I do not read Shakespeare’s plays for fun. I am not saying that I do not enjoy his work, but in my spare reading time, no. If it was a school assignment, I would read it, and if I enjoyed it, I would maybe revisit it, but in spite of owning his collected worsk, I do not regularly read them for fun and have not read all his work. So I do not know if hated Cymbeline because the story sucks or because Michael Almereyda, one of my usually reliable favorite filmmakers, did a poor job adapting it.
I forget Almereyda exists, then I see one of his movies at home, absolutely adore it then look up the director, discover he did it then resolve to do better by him and see his films in the theater, but they never come to a theater near me, or if they do, it is so brief that I do not notice it. I adored his adaptation of Hamlet, but forget if I saw it in the theater or on VHS! I saw Nadja in the theaters when I was in high school and just beginning to love movies because I love vampires, but I do not recall it making a grand impression on me. I definitely saw The Eternal, Experimenter and Marjorie Prime at home. I adored the first two, but even though the last film was solid, it did not hit me as hard as the others. I decided to stop haphazardly enjoying his work then added all his other available movies to my queue and figured starting with Shakespeare was a safe bet. After all, the cast virtually promised excellence.
Ethan Hawke is one of the great American actors even though it is easy to forget it, and Hawke collaborated with Almereyda on Hamlet. John Leguizamo also had Shakespeare experience, but with Baz Luhrmann in Romeo + Juliet, which I definitely saw in theaters and own both soundtracks. The gone too soon Anton Yelchin, the legends Ed Harris, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Delroy Lindo, constantly evolving Dakota Johnson (I feel as if she deserves the credit that Kristen Stewart gets) and solid character actor staples Kevin Corrigan and James Ransome are also in the cast. The tipoff was Milla Jovovich, whom I adore, and I love in this film. I actually think that Jovovich is a good actor, but she is rarely in good movies and sadly Cymbeline is not the exception to the rule.
Cymbeline feels as if he took King Lear’s crappy father, Othello’s jealous lover murder your framed lover scenario, the secret marriage from Romeo & Juliet and the ambitious queen from Macbeth (I am probably missing other ingredients, but reverse engineering has never been my strong suit), stirred it all up using the least plausible combinations then decided to use that story. It could be that the translation to modern sensibilities lost some resonance in the process, but I was intrigued by the idea of a British local tribal king being cast as the head of a (biker) gang forced to begrudgingly pay tribute to the Romans who are characterized as cops, an occupying force. No, I never watched Sons of Anarchy. I tried, but I could not even finish the first episode. It may have suited the story better if it was set in a twentieth century era when graft was more common like Boardwalk Empire or set it in another country during the twenty-first century in which criminals and cops are usually interchangeable, but with the latter, the cast needs to change. From an outsider’s perspective, LAPD’s most notorious problems seems to stem from racial and sexual violence, which is a bias, empathy problem, not financial corruption, but maybe they hit every branch while falling down. I do not know. In spite of the parallels not quite working, I did not have an innate problem with the shift and generally enjoy modern takes on classical works of literature.
I did not like the skater culture aesthetic. If you want me to think nobility in status or spirit, I am not thinking of skateboarders. It did not intersect well with the idea of a gang. Both cultures have different personality styles that seem innately opposed to each other. Gangs seem really regimented, disciplined, driven and invested. Skateboarders seem obsessed with one thing and otherwise disinterested with anything normative or that adheres to hierarchy. Once again, I am an outsider when it comes to skateboard culture. The closest that I came to absorbing it was watching Dogtown and Z-Boys, Lords of Dogtown and Skate Kitchen otherwise I give a wide birth to films featuring that sport.
I also despised one of the characters in Cymbeline that I was supposed to like. How could Posthumus ever impress a king? Just given what the audience is shown of Posthumus, he is the opposite. Penn Badgley (who?) plays Posthumus, and he does not convince me that Posthumus is worthy of all this favor. Badger was the weakest actor in the cast. I actually hated this character, and I do not think that I am supposed to. There is a difference between being poor, a skateboarder, and being a loser, fuckboy whom his wife should divorce immediately. I would not even want to be his roommate.
Once again Jovovich nails her depiction of the queen by aiming for trophy wife a la Queen of Versailles meets ruthless, social climber, desperately unhappy lady who lunches. Her twenty first translation of a queen actually works. Lindo is truly a professional because he has to tell the two whitest of white boys that he is not actually their father. Um, if they did not already know, your kids are dumb as toast and less tasty. It is one time that race bending did not work within the context of the story.
Even though Cymbeline is only ninety-eight minutes long, it felt like an eternity. I did not enjoy this film even a little bit. It is not worth seeing for the cast. If you are a fan of Google, there is a nice moment, but I do not think that it is worth slogging through this absurd story. Everyone has a bad day, and it is just better to chalk this up to one of those then simply forget it existed. Dreadful!