fools of ourselves by making much ado about -- nothing more than deceptive perceptions.

One more trap awaits the film’s potential audience. That’s the auteur theory. Shakespeareans will eagerly travel to see an Olivier Shakespeare, a Welles, a Kozintsev, a Branagh.  So who’s this guy Whedon? He’s the well-known director of TV episodes of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Dollhouse. His major film credit is The Avengers. Again, people who read Whedon on the basis of that record will miss this excellent rethinking of a rare Shakespeare -- to their loss.