Much Ado About Nothing

Joss Whedon made this in the gap after The Avengers, in his own house, with actors he had worked with for years, and he shot it quickly and in black and white. It is modern dress: the men arrive in dark cars and darker suits, the women are in cocktail dresses, and the war Don Pedro has come home from is never explained. The idea is that the play is a house party with a plot, and for most of its 109 minutes the idea holds. It is the most likeable screen Much Ado since Kenneth Branagh’s, and it has the same soft spot Branagh’s had, in the story about Hero.

Jay Hunter shoots the house as though nobody had seen one before. The light comes through big windows and lands on marble and glass, the pool sits flat and grey under a white sky, and the kitchen, where much of the plotting happens, has more worktop than most flats. Michele Yu and Cindy Chao had a furnished house to start from, and one conspiracy is hatched in what is plainly a child’s bedroom; the film does not comment. Shawna Trpcic puts the men in thin ties and the women in dresses that would do for a funeral or, with a change of shoes, a wedding. Now and then, in the handheld passages, it looks like an expensive wedding video, and we mean that as a mild complaint.

Amy Acker is the reason to see it. Whedon opens with a scene the play does not have, wordless, of Benedick dressing and leaving Beatrice’s bed while she pretends to sleep, and Acker plays every line after that with that morning behind it. Her Beatrice is quick, tired and sore, and she is funny because she is the sharpest person in the house and knows it does her no good. There is a pratfall in the kitchen, during the plot to convince her Benedick loves her, that made us laugh out loud; then she picked herself up and spoke about taming her wild heart to his loving hand, and we found we had stopped laughing and could not say when.

Alexis Denisof has the harder job, and for the first half hour he pushes at it. His eavesdropping is staged as garden farce, with press-ups, and what would read as timing from the back of a theatre reads as mugging from three feet away. We forgave it about the time he stopped trying to be funny and started listening to Acker, after which the pair are as good a Beatrice and Benedick as we have seen on screen in years. Nathan Fillion’s Dogberry is a head of security with an earpiece and complete faith in himself, and Fillion plays it dead straight, which is the only way it works. Clark Gregg’s Leonato hosts with the patience of a man whose house has been taken over, which, in a sense, it had.

The trouble is the plot the comedy hangs from. Fran Kranz gives Claudio’s jealousy more conviction than the part usually gets, and Jillian Morgese’s Hero is sweet and given almost nothing to do, which is the play’s fault before it is hers. But a film set now asks us to accept that a woman’s future turns on what a man thinks he saw from a window one night. Whedon shoots that stretch straight, and it does not hurt the way it should; through the second half’s turn, which we will not describe, we felt the modern setting had stopped helping. Sean Maher’s Don John sulks handsomely by the pool and is never given a reason. Whedon wrote the score himself, mostly cocktail jazz, and Sigh No More, sung at the party, is lovely; the rest is pleasant and gone by the credits.

Whedon and Daniel S. Kaminsky cut it quick, and 109 minutes is right: the verse goes at conversational speed, and if you miss one joke there is another coming. Beside Branagh’s version this is cooler, smaller and funnier in its quiet moments, and less sure of itself when the mood darkens. Beside Whedon’s own television it is the film where his fondness for people talking over one another finally meets the writer who did it first.

Watch it on a sofa, with a drink, beside someone who will argue afterwards about whether Denisof is any good. He is. It takes him a while.