We do not have many films on which to judge Joss Whedon as a filmmaker. Much Ado About Nothing, which opens in theaters today, is technically his third film, but it is in some ways our first opportunity to truly judge Whedon's abilities as a director of cinema.
Closely adapted from the Shakespeare play, Much Ado offers little opportunity for Whedon to rely on his well-known facility for clever dialogue or shocking plot twists; the text forces him to act as a director and not a screenwriter with a camera. Its now-legendary tight shooting schedule – it was filmed over Whedon's two-week vacation in-between principal photography and post-production on The Avengers – likewise serves to reveal the inner core of Whedon the director. Working that quickly, artistic decisions must be made with the heart and the gut instead of the head. What we see on the screen in Much Ado is Whedon stripped to his cinematic instincts. The tragedy of the film is that those instincts are hardly cinematic.
It is telling that Whedon's first feature film was a direct extension of his TV series Firefly, and that his second feature film, The Avengers, was not only an installment in a larger franchise, but has now been extended into a TV series. Neither film was significantly different in form or function from Whedon's television work, where the dialogue-driven plot development is king, clever twists and glib lines are hard currency, and anything resembling the poetry of cinema is generally absent. In actual television, this can still sometimes produce artful moments, the kind built up through accumulation over time of bright spots in writing and acting. In film, this aesthetic is death.
Shakespeare's play is something of an ur-text for the modern romantic comedy. It revolves around two couples: Benedick and Beatrice (Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker), the heart of the piece, who proclaim disdain for one another via delicious verbal sparring; and Claudio and Hero (Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese), a younger couple dumbly in love and arranged to be married. Each couple is torn apart and brought together again by various episodes of deception and deceit, many of which feature the comically absurd Shakespearean trope of people masquerading as one another and successfully conning their loved ones. This trope is not merely an Elizabethan leftover, some anachronistic glitch that must be apologized for or papered over in a modern production. The frothy nonsense of his characters' behavior is an essential part of Shakespeare's art; his vision of the world is one in which no reason need be given for absurdity beyond the bizarre fluctuations of the human heart.
This vision seems to prove too strange for Whedon, who more than once has pointed out to audiences the prevalence of alcohol on screen and joked, "There are certain things in this movie that just don't make sense unless the characters are super-drunk." It's a glib, throwaway line, but also a revealing one; couched within it is a deep need to make sense out of nonsense that goes a long way towards explaining the overly determined, overly literal mood of Much Ado.
The scenes in Much Ado seem staged by someone terrified of being misunderstood, who bends over backwards to avoid ambiguity or confusion. To offer up perhaps the most egregious example: Whedon has decided to tack on a silent prologue to the play depicting Benedick sneaking away from Beatrice's bedroom after a night of passion, a scene designed to eradicate any possible ambiguity from her later statement that Benedick had "once before" won her heart "of false dice." Much of the film is conducted in a sort of broad pantomime that strains to limit the amount of interpretation necessary or even possible for the viewer about the meaning of what goes on.
The multiple cameras in use by cinematographer Jay Hunter (who, unsurprisingly, normally works in reality television) are concerned merely with following the actors around and making sure we see them say their lines. The shots and edits are purely functional, designed to transmit verbal and intellectual information, but failing to provide what really matters: the unexpected rhythms and tonal shifts that communicate deeper ideas about new ways of being, seeing, and feeling.
A close look at the trailer for the film serves as an excellent stylistic contrast, as it is so remarkably well-edited that the shots all seem more powerful than they play in the film. There, the full array of cinematic tools are deployed to convey not a gag or a theme but a mood, a feeling, a way of seeing the world. In the trailer, far more attention is paid to cinematic rhythm, to the impressionistic joining of shots and sounds in a non-literal – dare I say, poetic – manner.
In the film proper, poetry hardly shows its face. There are brief moments: a b-roll close-up of Alexis Denisof caught my eye, and a hillside funeral procession carries a certain haunting beauty. The stronger actors – Denisof, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Nathan Fillion – all manage to snatch a few brilliant seconds from the drabness of the production. And as mentioned above, there is Amy Acker, doing ten times the heavy lifting of any other member of the ensemble. Her rendition of Beatrice's "Oh that I were a man" monologue is so searingly powerful that Whedon should really consider smash-cutting directly from that to footage of Acker dropping a mic and walking off, and just end the film there.
The film is not without its moments, not without its charms. It may seem churlish to react so poorly to what is essentially a quickly-made romp with friends, but there is something just so profoundly disappointing about the entire enterprise. Joss Whedon is a phenomenally successful media human, arguably one of the most successful people working behind a camera in this particular moment. That he should take his connections, his talent, and his time, and try and tackle a powerful text in a fresh way is exhilarating. That he should fail to bring anything new or meaningful to the table is depressing.
Making it through a Joss Whedon venture sometimes feels like finishing a crossword puzzle; you feel smart for knowing all the words, and it's neat to see how they all fit together, but that doesn't necessarily add up to art. In Much Ado, he gets decent laughs by finding the right time to have a character pull out an iPhone, or look disbelievingly at the suggestion of one of those absurd Shakespearean masquerades. There's a lot of well-timed slapstick. But the cleverness, while amusing enough, is ultimately hollow, and hardly new. The attempts in Much Ado to subvert or comment on the romcom or Shakespearean genres are essentially the same old moves he's been using since Buffy the Vampire Slayer started peppering her knowing dialogue with writer's room references like "Big Bad" and overt references to the tropes and cliches of her genre.
Much Ado isn't unwatchable. It just isn't much of anything at all. The film is entertaining enough, thanks to the charm and ability of its rather strong cast (particularly the bristlingly powerful Acker) and the fact that Whedon is, on the whole, a very clever crafter of scenes. He has a knack for getting his actors into a stimulating rhythm, for blocking a decent bit of slapstick, and, as always, he is a deft hand at making jokes at the expense of whatever genre he's working in. Whedon has always been clever, but that's exactly the problem with Much Ado: it substitutes cleverness for depth of thought and feeling, and in so doing manages to drag a transcendent work of art terminally back down to earth.
What should be a celebration of the endurance of Shakespeare, of independent artistry, and of cinematic enthusiasm, ends up merely feeling like a celebration of Joss Whedon and company. Which, in all honesty, should serve the film well enough. The crowd I saw it with could barely contain themselves as each of the familiar faces from previous Whedon projects revealed themselves. Many critics are likely already prepping pieces that call Whedon's take on Much Ado "refreshing" and "daring." But what I see is a film of great ambition and freedom that ends up small and limited, never adding up to more than the sum of its parts.
I had grand ideas of finding a new side to Whedon in this film, of discovering the artist I hoped was buried underneath the showrunner. It turned out all that hope was ... well, you know the phrase.
