The color slowly
drains out of the new King Lear as it goes along, as if to formalize
its depiction of a nation bled dry by its own awfulness. Adapted and
directed by Richard Eyre, this BBC Two and Amazon co-production is a
modernized version of William Shakespeare’s epic about a doddering
old ruler (Anthony Hopkins), who decides to divide his kingdom among
his three daughters, Goneril, (Emma Thompson), Regan (Emily Watson),
and Cordelia (Florence Pugh) based on how fawningly they express
their love for him — a fit of narcissism that jump-starts multiple
plots to overthrow Lear, and sends the kingdom spiraling into chaos,
war, and ruin. Any production of Lear could feel relevant if mounted
during a period when the world’s most powerful man was a
foggy-minded 72-year-old whose policies seemed driven by greed,
cruelty, a bottomless thirst for acclaim, an eagerness to involve his
children in government, and a terror of changing times, but Eyre
sharpens the parallels by setting his film in an alternative, vaguely
dystopian universe that feels like a premonition of where Western
civilization is headed. For its first half-hour, this Lear plays like
a stealthy editorial cartoon about Trumpism, conceived for plausible
deniability, so that we can hear lines like “I am a man more sinned
against than sinning” and “The worst is not, so long as we can
say ‘This is the worst” and think of them as intentional or
coincidental commentary, depending on our biases.
A climactic duel
trades swords for modern MMA fighting techniques, the characters all
wear modern clothes (including recent vintage military uniforms), and
they travel by motor vehicle and aircraft instead of horses, but key
action still occurs in and around ancient spaces — castles and
manors, mainly. The juxtaposition of new and old encourages us to
conflate royal despots with 21st-century politicians and CEOs who
carry on like tribal chieftains and maintain security forces that are
essentially private armies. As portrayed by Hopkins, Lear comes off
as a decadent corporate oligarch who has somehow conquered all of
England and surrounded himself with square-jawed soldiers who kill
and torture on his command. Their ruthlessness makes the
soft-bellied, physically helpless old man feel macho by association.
A chilling scene early on finds Lear, lounging about in his castle
while surrounded by soldiers, humiliating Goneril’s steward Oswald,
played by Christopher Eccleston; the combination of Eccelston’s
prim demeanor and posture and Lear’s relentlessly jocular needling
gives the moment a hint of impending homophobic murder. When Goneril
enters the room moments later, the men murmur somewhat dismissively,
as if the arrival of a woman in an all-male space made them close
ranks to reaffirm which gender is boss.
Soon enough, though,
Eyre’s Lear settles into a more traditional groove, notwithstanding
the modern embellishments. Eyre has cut the text to the bone,
sometimes to its detriment, though the edits elevate the play’s
parallel, secondary story — the bastard Edmund (John McMillan)
plotting against his father, the Earl of Gloucester (Jim Broadbent)
and his half-brother Edgar (Andrew Scott) — in fascinating ways.
This streamlined Lear jumps so regularly between the two major,
occasionally overlapping storylines —Lear and his daughters, and
the Earl and his sons — that we think of them as mirrors, even more
so than we might while watching a full-length theatrical production.
The characters are simplified, chiseled down into nuggets of
psychology in ways that make them seem to blend into each other and
assume each other’s plot functions. This is sometimes marvelous, as
when Lear’s figurative blindness is compared to the Earl’s actual
blindness, or when Lear is reduced to a nomadic fool, pushing a
shopping cart in a marketplace like a homeless person while wearing
the fedora that once sat on the head of his actual Fool (Karl
Johnson). There’s even a moment when Edgar, walking along in the
muddy moors in disguise as “Poor Tom,” laments the awfulness of
life in voice over, while Eyre crosscuts between him and the Earl as
he’s escorted from the scene of his blinding.
On the minus side,
although this Lear makes sure to stage most of the set pieces you
might’ve heard about even if you’ve never read or seen the play —
such as the blinding scene; the duel between Edmund and Edgar; Lear,
the Fool, and the Earl of Kent (Jim Carter) wandering in the rain;
and Lear’s tearful reconciliation with Cordelia — without enough
connective tissue, they don’t land as hard as they should, despite
the undeniable panache that Eyre and his crew bring to the staging
and filming.
We should
acknowledge here that an unexpurgated Lear is troublesome for theater
companies no matter how much text they preserve. It’s a
damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t play. Delete too much and key
plot points become incomprehensible, but if you leave most or all of
it alone, the story is still hard to follow because of the
often-frustrating decisions Shakespeare made to begin with. As in
Hamlet, another of the Bard’s extra-long, shaggy tragedies, there
are lots of narrative cul-de-sacs, loose ends, and seeming
redundancies, and characters that duplicate ideas in ways that can
feel alternately revelatory and pointless. Many emotionally
significant confrontations and acts of violence occur offscreen only
to be summarized later (the Fool pretty much vanishes halfway
through, functionally replaced by Edgar in his Poor Tom disguise). To
the 21st-century eye, these may seem like mistakes — does YouTube
have a “Shakespearean goofs” channel? — even if they open up
fresh avenues of interpretation for spectators who’ve committed to
Shakespeare’s aesthetic. There have been many effective instances
of a film reducing the plot of a Shakespeare comedy or drama to the
barest essentials and somehow still putting across the intellectual
and emotional core of the piece. One of my favorites is Orson Welles’
Othello, a 91-minute adaptation of a three-hour text that finds
visual equivalents for many of the concepts Shakespeare expressed in
dialogue. This Lear is not on Welles’s level — few Shakespeare
adaptations are — but it has strong justifications for every
alteration it makes, even when the results frustrate. (A third-act
string of deaths happen so close together, and mainly offscreen, that
I shuttled back to make sure I didn’t inadvertently skip scenes.)
Eyre’s tight but rarely intrusive closeups and Ben Smithard’s
digital widescreen photography help unify a movie that might
otherwise feel too fragmented and rushed. Smithard gives the whole
thing an infusion of grey — subtle at first, overt later — as if
England’s overcast skies had infected the buildings, the
characters, and the land itself.
As is usually the
case with top-drawer BBC Shakespeare adaptations, the actors are
terrific. Thompson’s scheming flirtatiousness as Goneril, Watson’s
wide-eyed bloodlust as Regan, Jim Carter’s basso-voiced hardiness
as the Earl of Kent, and Tobias Menzies’ militarily precise sadism
as the Duke of Cornwall all make powerful impressions. Florence Pugh
does a better job than most actresses in the rather thankless role of
Cordelia, a character whose decency can feel more like a rhetorical
flourish than a character trait. (How did a family that awful produce
a woman that honorable, anyway?) Hopkins’ Lear is unrelentingly
peevish and nasty throughout the first two-thirds of the play, so
much so that when he finally suffers in exile and then softens and
becomes more functional and self-aware, the miseries visited upon him
in the last act feel even more like karmic payback than they might in
longer productions. Recent adaptations often present Lear as
suffering from a more scientifically defined version of Alzheimer’s
disease, and this one is no exception. Anyone who’s seen loved ones
grapple with the condition will flinch in recognition when Lear
inappropriately touches Goneril (not registering that she’s his
daughter) and verbally stumbles his way toward recognizing Cordelia
(Hopkins’ reading of “I think this lady to be my child” is
devastating).
Ultimately, and
perhaps surprisingly, the Earl-Edgar-Edmund story hits just as hard,
partly because the conflicts were already laid out so precisely by
Shakespeare — and so clearly marked as a secondary plot — and
partly because the three actors give slightly flatter performances
than the rest, almost like what you’d expect to see in an action
thriller or gangster picture. Jim Broadbent’s Gloucester is an
oblivious jerk early on and a gelded patriarch later, his blindness a
biblical punishment for his failure to see the damage he caused by
embracing one son and casually rejecting and humiliating the other.
Scott’s Edgar moves almost seamlessly from astronomer-climatologist
to framed fugitive and finally to Fool-replacement and fratricidal
combatant; it works because the performance has been conceived in
almost entirely physical terms, conveyed through closeups of Scott’s
confused and then tormented face and long shots of his increasingly
ragged and dirty form as it lopes across desolate landscapes. With
his probing stare, gleeful proclamations, and fourth-wall-breaking
monologues, Macmillan’s Edmund would get along swimmingly with Iago
and Richard III, and Eyre’s decision to cast an actor of color in
the role gives certain moments and lines a secondary layer of meaning
(particularly a sneering reference to him as a “half-blooded
fellow”).
However you feel
about the particulars of Eyre’s adaptation, this Lear captures the
heart of the play. It’s a vision of rule collapsing and both
individuals and institutions losing their minds, pitting brother
against brother, sister against sister, father against children,
friend against friend, in an exhausting struggle to hang onto scraps
of an old order that was already starting to crumble before Lear
first unrolled his map and divvied up the countryside. It’s as
political a production as it needs to be, and at its best, it feels
as current and as timeless as a nightmare.