Best of the Bard

As the summer Shakespeare festivals started packing up their tents and putting the swords and codpieces in winter storage, I wasn't yet ready to give up my Elizabethan addiction cold-turkey. So, if you're anything like me, here are some suggestions for a cinematic mini-fest that should temporarily stave off your cravings for iambic pentameter and incomparably profound insights into the mysteries of the human soul.

William Shakespeare

I make no apology for the fact that all but one of my top ten premiered in the last 15 years. Where be your Oliviers, your Burtons, your Orson Welleses? Fact is, I'm a theatre guy, and fanatical about Shakespeare—fanatically devoted to the conviction that these 500-year-old plays are as visceral and immediate today as any work of art that's being created at this very moment, and more deeply True than any created thing outside The Bible itself.(See what I mean about fanatical?)

What a pity that so many people think of Shakespeare as dusty and academic. I'm impatient with anything that puts a barrier between us and these soul-essential stories, and there's no getting away from the fact that 40- and 60-year-old film versions can't help seeming dusty, mannered or precious. At the very least, the out-of-date technologies and anachronistic acting styles put an extra lens between us and the original work.For me, that's one lens too many.

So without further ado, here's much ado about something: My own personal selection—in order of preference—of ten extraordinary journeys into the human heart by one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived.

1. Twelfth Night (1996)
directed by Trevor Nunn
Okay, the problem with Shakespeare's comedies is that they're just not very funny. Actually, that's only one problem: you also can't keep the eight million characters straight, and it's impossible to swallow—let alone follow—all that stuff about everybody being mistaken for everybody else. Twelfth Night changes all that: it's clear, it's laugh-out-loud funny down the home stretch, and these Royal Shakespeare Company actors know how to make the language sing. Helena Bonham Carter perfectly embodies Olivia's untouchable lovelorn beauty, and Ben Kingsley gives the light-hearted tale real ballast as a dark, almost dangerous Feste. But for my money, Imogen Stubbs steals the show: maybe the story is so easy to follow because she's just so darn smart, and every thought and feeling registers unmistakably on her face and in her body language. Wow.
Content: PG for mild thematic elements. Suitable for most all ages.

2. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
directed by Baz Luhrmann
Brash and brilliant Aussie director Baz Luhrmann raised two million eyebrows with his pedal-to-the-metal updating of Romeo + Juliet, but his over-the-top juvenile high-hormone sex-and-violence treatment is ideal for Shakespeare's most over-the-top juvenile high-hormone sex-and-violence play. The perfect match of style and substance, it's closer to West Side Story's urban intensity than Zeffirelli's pretty romantic romp through the Renaissance daisies. If the look and pacing are MTV and video game, the emotions are pure opera—which pretty much sums up adolescence, at least as I experienced it, and is pretty much perfect for Luhrmann, internationally renowned for his innovative staging of classic operas, and other highly theatrical films like Moulin Rouge or Strictly Ballroom. In 1996, Leo DiCaprio was the teen heartthrob, and if he can't exactly fulfill the nuances of the text, he certainly incarnates the essence of all-consuming teen-aged smittenness—as does Claire Danes, who does better with the words. It's endlessly inventive, fast and furious as a street-racer, and I think Bill Himself would be proud of its passion. (For a great Double-Bill, follow this one with Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard's brilliantly entertaining riff on events that maybe led to the writing of R+J.)
Content: PG-13. Stylized but intense gang violence. The sexual elements are underplayed.

3. Richard III (1995)
Directed by Richard Loncraine
Brits love to forget that, prior to the Second World War, an upper class Hitler-friendly fascism was part of the national politics; Remains of the Day gives us a downstairs view. In 1995, director Richard Loncraine and lead actor Ian McKellen, inspired by a renowned National Theatre production, played the "what if" game with Richard III, re-imagining Shakespeare's tale of sociopathic political ambition in a pre-WW2 England where right-wing totalitarianism has carried the day. The final battle scenes don't quite come off, but don't let that overshadow the absolute genius of all that comes before. Every duke and earl is memorable, the Machiavellian story-line gripping, the twisted psychology all too comprehensible: when Dick Three courts Lady Anne over the dead body of the husband he has himself murdered, the scene—miraculously—is utterly convincing. Harder than it looks. (Check out Al Pacino's Looking for Richard for a mind-expanding look behind the scenes at another production of this bloody masterpiece.)
Content: Rated R for violence and sexual content, and it's primarily the former that's the issue here.

4. Hamlet (1991)
directed by Franco Zeffirelli
If you think Mel Gibson is nothing but an action hero, or that Hamlet's just a melancholy Dane who's too depressed to actually do anything—faced with the choice whether to be or not to be, he'll pick "not to be" every time—Zeffirelli's high-energy treatment of Shakespeare's masterpiece will be a revelation. Mel can act, the play can sizzle, and this movie proves it. David Ball literally wrote the book on dramatic action; it's called Backwards & Forwards, and in it he uses Hamlet as his prime example of a character "catapulted into action, into battle, at a breathtaking pace that leaves no room for sluggish depression." I'm convinced everybody on this project read Ball's book—especially screenwriter Christopher DeVore, who relentlessly cuts to the chase. This is Zeffirelli's best movie, gorgeous to look at but stripped of his habitual sentimentality: he sets the film in a stony medieval castle by the sea, his Hamlet a warrior prince. Glenn Close is stunning as Queen Gertrude, and if the arras scene overdoes the Oedipal thing, there's no question men would kill kings for her. Paul Scofield is a heart-rending and non-melodramatic Ghost, more haunted than haunting. You won't find a hint of gentle Bilbo in Ian Holm's Polonius, who drives the story forward by playing down dodder to emphasize guile. Alan Bates suggests a strain of sensual self-indulgence that's the fatal flaw in his otherwise commanding Claudius, potent adversary for Gibson's fiery Hamlet. And can you imagine any actress better suited than Helena Bonham-Carter to play Ophelia? Naï ve, fragile and fetching. This movie just plain works.
Content: PG. Though the Oedipal complex stuff is prominent, there's no nudity.

5. Titus (2000)
directed by Julie Taymor
I'll admit, I'm completely confounded—where to put Julie Taymor's gut-punch of a film, Titus? It may be Shakespeare's worst play: it may also be the most brilliant, certainly the most audacious screen adaptation of anything in Wild Bill's oeuvre. If the appeal of Shakespeare's work is its profundity, how would any version of this callow, mean and trivial Jacobean-wannabe get anywhere near a Top Ten list? But the experience of seeing Taymor work aesthetic alchemy on this leaden-spirited proto-exploitation mess is extraordinary: when the story gets dumb, she cranks up the camp, and when it reaches for profundity she commits with such potency, one almost traces the rough outlines of what will someday issue forth as King Lear—perhaps the Bard's greatest work. Taymor took a better-than-average Disney movie and made a theatrical work of art when she transposed The Lion King to Broadway. In her audacious re-imagining of "Titus Andronicus," she has taken a theatrical sow's ear and made a cinematic silk purse—stuffed with human entrails perhaps, but a silk purse nonetheless.
Content: Rated R. Grisly violence. One shot pans across a Roman orgy. Though it doesn't glorify violence or sex, take the R rating seriously.

6. Hamlet (2000)
directed by Michael Almereyda
Literary folks who figure Shakespeare is all about the poetry find Michael Almereyda's lean and hungry Hamlet infuriating. The text is cut down to essentials, leaving much of the story to be told in images. But that's what movies do best, and this uber-hip NYC corporate re-working does it great. Ethan Hawke's grief-shattered rich-kid Hamlet obsessively edits video images of his now-dead father (Sam Shepard), whose ghost is first glimpsed on a surveillance camera. If delivering the "To be or not to be" speech in the "Action" section of a video store strikes some as too clever, it pays off when we see that the play wherein he'll catch the conscience of the king is a montage of video clips that Hamlet's assembled. Not every word of the text is spoken—you'll need to check out Kenneth Branagh's sometimes brilliant, too often laughable four-hour-plus self-indulgence for that—but the text isn't ignored, either. Cast members like Kyle Maclachlan (Claudius) and Diane Venora (Gertrude) have impressive Shakespearean stage credits, Liev Schrieber's Laertes is more than just the standard issue vengeance machine, and even Bill Murray's Polonius works splendidly, more Lost in Translation than Ghostbusters. At the heart of it, Julia Stiles makes narrative and emotional sense of the often-puzzling Ophelia like few others. "Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia" indeed. Nobody else is going to rate this one this high, but, screen or stage, this Hamlet shook me emotionally more than any other I've seen.
Content: Rated R for some violence, but it's quite mild. The film is quite unoffensive.

7. Henry V (1989)
directed by Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh's Henry V launched not only the stardom of its actor/director/adaptor, but also a lasting renaissance of big-screen bard. Olivier set the standard with his rally-round-the-flag 1944 film version, but Shakespeare's perspective on war was far more ambivalent, and Branagh puts those agonizing qualms and quandaries center-stage. From the opening speech, set amid the "flat unraised" realities of a theatre backstage, to the bloodier battle realities of "the vasty fields of France," this is a thrillingly theatrical film with an extraordinary cast of Britain's finest Shakespearean actors.
Content: Rated PG-13 for battlefield violence.

8. Othello (1995)
directed by Oliver Parker
With all respect to Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, Laurence Fishburne is the definitive screen Othello. For starters, those other guys were pretty darn white and, much as I'm willing to put political correctness aside, the whole race thing is kind of important to the story, don't you think? Apart from that, though, Fishburne brings an intelligent fierceness to the role: from the opening moments, as poised and self-possessed as he is, we know there's a warrior underneath, and we feel a terrible dread as social constraints begin to be stripped away by the acerbic manipulations of Iago. Kenneth Branagh is utterly extraordinary in that pivotal role: it might be his ultimate screen performance were it not for annoying direct takes to the camera that are jarring enough to detract from the overall strength of an otherwise fine film. And Irene Jacob—known to Kieslowski fans for her work in Red and The Double Life of Veronique—is a superb choice for Desdemona.
Content: Rated R for some sexuality, including one sex scene where Branagh talks to the camera.

9. Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
directed by Kenneth Branagh
Oh, the pleasure of seeing Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh go at it in Much Ado About Nothing! The verbal sparring of Beatrice and Benedick has always been the play's principal attraction, and their transformation from friendly foes to astonished lovers has never been delivered with more wit and delight. American actors Michael Keaton and Keanu Reeves were ill-served by the rehearsal process for this film and end up awkwardly out of place in an otherwise strong cast, but that's a failing it's easy to overlook in this sunny and likeable production.
Content: Rated PG-13, presumably for some double entendres, but there's little cause for concern.

10. Macbeth (1971)
directed by Roman Polanski
There's a disturbing link to off-screen reality when Shakespeare's bloody and murderous Macbeth is directed by a man whose wife was slaughtered by a quasi-spiritual cult not two years prior to filming.Roman Polanski's rendering of "the Scottish play" is as gruesome, repulsive and drearily perverse as you might expect, stripping the well-known tale of any comforting familiarity by setting it in a cold and mud-smeared Scotland that's primal and horrifying as a nightmare. Little of Shakespeare's text remains intact: this is a brutal, nasty treatment of the story that won't dress up evil in eloquent speeches or heroic battle sequences. While I won't recommend it for everyone—there's nudity and barbarism aplenty—I will defend it as an important and legitimate piece of work. Better this than the all-too-common strategy of bad artists and false prophets, making evil look good, and good evil.
Content: Rated R. Extremely violent. Nudity is limited to the witches, who are anything but sexually alluring.

Ron Reed is founder and managing artistic director of Vancouver's Pacific Theatre. Ron says he started Pacific in 1984 so he could act in any play he wanted, and he's ended up a playwright as well.