The new Much Ado is a charming, understated success. The actors are not trained Shakespeareans; they're tv series folk, and they say the lines conversationally and casually, paying scant attention to the verse or to the mannered prose rhythms. It works, on the whole, although some of the great lines are delivered so unemphatically that they're swallowed and lost. Whoever would imagine that Benedick's "the world must be peopled' could slip by an audience without e'en a giggle. The text is judiciously pruned -- the only major omission the nighttime ceremony for presumably dead Hero -- but that's a scene that has always made me uncomfortable so I wasn't sorry to see it go. The Dogberry-Verges sequence is a brilliant deadpan triumph. There's very little added business, thank you, but what there is. is choice. The actress who plays Beatrice (Amy Acker) has borrowed so much from Emma Thompson's delivery (in the last filmed Much Ado) that if you were to close your eyes, you'd think that you'd time-traveled back to 1993.The director, whom I had never heard of but is apparently famous, is Joss Whedon. Thanks, Joss.
I've seen many many modern films in which hero and heroine don't get on at first but little-by-little find themselves in love and in marriage. But Shakespeare was there first. Beatrice and Benedick are the mom and pop of a half-a-zillion subsequent comedies. It's good to see them as alive and thriving as they are in this realization.