PULP ELIZABETHAN FICTION

By RICHARD CORLISS Sunday, June 24, 2001
    • SEX? VIOLENCE? WE GOT 'EM FOR you, and in the King's English. As every teacher knows, kids won't touch Shakespeare unless he is made all hot and gaudy and R-rated. So let's get with it, moviemakers! If the Bard writes about a Moor who loves a Venetian lady, show them naked in bed together, and have Iago woo Emilia from the rear. If the subject is villainy on a royal scale, as in Richard III, cram the screen with ingenious murders. Everyone says that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd have been a screenwriter. But would he be Joe Eszterhas? Would he have shown one of his characters enjoying fellatio--then gasping in horror as a dagger, thrust upward by an assassin hiding under the bed, suddenly emerges through the victim's chest?

    Actually, that murder, in the new film of Richard III, offers a cleverer twist on the orgasmic affinity of love and death than any devised by Eszterhas for Basic Instinct. It has the added jolt of literary blasphemy, like hearing a Tupac Shakur lyric sung in Westminster Abbey. Melodrama in Shakespeare? How awful, how scabrous, how very...appropriate, since Will was a man of the theater who gloried in the trappings of stage sensation. And because Richard III and Iago are the two scurviest, most seductive villains in the canon, it is right for directors to find a movie equivalent, in images and action, for Shakespeare's pulsing poetry and Elizabethan bloodlust.

    Oliver Parker's Othello is the more standard of the two, a solid reading that pulls out the stops on an easily played organ. This is, after all, a soap opera of the had-I-but-known variety. All the Moor has to do is ask his wife's servant, "Pray, did thee swipe fair Desdemona's hankie?" and the misunderstanding is resolved as smoothly as any episode of Home Improvement. But then there would be little allurement in the role for some of this century's most dominant actors.

    That Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier both donned blackface in famous film versions doesn't mean no one else should try. Parker had the radical idea to cast a black man as Othello, and Laurence Fishburne brings an outsider's dignity to the role of Shakespeare's noblest chump. Irene Jacob is a lovely, sallow Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh--looking bloated and rheumy, slithering snakelike on rooftops, whispering his venomous gossip as if it's his last confession--makes a fine Iago, a demi-devil working his cool wit to destroy those he might have loved.

    Richard III, as conceived by actor Ian McKellen and director Richard Loncraine, is one bold customer. Here is Shakespeare's upper-class mass murderer reimagined as a clever fascist in the court of Edward VIII. The 1930s was a decade of ruthless strongmen, in both European politics and Hollywood movies. Gangsters, mesmerizing in their amoral ambition, were the men of the moment; they lent a sick thrill to the front page and entertainment section. This Richard is such a fellow, Hitler as Scarface. From the opening titles, which explode in a blast of artillery, to the closing image of Richard laughing on his way to a fiery hell, this is not just Shakespeare played on film. It is all movie--fully as cinematic as its clear antecedents in the killer-comedy genre, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Dr. Strangelove.

    Not a word of the text is spoken until nearly 10 minutes into the film, when Richard delivers his "winter of our discontent" speech, in part to the triumphant house of York, in part to us in the audience as he urinates. Glamour and squalor, the blood of aristocrats and the mud of wild boars, are contrasted, then mixed as the corpses pile up in this Deco Armageddon. The movie, set in the Machine Age--tanks, motorcycles, machine guns--even finds a way to justify Richard's cry, "My kingdom for a horse!"

    A cast of British stage royalty (Maggie Smith, Nigel Hawthorne, Jim Broadbent) and Hollywood stars (Annette Bening, Robert Downey Jr.) lend their eminence to the swank carnage. But it's all McKellen's show. Sir Ian struts and purrs, swats underlings with his mummy's paw of a left hand, dies as uncontritely as he killed. Film and performance go withered hand in glove; both have chutzpah to spare.

    If Europe in the '30s seems too remote, consider Richard of Gloucester as the evil twin to Richard of Whittier. As a satanic conniver, McKellen combines the darkest dreams of the 37th U.S. President and his Secretary of State. He has the hunched posture of the cartoonist's Nixon, the brutal statecraft of the conspiracy theorist's Henry Kissinger. This movie is the fetid, enthralling goods, the Nixon that Oliver Stone didn't quite dare to make.