As You Like It (2007)

Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?

Can a Shakespeare gender-bending comedy ever work on film? Onstage one buys the convention that a gorgeous woman can convince everyone that she is really a he, but I've yet to see it work on film. Bryce Dallas Howard is talented and gorgeous, but it takes another kind of sex appeal to play Rosalind. It takes a woman who isn't afraid to convincingly play a man! Kate Hepburn could have pulled it off, or a young Emma Thompson, but Ms. Howard never even attempts to walk in a man's shoes. That spoils the fun, the dramatic (and sexual) tension, and the plausibility.

As with every Branagh film, there's much to like: A brilliant opening that sets the stakes high, clear and specific actors' choices, gorgeous art design, yadda yadda, but frankly, I think Branagh was in love with his leading lady. June 21, 2008

East is West

One may have little regard for As You Like It and still feel that chopping it to pieces and scattering the bits over the vernal salad of Arden is not a recipe for success. Cut two-thirds of the play as Branagh does and what remains? A string of sketchy vignettes without the time or the text to breathe, develop and resolve. At best the results can be likened to a volume of illustrations: easy, superficial, providing discrete visualizations of key moments, but aliterate and threadbare in itself.

And yet. While this movie is filled with things that I have little use for--colorblind casting, thematically pointless multiculturalism, Kevin Kline--I found it surprisingly watchable. The Japanese setting does not distract overmuch, and it largely vanishes once we reach Arden: a forest is a forest. Most of the performers are capable, and a few--Adrian Lester, David Oyelowo, even Brian Blessed--are better than that. Some of the scenes are played with conviction and warmth, and prove unexpectedly touching. This isn't a good As You Like It, or a good film, but it's the first piece of Branaghian Shakespeare since Henry V that isn't a complete waste of time. March 16, 2008

I had a hard time deciding what to rate this movie.

I couldn't decide how many stars to give, three or four, I decided on four. My reason, I liked the movie. I laughed in it and enjoyed the romance. I loved the beauty of the music and the scenery. I liked the directing, the play was easy to follow and the words well spoken. Why I almost gave it a three is because it was set in Japan (what was up with that???) and Rosalind when playing a man shouldn't have been so made up. The main reason though was because I asked my dog the same thing another reviewer asked their cat, "Did this tell you why Rosalind had to stay dressed as a man?". In Kenneth's quest to make Shakespeare dearly loved by many he changed too much for those of us who already dearly love Shakespeare. However, Shakespeare is not the Bible and William did his best to make the plays accessible to the masses and so does Kenneth so I only knocked down one star instead of two. It is no Henry V though, the greatest movie of all but worth watching and better than 99% of the drivel that is called entertainment. January 13, 2008

Sometimes the Forest of Arden ought to be just the Forest of Arden!

"As You Like It" is one of my favorite plays. Grounded in the tradition of Greco-Roman pastoral, the play asks the following question, via Jaques: If man, who is trying to escape the intrigues of court, escapes to the green cabinet of nature, will he not consequently bring the intrigues of court with him, and therefore ruin nature? Shakespeare answers this question, which seems very timely in our warming world of globalization, in the affirmative.

This film, which is peerlessly acted, gains nothing by its Japanese setting, which, admittedly scrumptious to behold, is merely distracting. I fully expected a mincing Gilbert & Sullivan chorus to break into "If you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Japan, on every vase and jar, on every screen and fan." I have no objection to updating, nor to removing the setting to another location--or as Shakespeare would say, to another part of the forest. Such a removal was successful in Trevor Nunn's "Twelfth Night," which was set in a Cornish "Illyria." It was also done with delightful tongue-in-cheek in the 1960s' "Midsummer Night's Dream," which focused on a stately British home, labeled "Athens." Furthermore, I even suspended my disbelief when Brannagh set "Much Ado about Nothing" in Tuscany (partly because I love Italy). In none of these cases, did the change of setting disrupt the illusion. By placing "As You Like It"--most of which takes place in the fantastical "Forest of Arden" (to which the characters refer repeatedly)--in the historical context of a violent nineteenth-century Japan, Brannagh disrupts the magic as irrevocably as if he had placed the first scenes in the 1930s' Leni Riefenstall-inspired glamor of the Third Reich and then had everyone escape to the Forest of Bavaria, still calling it the Forest of Arden.

Because Brannagh has already burst the bubble of Shakespeare's magic, his final metatheatrical conceit, of having Rosalind deliver the epilogue (full of gender-bending innuendo, since the part was originally played by a boy playing a girl playing a boy) among the actors dressing-room caravans, falls flat. I also think that Brannagh's moving scenes around, his making cuts (Touchstone, one of Shakespeare's greatest clowns, got lost somewhere in the forest), spoiled the rhythm of the play which takes on an incantatory magic in the "And I for Phebe, And I for Ganymeade, And I for Rosalind, And I for no woman" scene between the pastoral Silvius and Phebe, and the lovers Orlando and Ganymede/Rosalind.

I am also cross with Kenneth Brannagh for recycling the ending which was delightful and far more effective in "Much Ado" ("Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more!"), complete with the actors dancing in circles--all viewed from above among cascading rose-petals (Perhaps they were cherry blossoms this time.).

On the plus side, English subtitles were available, and, as I said, the acting is excellent and Rosalind is more than lovely to look at, as are the costumes.

Although I am generally a great fan of Kenneth Brannagh, I do wish he had left the Forest of Arden in its magical land of nowhere. November 8, 2007

5 minutes of commercials

I really liked the play, it was very well done and worth watching. What I hate is the 5 minutes of commercials at the beginning of the DVD that you can't skip or fast forward through. This is just BS. A pox upon the people that do this. I will never purchase another HBO DVD. November 3, 2007

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