King Lear (BBC/Amazon Prime Production) (Film Review)
Aka the one starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Tobias Menzies, Jim Broadbent, Emily Watson, Andrew Scott et al, set in a contemporary AU Britain where a momentous political decision about the country's future is made based on a temper tantrum, and then it turns out no one is equipped to handle the consequences as the country goes to hell on an ever faster pace. Very AU, that one.
Seriously though, much like the Ian McKellen/Richard Linklater Richard III presents an Alt!Britain of the 1930s going fascist with lots of echoes and images of the actual 1930s, this 2018 Alt!Britain has some obvious reminders. Most pointedly during the entire Lear & Co. on the heath sequence, because in this version he's not raging on a heath and finding temporary shelter in a hovel with "Mad Tom", aka Edgar, he and the Fool stumble across Tom/Edgar in a collection of refugee tents, and that's also where Gloucester and Kent find them. Which means that when Gloucester is in tears as he offers Lear warmth and shelter for the night elsehwere, the silent refugees crowing in their tents that barely shield them from the storm, to whom no one offers any such thing, look very unimpressed. The rest of the film is less pointedly acidic re: real life circumstances, but the dysfunctional Britain it's set in only has far more soldiers (in green brown khakis, btw, this is one version that does not play the fascist game) than the real deal, looks wise. It also starts out already looking grim but in the course of the action what colours are left get bleached and drained more and more; the cruel world depicted isn't done so in black and red colours but by the colours vanishing, which, again, avoids what has become a cliché by now.
The actors are all excellent. Anthony Hopkins rises to the key Lear challenge of making Lear awful in the first part and both pitiable and sympathetic in the second without this feeling like two different people. The transition is done step by step as Lear shows increasing flickers of empathy for people not himself the lower his fortunes get, while still retaining that capacity for being lethal. People are legitmately scared of Lear at the start of the play when he still has his power; when powerless Lear at the ends mentions having killed the man who killed Cordelia, Hopkins doesn't say this ragingly or with tears, though at different points in the play he amply displays both, he says it matter of factly, because of course he did. (Lear's decline in the play is always mental; for all the mentions of his age, the play has him enjoying his hunting - which in the Renaissance Shakespeare wrote in requires a good physical condition -, surviving a night out in the storm without catching as much as a cold, being able to kill a trained and presumably young soldier and being able to carry a grown woman just before his own death.) In his showdown with Goneril Hopkins does the full emotional brutality bit (and Emma Thompson, who's done two movies with him in the past where they had sparring scenes where she held her own, this time plays Goneril as deeply wounded, and truly scared of her father), while in his final scene with a living Cordelia (Florence Pugh) he's incredibly tender. I've seen Lears who cling to Cordelia in that scene, down to smothering her just rage; Hopkins' Lear doesn't, he comforts ans supports her as she has earlier comforted him, and you have the sense he uses what he's learned through the play in empathy. The man he was at the beginning wouldn't have been capable of it.
Lear's knights being modern-day soldiers enhances the sense that they are actually a threat (in addition to being rowdy), and that Goneril has good reason for her initial objections. Mind you, as I said, in this King Lear, soldiers are everywhere; at Gloucester's castle - Edmund is in the army from the start, being on guard duty when Gloucester has his initial conversation with Kent, and Tobias Menzies' Duke of Cornwell is in uniform throughout, which, btw, both in the scene where Edmund reports his father's letter-from-Dover to Cornwell and later when Albany calls Edmund a traitor made me wonder: while what Edmund does throughout the play is obviously very morally wrong, is any of it other than his initial framing of Edgar illegal in either the play's world or in Shakespeare's? Because technically, what he's doing when telling Cornwell about his father's plans is reporting his father is in contact with a foreign army planning an impending invasion. And later, while his affairs with Regan and Goneril are in one case adulterous and obviously calculated (he wouldn't bother if they weren't the most powerful women in the land), they're not illegal in a modern day setting. The sisters murdering each other wasn't his idea, nor did he seem to know about it before it happens. Condemming Lear and Cordelia to death on his lonesome is illegal or at least should be discussed with Albany first, but Albany doesn't know about this yet when he makes his charge. Given Edmund has just co-lead an army that successfully beat back an invasion, it's hard to see the "traitor" charge as anything but "I know you have an affair with my wife, and now that we've won on the field and don't have to be allies anymore I can at last do something about it". Considering that Albany, other than Edgar, is one of the few lawfully good characters in the entire play, that's, hm, interesting.
Speaking of Edmund: since the last Edmund I've seen, in the National Theatre production with Simon Russell Beale as Lear and played by Sam Througton, was something of a let down, I was glad John Macmillan turned out to be far better. No smarm, for starters, being able to pull off sincerity in his deceptions of father and brother so they don't look stupid for believing him, while his expression once Gloucester and Kent have wandered off in the opening scenes suggests a lot about what he thinks re: his father's nudge-nudge-wink-wink account of his mother, and oh, also handsome enough so that it is understandable on that level, too, why both Goneril and Regan bother. The play's vigorously trimmed down, so sadly Edgar's account of Gloucester's death is gone, but as opposed to the NT production, this did not bother me because the actors managed to attribute Edmund's last minute flicker of repentance to his relationship with his brother instead, which in this production makes more sense. Incidentally, the final duel between the brothers is fought, due to the contemporary setting, not with swords but with a mixture of wrestling and boxing, with Edmund retaining the upper hand until Edgar in one twist manages to break his back. Edgar then holds him in his arms, crying, and Edmund's confession-plus-attempt-to-take-death-order-for-L&C.-back as a response to that emotion worked on me. Lastly, casting Edmund with a poc actor (while both Gloucester and Edgar are white) gives Albany's earlier reference to him (in a "you're a traitor" outburst) as a "half-blooded fellow" a new racist layer which however as a replacement of the illegimate birth put down (no longer a draw back for a contemporary audience) works. Interestingly, the actors playing France and Burgundy also are poc, though later the soldiers in Cordelia's French army are mainly, though not exclusively white, so it's not quite that the production codes foreign = black.
It's one of those productions where you can see the phrase "toxic masculinity" in many a mind involved in it, because it's pretty blatant, from the good ole' boys vibe between Gloucester and Kent in the opening scene via Lear's narcissism and tyranny with his three daughters to the arrival of Lear and his soldiers at Goneril's house to their (and Kent-in-disguise's) taunting of Oswald. (Played, btw, by Christopher Eccleston; considering Eccleston has spent a life time playing angry northerners, letting him play here a wimpy southerner - and he completely dropped his own accent for this role - bullied by Kent-as-Caius-the-northerner almost works as a casting in-joke.) The reaction, too, of the soldiers when Goneril enters is very much that of a male crowd designed to make woman's skin crawl. Of course, later the balance of power shifts, and then we get other subtexts. As with most productions, the blinding of Gloucester stands out in brutality, and here Cornwell and Regan are fellow sadists treating it as a mutual turn-on, with Cornwell using Regan's entwined with his own to do the actual blinding. (BTW, one of the few let downs to me was that this was a production where Regan a) is hinted to be interested in Edmund before Cornwell dies, and b) when he dies, actually backs physically away from him. I much prefer it if they remain an evil power couple devoted to each other until he croaks it. In the NT production, Regan was genuinely devastated.) And Cordelia is in uniform throughout her later appearance, as her army's commander, though her husband makes a brief return appearance early on.
During the advance of Cordelia's army, we get a montage not just of tanks driving against each other but bombings via air planes, and bombings of civilians, no less (as evidencd in a house where blind Gloucester and Edgar briefly find shelter), which is modern warfare but does drive the point home this is an invasion and people are dying for this Lear family quarrel. (As oppposed to, say, Macbeth, where there is ample reporting of Macbeth's tyranny, we don't hear anything about how/if the population objects to and suffers under Team Goneril/Regan/Albany/Cornwell's rule. Lear himself and Gloucester suffer, but the people? Hm.)
Lastly, about Edgar: this was one of the more knowing Edgars, i.e. while he's naively believing his brother at the start, the way Andrew Scott plays Edgar-as-Tom never lets you forget this is a performance of Edgar's; depending on whether or not the other characters are looking at him, he drops in and out of (Tom) character, taking in what is happening. There's also a process in how he reacts to his father, as opposed to instant realisation/forgiveness. You can see that Gloucester's compassion for Lear is what starts to persuade Edgar to his father's better nature, but he's still not completely sure until he sees him blinded. Also, the film changes Edgar letting his father "jump" at a safe place in order to get the suicidal impulse out of his system to him being ready to let him actually jump except that Gloucester then faints at the edge of the cliff (Edgar is all affection and grief from this point onwards). As mentioned earlier, he's in tears over killing his brother (while also not doubting the need to do it). And of course the final words of the play belong to him; when Scott speaks them, they aren't addressed to either Albany or Kent but to the audience, and not really just about Alt!Britain anymore. "We that are young / shall never see so much nor live so long" indeed. In conclusion: A powerful, devastating and very contemporary Lear.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1308851.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Seriously though, much like the Ian McKellen/Richard Linklater Richard III presents an Alt!Britain of the 1930s going fascist with lots of echoes and images of the actual 1930s, this 2018 Alt!Britain has some obvious reminders. Most pointedly during the entire Lear & Co. on the heath sequence, because in this version he's not raging on a heath and finding temporary shelter in a hovel with "Mad Tom", aka Edgar, he and the Fool stumble across Tom/Edgar in a collection of refugee tents, and that's also where Gloucester and Kent find them. Which means that when Gloucester is in tears as he offers Lear warmth and shelter for the night elsehwere, the silent refugees crowing in their tents that barely shield them from the storm, to whom no one offers any such thing, look very unimpressed. The rest of the film is less pointedly acidic re: real life circumstances, but the dysfunctional Britain it's set in only has far more soldiers (in green brown khakis, btw, this is one version that does not play the fascist game) than the real deal, looks wise. It also starts out already looking grim but in the course of the action what colours are left get bleached and drained more and more; the cruel world depicted isn't done so in black and red colours but by the colours vanishing, which, again, avoids what has become a cliché by now.
The actors are all excellent. Anthony Hopkins rises to the key Lear challenge of making Lear awful in the first part and both pitiable and sympathetic in the second without this feeling like two different people. The transition is done step by step as Lear shows increasing flickers of empathy for people not himself the lower his fortunes get, while still retaining that capacity for being lethal. People are legitmately scared of Lear at the start of the play when he still has his power; when powerless Lear at the ends mentions having killed the man who killed Cordelia, Hopkins doesn't say this ragingly or with tears, though at different points in the play he amply displays both, he says it matter of factly, because of course he did. (Lear's decline in the play is always mental; for all the mentions of his age, the play has him enjoying his hunting - which in the Renaissance Shakespeare wrote in requires a good physical condition -, surviving a night out in the storm without catching as much as a cold, being able to kill a trained and presumably young soldier and being able to carry a grown woman just before his own death.) In his showdown with Goneril Hopkins does the full emotional brutality bit (and Emma Thompson, who's done two movies with him in the past where they had sparring scenes where she held her own, this time plays Goneril as deeply wounded, and truly scared of her father), while in his final scene with a living Cordelia (Florence Pugh) he's incredibly tender. I've seen Lears who cling to Cordelia in that scene, down to smothering her just rage; Hopkins' Lear doesn't, he comforts ans supports her as she has earlier comforted him, and you have the sense he uses what he's learned through the play in empathy. The man he was at the beginning wouldn't have been capable of it.
Lear's knights being modern-day soldiers enhances the sense that they are actually a threat (in addition to being rowdy), and that Goneril has good reason for her initial objections. Mind you, as I said, in this King Lear, soldiers are everywhere; at Gloucester's castle - Edmund is in the army from the start, being on guard duty when Gloucester has his initial conversation with Kent, and Tobias Menzies' Duke of Cornwell is in uniform throughout, which, btw, both in the scene where Edmund reports his father's letter-from-Dover to Cornwell and later when Albany calls Edmund a traitor made me wonder: while what Edmund does throughout the play is obviously very morally wrong, is any of it other than his initial framing of Edgar illegal in either the play's world or in Shakespeare's? Because technically, what he's doing when telling Cornwell about his father's plans is reporting his father is in contact with a foreign army planning an impending invasion. And later, while his affairs with Regan and Goneril are in one case adulterous and obviously calculated (he wouldn't bother if they weren't the most powerful women in the land), they're not illegal in a modern day setting. The sisters murdering each other wasn't his idea, nor did he seem to know about it before it happens. Condemming Lear and Cordelia to death on his lonesome is illegal or at least should be discussed with Albany first, but Albany doesn't know about this yet when he makes his charge. Given Edmund has just co-lead an army that successfully beat back an invasion, it's hard to see the "traitor" charge as anything but "I know you have an affair with my wife, and now that we've won on the field and don't have to be allies anymore I can at last do something about it". Considering that Albany, other than Edgar, is one of the few lawfully good characters in the entire play, that's, hm, interesting.
Speaking of Edmund: since the last Edmund I've seen, in the National Theatre production with Simon Russell Beale as Lear and played by Sam Througton, was something of a let down, I was glad John Macmillan turned out to be far better. No smarm, for starters, being able to pull off sincerity in his deceptions of father and brother so they don't look stupid for believing him, while his expression once Gloucester and Kent have wandered off in the opening scenes suggests a lot about what he thinks re: his father's nudge-nudge-wink-wink account of his mother, and oh, also handsome enough so that it is understandable on that level, too, why both Goneril and Regan bother. The play's vigorously trimmed down, so sadly Edgar's account of Gloucester's death is gone, but as opposed to the NT production, this did not bother me because the actors managed to attribute Edmund's last minute flicker of repentance to his relationship with his brother instead, which in this production makes more sense. Incidentally, the final duel between the brothers is fought, due to the contemporary setting, not with swords but with a mixture of wrestling and boxing, with Edmund retaining the upper hand until Edgar in one twist manages to break his back. Edgar then holds him in his arms, crying, and Edmund's confession-plus-attempt-to-take-death-order-for-L&C.-back as a response to that emotion worked on me. Lastly, casting Edmund with a poc actor (while both Gloucester and Edgar are white) gives Albany's earlier reference to him (in a "you're a traitor" outburst) as a "half-blooded fellow" a new racist layer which however as a replacement of the illegimate birth put down (no longer a draw back for a contemporary audience) works. Interestingly, the actors playing France and Burgundy also are poc, though later the soldiers in Cordelia's French army are mainly, though not exclusively white, so it's not quite that the production codes foreign = black.
It's one of those productions where you can see the phrase "toxic masculinity" in many a mind involved in it, because it's pretty blatant, from the good ole' boys vibe between Gloucester and Kent in the opening scene via Lear's narcissism and tyranny with his three daughters to the arrival of Lear and his soldiers at Goneril's house to their (and Kent-in-disguise's) taunting of Oswald. (Played, btw, by Christopher Eccleston; considering Eccleston has spent a life time playing angry northerners, letting him play here a wimpy southerner - and he completely dropped his own accent for this role - bullied by Kent-as-Caius-the-northerner almost works as a casting in-joke.) The reaction, too, of the soldiers when Goneril enters is very much that of a male crowd designed to make woman's skin crawl. Of course, later the balance of power shifts, and then we get other subtexts. As with most productions, the blinding of Gloucester stands out in brutality, and here Cornwell and Regan are fellow sadists treating it as a mutual turn-on, with Cornwell using Regan's entwined with his own to do the actual blinding. (BTW, one of the few let downs to me was that this was a production where Regan a) is hinted to be interested in Edmund before Cornwell dies, and b) when he dies, actually backs physically away from him. I much prefer it if they remain an evil power couple devoted to each other until he croaks it. In the NT production, Regan was genuinely devastated.) And Cordelia is in uniform throughout her later appearance, as her army's commander, though her husband makes a brief return appearance early on.
During the advance of Cordelia's army, we get a montage not just of tanks driving against each other but bombings via air planes, and bombings of civilians, no less (as evidencd in a house where blind Gloucester and Edgar briefly find shelter), which is modern warfare but does drive the point home this is an invasion and people are dying for this Lear family quarrel. (As oppposed to, say, Macbeth, where there is ample reporting of Macbeth's tyranny, we don't hear anything about how/if the population objects to and suffers under Team Goneril/Regan/Albany/Cornwell's rule. Lear himself and Gloucester suffer, but the people? Hm.)
Lastly, about Edgar: this was one of the more knowing Edgars, i.e. while he's naively believing his brother at the start, the way Andrew Scott plays Edgar-as-Tom never lets you forget this is a performance of Edgar's; depending on whether or not the other characters are looking at him, he drops in and out of (Tom) character, taking in what is happening. There's also a process in how he reacts to his father, as opposed to instant realisation/forgiveness. You can see that Gloucester's compassion for Lear is what starts to persuade Edgar to his father's better nature, but he's still not completely sure until he sees him blinded. Also, the film changes Edgar letting his father "jump" at a safe place in order to get the suicidal impulse out of his system to him being ready to let him actually jump except that Gloucester then faints at the edge of the cliff (Edgar is all affection and grief from this point onwards). As mentioned earlier, he's in tears over killing his brother (while also not doubting the need to do it). And of course the final words of the play belong to him; when Scott speaks them, they aren't addressed to either Albany or Kent but to the audience, and not really just about Alt!Britain anymore. "We that are young / shall never see so much nor live so long" indeed. In conclusion: A powerful, devastating and very contemporary Lear.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1308851.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.