5 reasons Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing fails as a Shakespeare adaptation
Everyone seems to love Joss Whedon’s adaptation. I can’t stand it. Recently I tried to rewatch it and convince myself that it wasn’t that bad, but by the 15- or 20-minute mark I was bored out of my mind and turned it off.
I love Much Ado. It’s a fantastic play. Even relatively shoddy productions are fun to watch. Kenneth Branagh’s film is excellent. Whedon’s film intervenes in, departs from, or minimizes just about every interesting plot point, backstory, or established characteristic in Shakespeare’s text, and I think it does so in ways that make the text less interesting, not more. It’s not innovative. It doesn’t add anything new or interesting to the story. It often doesn’t even make sense.
If you disagree with me, please let me know and tell me why! I would always rather find genuine value in a film than write it off. But right now I don’t understand what we’re supposed to get out of this one; I think Whedon’s decisions detract from the story rather than elevating it as an adaptation ought to do. Here’s why:
1. Filming Much Ado in black and white kills the bright, saturated tone that the text demands. The story is about leaving the bleak worlds of war, conflict, and isolation and entering into the colorful, fanciful worlds of celebration, courtship, and union. Removing color doesn’t complement the text in any meaningful way and doesn’t offer the audience additional insight or entry points into the text. It makes it harder for Whedon to vary tone from scene to scene, and it results in a film that feels uniformly fairly flat and bleak.
2. War and the military play an important role in the original text, and Whedon fails to deal with them. He could have excised them from the text, since he seems to have no problem making other cuts, or he could have seriously engaged with the fact that Claudio, Benedick, Don John, and others are veterans who have literally just returned from combat. They’re probably dealing with some heavy stuff, potentially with PTSD. At the very least they’re just now reuniting with friends and family who might never have seen them again, and the whole show revolves around their having finally come home and their trying to get back into the pace of civilian life. Whedon’s direction never cues us in to any of this; the reunion seems no more significant than a suburban family’s Easter dinner. As a result, the opening scene’s references to war and enemy deaths seem bizarrely out of place and don’t make sense in the context of the rest of the film.
3. Women’s status in Elizabethan society is a major focus of Much Ado. Whedon either doesn’t understand the role of gender in the play or doesn’t care enough to make it comprehensible in a contemporary setting. In Shakespeare, Hero’s having sex before marriage could ruin her and mar her whole family’s reputation, Beatrice’s insistence that she is happy to be an independent woman and never wishes to marry is seriously transgressive, and Beatrice’s and Benedick’s coming together is conditioned on Benedick performing a revenge killing that Beatrice herself is prevented from doing because she is not a man. Whedon could have cut the text so that Claudio is incensed at Hero specifically for sleeping with someone else after they got engaged, but according to the actual words of the script Claudio is enraged simply that Hero is not a virgin. Whedon could have set the film in a conservative, religious setting where sex before marriage is considered a serious sin, but in Whedon’s setting no one cares that Don John and Conrade are sharing a room or that Beatrice and Benedick have slept together — which, by the way, contradicts Beatrice’s insistence that she’s not and never has been interested in men. We’re left with a plot that’s internally inconsistent and doesn’t make any sense in its historical/social context.
4. Neither Whedon nor the actors seem comfortable with Shakespeare’s text. A lot of the dialogue sounds stilted or flat, and when actors manage to make their lines sound like natural speech their delivery often fails to match up with what’s being expressed. The cuts Whedon made to the script seem pretty haphazard, include some really central speeches that bring home the point of the show and major character growth (e.g., Benedick’s “man is a giddy thing” speech), and result in an uneven and unsatisfying pace for the film, with some scenes more or less skipped over and others dragging on disproportionately.
5. The relationship between Beatrice and Benedick in Whedon is dull and bitter. They don’t even seem hurt or conflicted, just bored, like people stuck at a family party together who don’t really want to be there. In Shakespeare, their relationship is bright, energetic, flirtatious, and fun: a “merry war”. You know Angelica’s lines about her relationship with Hamilton? “So this is what it feels like to match wits / with someone on your level, what the hell is the catch? It’s / the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light” — That’s what’s going on with Beatrice and Benedick, and it’s pretty explicitly established in Shakespeare’s script. They’re great friends and enjoy their verbal sparring matches; their sparring even enables them to be friends, when a man-woman relationship without the distance provided by their pseudo-enmity might be considered inappropriate. The conversion that happens in Shakespeare is that they’re brought to realize that they can be lovers without losing their strong individual identities, and that by doing so they can even deepen the relationship they already value. In Whedon, they’ve already been lovers: Beatrice is just mad that Benedick didn’t call her after they had sex, and then she forgives him and they get back together.
6. In Shakespeare, Don John and Conrade have a homoerotic relationship that in some ways accounts for their status as outsiders and their motivation to destroy the heterosexual relationship between Hero and Claudio. Whedon makes Conrade a woman, erases the one non-hetero relationship in the story, and, by allowing their sexual relationship to be flagrant to the point of fingering in front of a non-consenting third person, completely removes the play’s consideration of the complicated trade-offs made between traditional/sanctioned straight relationships and nontraditional/unsanctioned same-sex relationships — namely, that in pre–birth control days same-sex sex actually allowed a great degree of sexual freedom and agency, the partners’ equal class status allowed for a relationship that wasn’t necessarily hierarchical, and the lack of marital restriction allowed relationships to be fairly fluid; on the other hand, the relationships weren’t legitimized by society and were left out of the celebration and sharing that Hero, Claudio, Beatrice, and Benedick get to enjoy.
