The Hollow Crown: Richard III
Aka the one with the inevitable compare and contrast. Not only did I watch various versions of the play throughout my life, but I had to write a paper on it decades ago in school, so.
Dominic Cooke, who directed all parts, started to let Richard talk to the camera in his near-end monologue in Henry VI, so it didn't surprise me that his solution to all the villainous monologues and asides of Richard III was not to do them as voice overs but Richard talking to the camera as well. "Villain takes audience into his confidence" isn't a unique or original-to-Shakespeare concept, but Richard III arguably is the Elizabethan play which does it best, and the one which influenced a great many subsequent villains (including Francis Urquart in the original British House of Card and his American incarnation Frank Underwood), so I'm not surprised Cooke went for that choice. All in all, it worked, but it contributed to a weird "can't make up its mind whether it wants to be "realism" or fantasy" vibe I got from this film version.
On the one hand, there are the earnest attempts at giving the audience a guide line when it comes to dates, with the "ten years later" (meaning ten years between the end of the Henriad and the start of Richard III, the film, as opposed to Richard III, the play, which opens directly after the previous play concluded, as evidenced by the fact that in the play, the Richard-Anne scene takes place during Henry VI's burial), which made me sigh and say: Guys, don't even try. Shakespeare's timeline for the histories, if you can call it that, is SO different from, well, history (for example, his Richard first shows up when historical Richard was three years old), that it's really just a headache to try and mingle the two. Also, the costumes are a great deal more historical than what, say, The White Queen offered. On the other hand, there aren't just the Shakespearean ghost/nightmare scenes, no, The Hollow Crown tops that with adding Margaret and her mirror of curses to the battle of Bosworth, not just as a guilty hallucination of Richard's but in fact, physcial presence after he's died. But the biggest "huh" moments in terms of "wanting to be realistic yet not" for me were that because of the "ten years later", the Richard and Anne scene could no longer take place over Henry VI's coffin. So instead it takes place over his grave. Which is mysteriously in the middle of the woods. With a single sad crucifix marking the spot. Guys, not even even Shakespeare, writing the Tudor version of history, ever implied they buried Henry with less than full state ceremony. (For the record, historical Henry first got buried in Chertsey Abbey and then got reinterred in Windsor Castle, where his bones still are. Much of the point of killing Henry was to make it clear to all and sunder he was dead, so there would be no more subsequent attempts to restore him to the throne, and a secret grave in the middle of the forest would have defeated that purpose.) It's also not clear why Anne has to sneak out in the middle of the night to go there (and what did she do in this 'verse during those ten years?), and I suppose Richard had her secretly watched so he'd know just when to show up.
(The other secret graves of the woods are those of the princes, but there was a better visual plot point to that, which I'll get to. Though it's still weird geography, but never mind.)
Richard III is among other things Shakespeare doing a "Rise and Fall of a Supervillain", and Cooke picks the chessboard in Richard's room as an ongoing motif - Richard first sets it up and plays against himself, later with Buckingham, and he's moving all the other characters the way he wants them to act, but the moment he actually has the throne and has ultimate power, he's not in control anymore and keeps making mistakes, so the board gets overthrown over the fallout of the princes' murder. The visual of the chess pieces gets returned to effectively at the very end, as the film doesn't close with Henry VII's triumphant coronation with Elizabeth of York, but with the camera first going down to show a single fallen black chess piece in the drain and then returns to the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth, pulling upwards to reveal all the corpses and Margaret standing among them, as a bleak end note on the War of the Roses and its human cost.
The other very memorable directorial choice is to open with a close up on Richard's naked deformed back while he utters his famous "now is the winter of our discontent" line at the start of the play. (BTW: I did not think "good special effect" until later.) Just how Richard's physical deformity is dealt with varies from production to production - I've seen stage Richards who don't even limp, let alone have a humpback, there's Olivier who did both but also kept Richard very agile, Ian McKellen had a small hump but not much else, and on the other end of the scale you have Anthony Sher going on crutches throughout. The Hollow Crown's Richard is already deformed in the Henry two parter, but not until Richard III do you get the sense that this means constant physical pain, as when he's getting into and out of armor/cloaks; there are various points, including the coronation, where Richard falls down and has trouble pulling himself up. It's not used to woobify him (I'm not sure you could if you wanted to when using Shakespeare's text), but it's definitely part of what makes him.
To use a comparison: with Olivier's Richard, the hump and limping are basically part of the ÜberMachiavellianSupevillain deal, you don't get the sense it bothers him. With Cumberbatch's Richard, you get the sense he hates the indignity of it, and while he has already decided to get rid of the princes a long time ago, the moment where it becomes personal rather than "one more obstacle to keeping power" is when his younger nephew taunts him about his back; very chilling scene, and the direction lets the uncomfortable silence and Richard's lethal look last before the dialogue restarts.
There's a lot of black humor in the first half of Richard III, the play, but The Hollow Crown only plays it up in one scene - Buckingham and a delegation of the citizens of London coming to Richard to petition him to accept the crown, and Richard fake-humble declining before letting himself be persuaded. It's one of the highlights.
Any production of Richard III has the problem that the nominal hero and winner, Richmond/Henry VII doesn't show up until the near end (note: the next time when Will S. did the ursurping king getting defeated thing, he establishes Macduff much earlier), and there isn't much you can do about it, so he usually gets cast with a good looking young actor and told to interact friendly with his men to make a counterpoint to evil Richard. (BTW, by now I'm usually good at detaching Shakespeare from history by now, but The Hollow Crown actually letting Henry defeat Richard in hand to hand combat - something both Olivier and McKellen avoided - made be go, oh, pull the other one, Will.) However, the true eventually victorious antagonists to Richard are the female characters, and as opposed to Olivier (who cut out Margaret and the Duchess of York both and reduced Elizabeth Woodville to near silence) and the McKellen/Loncrane movie (which cut Margaret though it gave some of her lines to the Ducess of York), Cooke goes for that. Which is why I don't really mind the second bewildering burial in the woods. I mean, letting Elizabeth, Margaret and Cecily (the Duchess of York) meet there so they can become this film's Kindly Ones/Weird Sisters/Fates and intercept Richard en route to Bosworth makes no logical or geographical sense (if Brakenbury buried the boys in some forest near the Tower, how is that en route to Bosworth?), but emotionally, it works. It's also where we get the pay off for producing Richard III not on its lonesome but as the tail end of the Henriad, because the Duchess of York's line to Margaret after Margaret listed all of Richard's victims, listing Margaret's victims ("I had a Richard till you killed him" etc.), re-establishes that Margaret isn't an innocent but when cursing Richard talks as a monster to a monster.
Now, in the play, I always had the impression that the Richard-Anne scene early on and the Richard-Elizabeth Woodville scene late work as counterpoints illustrating Richard's decline; he's utterly in control and manipulating Anne, but only believes himself to be manipulating Elizabeth when in reality she's running circles around him. The Hollow Crown gave me a slightly different impression, intentionally or not, because the Richard-Anne scene fails (to me) in terms of having the slightest seductive vibe. This Anne remains repelled instead of attracted/repelled and also doesn't emotionally buy into the false dichotomy of "take up the sword again or take up me". She just wants him to be gone. (Making it a bit of a mystery why she marries him, of course.) Otoh, while Elizabeth doesn't fall for Richard's reassurances in the slightest, I had the impression, the way Keeley Hawes plays it, that she decides to keep this open as an option just in case Richard wins and Henry Tudor loses. (Makes sense in terms of survival.) Speaking of Keeley Hawes: continues to be very good as Elizabeth Woodville in general. I wish she could have played the Sharon Penman version, which is my favourite.
While we're talking performances: Cumberbatch delivers the sardonic one liners and asides with relish and as mentioned also does self-loathing in terms of how Richard views his physical deformity. He's also good at the chilling killer moments (I mentioned the look when young Richard of York mocks him; there' also "I'm not in the giving mood today" to Buckingham and of course the intercutting between the princes getting murdered and Richard sitting at the chessboard, drumming his fingers). But for my money, his most memorable scene is when he hardly says anything, i.e. the confrontation with his mother, at this point played by Judi Dench. The earlier Margaret confrontation already has him discomforted (at this point the only thing that does), but he gets out of that with a verbal trick (ending her curse with her own name), whereas there's no snappy comeback with Cecily, Duchess of York, and part of the power of that scene isn't just that she (deservedly) condemms him for all he did but tells him she's always hated him from the moment of his birth (btw: this is where I wished they'd added some silent interaction between younger Cecily and Richard in the Henries, because there was none, just between and his father), and both audience and Richard believe her. There's an entire relationship sketched in that scene, and you can see it on Cumberbatch's face.
Overall, though, and back to the direction: I wouldn't call this one a must. It's a "let's get some good actors and do some Shakespeare for the Game of Thrones audience, but also for the British heritage audience" which doesn't, ultimately, go far enough to become its own thing. Again a compare and contrast: the McKellen/Loncrane Richard III by creating an Alt!Britain of the 1930s (complete with American Elizabeth Woodville, obvious Wallis Simpson associations are obvious and get across the hostilies the court feels towards the Woodvilles, and Richard becoming a fascist Franco/Mussolini-style dictator) did pull off that concept, and at a cinematic pace, too. (BTW, fun fact for the MCU audience; this one had a young RDJ as Anthony Woodville.) And in terms of "wow, this actor suddenly makes me see this character as I haven't before", there was nothing in all three parts in terms of what I felt when watching Jeremy Irons as Henry IV. (usually a bit part inevitably overshadowed by Falstaff and Hal both) in the Lancaster trilogy. No, not even Sophie Okenodo as Margaret - I mean, she was great, and I'm glad she got to play the role through all installments, instead of having a younger actress play Margaret early on - but Margaret already was one of the great female stage villains for me.
In conclusion: if you want to, wait for the dvd, you don't have to watch right now.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1173324.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Dominic Cooke, who directed all parts, started to let Richard talk to the camera in his near-end monologue in Henry VI, so it didn't surprise me that his solution to all the villainous monologues and asides of Richard III was not to do them as voice overs but Richard talking to the camera as well. "Villain takes audience into his confidence" isn't a unique or original-to-Shakespeare concept, but Richard III arguably is the Elizabethan play which does it best, and the one which influenced a great many subsequent villains (including Francis Urquart in the original British House of Card and his American incarnation Frank Underwood), so I'm not surprised Cooke went for that choice. All in all, it worked, but it contributed to a weird "can't make up its mind whether it wants to be "realism" or fantasy" vibe I got from this film version.
On the one hand, there are the earnest attempts at giving the audience a guide line when it comes to dates, with the "ten years later" (meaning ten years between the end of the Henriad and the start of Richard III, the film, as opposed to Richard III, the play, which opens directly after the previous play concluded, as evidenced by the fact that in the play, the Richard-Anne scene takes place during Henry VI's burial), which made me sigh and say: Guys, don't even try. Shakespeare's timeline for the histories, if you can call it that, is SO different from, well, history (for example, his Richard first shows up when historical Richard was three years old), that it's really just a headache to try and mingle the two. Also, the costumes are a great deal more historical than what, say, The White Queen offered. On the other hand, there aren't just the Shakespearean ghost/nightmare scenes, no, The Hollow Crown tops that with adding Margaret and her mirror of curses to the battle of Bosworth, not just as a guilty hallucination of Richard's but in fact, physcial presence after he's died. But the biggest "huh" moments in terms of "wanting to be realistic yet not" for me were that because of the "ten years later", the Richard and Anne scene could no longer take place over Henry VI's coffin. So instead it takes place over his grave. Which is mysteriously in the middle of the woods. With a single sad crucifix marking the spot. Guys, not even even Shakespeare, writing the Tudor version of history, ever implied they buried Henry with less than full state ceremony. (For the record, historical Henry first got buried in Chertsey Abbey and then got reinterred in Windsor Castle, where his bones still are. Much of the point of killing Henry was to make it clear to all and sunder he was dead, so there would be no more subsequent attempts to restore him to the throne, and a secret grave in the middle of the forest would have defeated that purpose.) It's also not clear why Anne has to sneak out in the middle of the night to go there (and what did she do in this 'verse during those ten years?), and I suppose Richard had her secretly watched so he'd know just when to show up.
(The other secret graves of the woods are those of the princes, but there was a better visual plot point to that, which I'll get to. Though it's still weird geography, but never mind.)
Richard III is among other things Shakespeare doing a "Rise and Fall of a Supervillain", and Cooke picks the chessboard in Richard's room as an ongoing motif - Richard first sets it up and plays against himself, later with Buckingham, and he's moving all the other characters the way he wants them to act, but the moment he actually has the throne and has ultimate power, he's not in control anymore and keeps making mistakes, so the board gets overthrown over the fallout of the princes' murder. The visual of the chess pieces gets returned to effectively at the very end, as the film doesn't close with Henry VII's triumphant coronation with Elizabeth of York, but with the camera first going down to show a single fallen black chess piece in the drain and then returns to the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth, pulling upwards to reveal all the corpses and Margaret standing among them, as a bleak end note on the War of the Roses and its human cost.
The other very memorable directorial choice is to open with a close up on Richard's naked deformed back while he utters his famous "now is the winter of our discontent" line at the start of the play. (BTW: I did not think "good special effect" until later.) Just how Richard's physical deformity is dealt with varies from production to production - I've seen stage Richards who don't even limp, let alone have a humpback, there's Olivier who did both but also kept Richard very agile, Ian McKellen had a small hump but not much else, and on the other end of the scale you have Anthony Sher going on crutches throughout. The Hollow Crown's Richard is already deformed in the Henry two parter, but not until Richard III do you get the sense that this means constant physical pain, as when he's getting into and out of armor/cloaks; there are various points, including the coronation, where Richard falls down and has trouble pulling himself up. It's not used to woobify him (I'm not sure you could if you wanted to when using Shakespeare's text), but it's definitely part of what makes him.
To use a comparison: with Olivier's Richard, the hump and limping are basically part of the ÜberMachiavellianSupevillain deal, you don't get the sense it bothers him. With Cumberbatch's Richard, you get the sense he hates the indignity of it, and while he has already decided to get rid of the princes a long time ago, the moment where it becomes personal rather than "one more obstacle to keeping power" is when his younger nephew taunts him about his back; very chilling scene, and the direction lets the uncomfortable silence and Richard's lethal look last before the dialogue restarts.
There's a lot of black humor in the first half of Richard III, the play, but The Hollow Crown only plays it up in one scene - Buckingham and a delegation of the citizens of London coming to Richard to petition him to accept the crown, and Richard fake-humble declining before letting himself be persuaded. It's one of the highlights.
Any production of Richard III has the problem that the nominal hero and winner, Richmond/Henry VII doesn't show up until the near end (note: the next time when Will S. did the ursurping king getting defeated thing, he establishes Macduff much earlier), and there isn't much you can do about it, so he usually gets cast with a good looking young actor and told to interact friendly with his men to make a counterpoint to evil Richard. (BTW, by now I'm usually good at detaching Shakespeare from history by now, but The Hollow Crown actually letting Henry defeat Richard in hand to hand combat - something both Olivier and McKellen avoided - made be go, oh, pull the other one, Will.) However, the true eventually victorious antagonists to Richard are the female characters, and as opposed to Olivier (who cut out Margaret and the Duchess of York both and reduced Elizabeth Woodville to near silence) and the McKellen/Loncrane movie (which cut Margaret though it gave some of her lines to the Ducess of York), Cooke goes for that. Which is why I don't really mind the second bewildering burial in the woods. I mean, letting Elizabeth, Margaret and Cecily (the Duchess of York) meet there so they can become this film's Kindly Ones/Weird Sisters/Fates and intercept Richard en route to Bosworth makes no logical or geographical sense (if Brakenbury buried the boys in some forest near the Tower, how is that en route to Bosworth?), but emotionally, it works. It's also where we get the pay off for producing Richard III not on its lonesome but as the tail end of the Henriad, because the Duchess of York's line to Margaret after Margaret listed all of Richard's victims, listing Margaret's victims ("I had a Richard till you killed him" etc.), re-establishes that Margaret isn't an innocent but when cursing Richard talks as a monster to a monster.
Now, in the play, I always had the impression that the Richard-Anne scene early on and the Richard-Elizabeth Woodville scene late work as counterpoints illustrating Richard's decline; he's utterly in control and manipulating Anne, but only believes himself to be manipulating Elizabeth when in reality she's running circles around him. The Hollow Crown gave me a slightly different impression, intentionally or not, because the Richard-Anne scene fails (to me) in terms of having the slightest seductive vibe. This Anne remains repelled instead of attracted/repelled and also doesn't emotionally buy into the false dichotomy of "take up the sword again or take up me". She just wants him to be gone. (Making it a bit of a mystery why she marries him, of course.) Otoh, while Elizabeth doesn't fall for Richard's reassurances in the slightest, I had the impression, the way Keeley Hawes plays it, that she decides to keep this open as an option just in case Richard wins and Henry Tudor loses. (Makes sense in terms of survival.) Speaking of Keeley Hawes: continues to be very good as Elizabeth Woodville in general. I wish she could have played the Sharon Penman version, which is my favourite.
While we're talking performances: Cumberbatch delivers the sardonic one liners and asides with relish and as mentioned also does self-loathing in terms of how Richard views his physical deformity. He's also good at the chilling killer moments (I mentioned the look when young Richard of York mocks him; there' also "I'm not in the giving mood today" to Buckingham and of course the intercutting between the princes getting murdered and Richard sitting at the chessboard, drumming his fingers). But for my money, his most memorable scene is when he hardly says anything, i.e. the confrontation with his mother, at this point played by Judi Dench. The earlier Margaret confrontation already has him discomforted (at this point the only thing that does), but he gets out of that with a verbal trick (ending her curse with her own name), whereas there's no snappy comeback with Cecily, Duchess of York, and part of the power of that scene isn't just that she (deservedly) condemms him for all he did but tells him she's always hated him from the moment of his birth (btw: this is where I wished they'd added some silent interaction between younger Cecily and Richard in the Henries, because there was none, just between and his father), and both audience and Richard believe her. There's an entire relationship sketched in that scene, and you can see it on Cumberbatch's face.
Overall, though, and back to the direction: I wouldn't call this one a must. It's a "let's get some good actors and do some Shakespeare for the Game of Thrones audience, but also for the British heritage audience" which doesn't, ultimately, go far enough to become its own thing. Again a compare and contrast: the McKellen/Loncrane Richard III by creating an Alt!Britain of the 1930s (complete with American Elizabeth Woodville, obvious Wallis Simpson associations are obvious and get across the hostilies the court feels towards the Woodvilles, and Richard becoming a fascist Franco/Mussolini-style dictator) did pull off that concept, and at a cinematic pace, too. (BTW, fun fact for the MCU audience; this one had a young RDJ as Anthony Woodville.) And in terms of "wow, this actor suddenly makes me see this character as I haven't before", there was nothing in all three parts in terms of what I felt when watching Jeremy Irons as Henry IV. (usually a bit part inevitably overshadowed by Falstaff and Hal both) in the Lancaster trilogy. No, not even Sophie Okenodo as Margaret - I mean, she was great, and I'm glad she got to play the role through all installments, instead of having a younger actress play Margaret early on - but Margaret already was one of the great female stage villains for me.
In conclusion: if you want to, wait for the dvd, you don't have to watch right now.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1173324.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.