Late last year, the cogs of the Hollywood machine churned out yet another highly anticipated Shakespeare retelling, this time based on the comedy Much Ado About Nothing. All Australia’s a stage, read the blueprint, and the men and women? Merely Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney.
With the release date drawing ever closer, news of the film began to spread far and wide. In a nearby village, conspiratorial murmurs rippled through the square, echoing down narrow cobblestone streets (yes, this is a metaphor for people posting on the internet).
“The rom-com is back!” cried a marketing executive cleverly disguised as a humble peasant. Townspeople witness to this bold claim turned to each other in disbelief. Was today finally the day? Had the prodigal, at long last, returned?
“Come,” beckoned a lowly serf of Lord Sony Pictures Entertainment, “and experience the story of Bea and Ben, a timeless and classic tale of two people reluctantly attending a destination wedding…”
A passing tradesman peddled his wares to the growing crowd: a creaky wooden cart full of gossip mags claiming the two leads engaged in an affair on set. I mean, who could fake that chemistry? Certainly not two incredibly attractive professional actors!
The audience’s appetite was whet. It was almost too perfect, sickly sweet brain candy dangled in front of their starving, horny mouths. All they had dreamt of, night after night, as they shifted around on lumpy straw mattresses. Finally here. But still…to some townspeople in the throng, something felt off. It was too good to be true. The other shoe had to drop.
And drop it did, halfway through the movie, when the peasants, serfs, and farmers glanced up from their tiny phone screens to their medium sized computer screens and saw a strange quote spray painted on the brick wall behind Sydney Sweeney. “There’s much to do with hate,” it read, “but more with love.”
What was that doing in the fluffy comedy of the season? And why hadn't they yet seen Glen Powell’s butt on screen?
Unfortunately, as it turned out, there simply hadn’t been time amongst the pre-movie fanfare to market this steamy tale of two hot people having shower sex on an exotic vacation as what it truly was–a retelling of a confusingly worded and somewhat irrelevant play from the 1500s. What a lousy coincidence!
And dear reader, if you'll allow me, a brief tangent. I would be remiss in failing to mention that the quote projected behind Sweeney is not even from the play the movie is based on, but whatever.
So what actually happens in this movie, and how close does it get to its (quietly) purported source material?
We open with Sweeney’s character, a law student named Bea, first meeting Powell’s character Ben, a financier at Goldman Sachs. (Wow. The original play would probably have been way more popular if Shakespeare had told us Benedick was in finance).
Right away, the movie tries its hand at physical humor, Bea spills coffee on her jeans and loudly and ineffectively attempts to dry them in the coffee shop bathroom. As charming as Sweeney behaves in front of the camera, she can’t quite pull off the more comedic beats and biting lines the script demands of her, and this failure exacerbates the hollowness of her performance. The lines and blocking want her to be quirky, but Sweeney’s Bea isn’t quirky, she’s bland, but attractive, and her attractiveness begs you to forget her blandness.
Powell, on the other hand, shines in these comedic moments, the strongest points of his performance (and honestly of the movie as a whole). Quick on his feet, Bea and Ben hit it off. After spending the night together, the two characters suffer a miscommunication when Bea hears Ben bad mouthing her to a friend.
This is where Powell’s acting as Ben begins to flail–he can do convincing comedy, but he can’t quite manage the shift from enthusiasm to cynicism demanded by his character. The dramatic tension between Bea and Ben (and Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado) is built off of joint cynicism, an obstinate belief in the nonexistence of love despite the most blatant challenges to its veracity. I need to believe that Ben is fundamentally cynical, but I don’t, because he spends most of the movie barely containing his enthusiasm, randomly channeling superficial cynicism only when the script directly instructs him to.
Bea and Ben are reunited when their sisters begin to date each other, a relationship which continually demands their proximity until they eventually find themselves flying to Sydney, Australia, for a destination wedding.
Fearful that Bea and Ben’s bickering will ruin the ceremony, their family members devise a plan to romantically entangle them. In rebuttal to this familial scheming, a fake dating scheme develops between Bea and Ben, and after various hijinks (Bea falls in the ocean after asking Ben perform a scene from Titanic on the bow of a boat, they get rescued by a helicopter, they destroy a wedding cake, they have shower sex, yada yada) which blur the line between what’s fake and what’s real, their plot is uncovered. It is only after overhearing a fight between their two sisters (which they later learn was staged with the intent of facilitating reconciliation) that Bea and Ben finally work things out (for some reason they bring back the helicopter for that scene, which felt unnecessary).
If I had to use two words to describe this film, they would be ‘generic’ and ‘shallow’. Both actors are generically attractive, both characters generically likable, or at least not blatantly unlikeable, and both undergo superficial character evolutions. Bea learns not to be ashamed of what she wants, after dropping out of law school and being honest about her feelings for Ben. Ben learns not to let fear get in the way of what he wants, despite having been hurt and disappointed in the past.
The relationship itself feels generic and shallow, too. Two hot people are (shocker) attracted to each other. They spend a lot of time pretending not to be. And then they finally admit that they are. The movie doesn’t feel the need to waste time showing the attraction developing or deepening, presumably because the audience already understands why the characters like each other: they’re both hot.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to have characters experience a fear of rejection, or be in denial about their attraction to another person. There is value to universality, in knowing that a diverse audience can relate to the emotions your characters are feeling. The problem is that these are the only conflicts in the movie, and they’re shallow. I didn’t really get a sense of why Bea was experiencing such inner strife about her decision to exit law school, or any specific past experiences which contributed to or exacerbated the issue.
The characters may grapple with universal sources of turmoil, but we aren’t given specifics about how Bea experiences it as an individual (only that she does), nothing to flesh her out or propel her forward. This isn’t a character driven plot, rather two characters going along with a plot. Bea experiences certain feelings because a writer wants her to.
Somehow, in sight of this, the secondary characters (who enjoyed prominence in the source material) actually manage to fade into the background, rather than enhancing the film, or helping us better understand the protagonists. Perhaps, in getting to know Bea’s mother, we understand her as a source of pressure on her daughter. Maybe we get the sense that her sister is ambitious, and the pressure Bea feels in comparison begins to make more sense. Unfortunately, the movie opts not to go in that direction. I honestly can’t tell you a single thing about Bea’s parents, except that they want her to go to law school (not sure why), and like her ex-boyfriend.
Ultimately, the movie spends way too much time trying to pursue humorous scenarios (playing giant chess with your ex? Hilarious.), and these situations fall flat because the movie was miscast and the characters don’t feel grounded. The time spent trying to insert jokes just feels like a waste.
Conversely, in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, two sets of lovers are, through farce and tragedy, forced to rethink both their definitions of love and their knowledge of each other. The layered meaning of the title itself speaks to the character-driven conflict. There is “much ado” in the process of figuring oneself out, in facing love, but all will be right in the end. The ‘nothing’ referred to in the title is in itself a double meaning. Taken without the ‘h’, as the word was often pronounced during the Early Modern period, Shakespeare implies, in a play reliant on the observation and overhearing of its characters, that we are sometimes inclined to ‘note’ things which turn out to be ‘nothing’. Beatrice and Benedick, to find ultimate happiness, must set aside the interventions of others and follow their hearts.
Beatrice and Benedick are known as Shakespeare’s most talkative and intellectual pair. Distinguishing them from their resemblance to another Shakespearean couple, Katherine and Petruchio of The Taming of the Shrew, who also spend the lion’s share of the play’s runtime fighting with one another, Beatrice and Benedick wage a “merry war” of words and quips. Though her uncle Leonato warns Beatrice that, “thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue” (2.1.16-17), she finds her match precisely because of the lash of her tongue.
In their bickering, we get a strong sense of why Beatrice and Benedick are a match for one another. Both what they say and the way they match each other in discourse develops their bond with one another. This reason, match, purpose, is sorely lacking from Anyone But You. Though the hijinks, on paper, may be similar, with Beatrice and Benedick’s families conspiring to entangle them, Shakespeare masterfully raising the comedic stakes with each passing scene, the driving purpose is missing.
Anyone But You feels like fan-fiction rushed to print. The reason the fiction was so successful to begin with was its reliance on the audience’s knowledge of the source material. However, during the publication process, the stilts of intellectual property were wrenched from the work, leaving only the shadow of a story unable to hold itself upright on a compromised foundation. At its core, Anyone’s true problem is its fear and unwillingness to be hoisted up by its source material, to sacrifice any of its generic marketability. At its core is a fundamental misunderstanding of the specificity needed to make a project like this work.
The best the movie can do, as an adaptation, is mirror tropes and put quotes on restaurant marquees in a pitiful elegy to its source material. This de-intellectualizing of the romantic comedy not only feels demeaning–as if the project's creators don't believe an audience is smart enough to buy into a work with literary subtext and timeless thematic precedent–it feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what has made the genre great in the first place. Today's cultural landscape seems to be obsessed with the idea of regurgitation, of remaking, rebooting, and refining. It often feels as if the output driven by this urge is denigrating rather than flattering the properties being adapted. But Hollywood (yes, the whole thing), if you’re reading this– the idea that modern audiences are only willing to consume the surface level and saccharine is itself a fiction. I’ll leave you with the words of Shakespeare: “A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours” (1.1.34).
Anyone But You (2023)