Branagh Faces the Music

By RICHARD CORLISS

We come to bury Branagh, not to praise him. Sorry, wrong play and all, but as Kenneth Branagh turns 40 this year--and as he presents Love's Labour's Lost, his fourth Shakespeare film as star and director--it's time to wonder what happened to this Great Hope of the British Theatre, this jack-of-all-arts, this next Olivier. By his mid-20s Branagh had earned raves as Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company, staged and fronted an acclaimed Romeo and Juliet and starred in the miniseries Fortunes of War with his future wife Emma Thompson. It all seems so very long ago when a new Branagh project was an event. Now it is a vague threat, and he is just another performer whose industry overwhelms his genius and sizzle.

After his burly film of Henry V, his al fresco Much Ado About Nothing and his all-the-words Hamlet, Branagh devises a high-concept Love's Labour's Lost. Hey, kids, let's cut most of the text, put in 10 classic show tunes and set the story in a mythical European kingdom at the start of World War II. He has cast it with young actors, many of whom have done little Shakespeare and less musical theater. So the Clueless Alicia Silverstone is the princess; Scream's Matthew Lillard and Face/Off's Alessandro Nivola join Branagh and the gifted Adrian Lester to complete a quartet of severely dimpled swains. The assumption--here as in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You--is that singing and dancing are not so much skills as attitudes. Anyone can do it. Just open your mouth, and pick up your feet. Well, no, it ain't so. To stumble through Cheek to Cheek and Let's Face the Music and Dance is to hobble their meaning and resonance.

Most of the people couldn't be prettier. The ladies' dresses are glamorously revealing (this is one of the most bosom-obsessed movies since Russ Meyer retired). There's a nice use of the Anglo-African actors Lester and Carmen Ejogo; Branagh pairs them off with white co-stars. And in the director's familiar long takes, some of the dance numbers do work up a pleasing tension.

But this is a sloppy job, both in little goofs (lyricist Dorothy Fields' name is misspelled in the opening credits; one character reads a letter, and the same text she is "reading" is visible on the other side) and in the cast's gung-ho amateurism. It's like Shakespeare done by the Fame kids. Even such old pros as Nathan Lane and Timothy Spall are made to perform their face-contorting comedy so close to the camera that mugging becomes assault.

Shakespeare will survive this distortion. So will Branagh; he is, above all, an energetic entrepreneur. But we must look elsewhere for an actor of classical grace and modern power who will be not the next Olivier but the next Ken Branagh.

--By Richard Corliss