Cymbeline
2015: Michael Almereyda

The box containing the DVD of this film bills trumpets a reviewer’s assessment of it as a “mashup of ‘Sons of Anarchy’ and ‘Game of Thrones’”. Whatever one thinks of those, one will notice that neither of them is “Shakespeare”. The quotation is carefully trimmed from David Rooney’s review in The Hollywood Reporter. What he actually says is, “But the central conceit simply doesn’t hang together well enough to create credible dramatic stakes, yielding an underpowered mashup of Sons of Anarchy with Game of Thrones.” It’s probably well to consider this film in those terms. It’s definitely more mashup than play, and more anarchy than Shakespeare.

Opinion may differ over whether making Shakespeare’s weirdest romance into a modern biker-gang story is inventive genius, or simply an instance of free association that could better have been dismissed as a bad idea. Ed Harris is the leader (“the king”) of a motorcycle gang in cahoots with a bunch of crooked policemen (inexplicably called “Roman”). Everything is played out in those terms. There are motorcycles, dive bars, torch singers, cocaine, skateboards, iPads, Che Guevara teeshirts, and a television showing the image of Barack Obama. Apparently these are essential to any modern production of Shakespeare.

In all fairness, yes: there is a bit of Shakespeare too. The words that are spoken are Shakespeare’s, or at least derived from Shakespeare’s text. But they are cherry-picked and falsely contextualized much as the reviewer’s quotation was — to such an extent that one might as well have turned this into almost any story. The film is not much over an hour and a half, while Cymbeline is actually one of Shakespeare’s longer plays. To further diminish Shakespeare’s input, most of the screen time in the film is given not to words, but to action.

The main point of such an operation seems to be to invite the admiration for the cleverness of those who can change one story into another one without altering the scripts. As such, it seems more exhibitionism than art, and even if it were clever, it wouldn’t shed much light on Shakespeare. Unsurprisingly, critics were not invariably impressed. Nor am I.

The main players here are Ed Harris (Cymbeline), Ethan Hawke (Iachomo), Penn Badgley (Posthumus), and Dakota Johnson (Imogen). None of them is in all or even most contexts a bad actor, but none really has much feel for Shakespearean language. (In the thirteen years that have elapsed since Ethan Hawke played Hamlet, he still does not seem to have arrived at a genuine understanding of the words he’s speaking.) The grandeur of this weird play is rendered up as a basically tawdry and inconsequential matter, and its emotional freight is scattered to the winds. A few of those nearer the edges of the play seem to understand it better: Delroy Lindo’s Belarius’ lines occasionally catch a glimmer of the poetic lyricism of the play. But without support, no single actor can carry the whole of the play.

All in all, if you want to see only one version of the play, do not see this. If you want to see two versions of the play, you will have to see this one, since there are (so far) only two. Otherwise, why bother? It was a bad idea from the start.

Watch Cymbeline on streaming video from Amazon

Buy Cymbeline from Amazon.