1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 23: Twelfth night or what you will

The period has been moved up to the 18th century, and the dialogue has been slightly simplified and clarified, but Shakespeare’s language is largely intact (and easier to understand than in Baz Luhrmann’s new Romeo & Juliet). Also intact is the elaborate low-comedy subplot involving the servants, which gets too much screen time relative to the main story.
[Roger Ebert; emphasis added]

Well, I don’t agree. For some fans of Twelfth Night, the misfortune of the steward Malvolio is the main story. Or at least it turns out to be as important as the main story: for, when the aristocrats have sorted themselves into couples, Shakespeare permits Malvolio to dampen their happiness.

Some critics suggest that Malvolio even has the legal recourse to undermine their happiness.

This movie gives short shrift to that interpretation. What indicates this, I’ll tell but not explain: when the closing credits arrive, the heroine dances in a dress. (Check this against her lover’s last speech in the play.)

On this point, I side with the critics and against the movie.

“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” is Malvolio’s parting line, and the other characters take him seriously for once. As the title suggests, it may be their last night of revelry. (The “twelfth night” is the last one of the Christmas season.)

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As in Downton Abbey, the worlds that the aristocrats and the servants inhabit aren’t quite separate from one another. The servants grasp upward – the heroine Viola no less than Malvolio. And such aristocrats as the Lady Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek encroach upon their inferiors. All in fun, of course. But they realize too late that what counts as fun depends on the goodwill of those encroached upon.

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What Ebert calls the “main story” is too complex to fully describe here. Let this suffice:

Viola has a twin brother with a small mustache. He drowns at sea (or so Viola believes).

She puts on a false, small mustache and a false identity (“Cesario”) and enters the employ of a Duke. This Duke (Toby Stephens) has a small mustache.

She falls in love with him.

(Does she fall in love with him because he reminds her of her brother?)

(And does she love her brother because he looks so much like herself?)

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The Duke and his courtiers are wimpy young men with small mustaches, and so it’s easy for Viola also to be taken for a man. Still, she’s the wimpiest-looking of the lot.

It’s amusing, then, to see her in military garb, leading a pack of officers: for the Duke has put “Cesario” in charge of wooing Olivia, the object of his unrequited love.

Olivia (Helena Bonham Carter) is in mourning. She, too, has lost a small-mustachioed brother.

She has many suitors besides the Duke. One is Sir Andrew Aguecheek (the great Richard E. Grant), a hapless friend of her frivolous and crude uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Mel Smith, the albino of The Princess Bride).

Olivia rejects all who seek her hand. With “Cesario,” however, she immediately falls in love.

As “Cesario,” Viola must resist Olivia’s advances and make the Duke’s case to Olivia while she herself pines after the Duke.

She woos skilfully, though she hardly can bear to. Her private pining only heightens her charm.

Viola is my favorite character in all of Shakespeare. In this version, she’s played by Imogen Stubbs (A Summer Story; The Rainbow; Sense and Sensibility), who specializes in compromised innocence. It’s a winsome performance.

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Poetical though Viola, Olivia, and the Duke are, their passions are insubstantial, whimsical, changeable (recall the other title, “What You Will”).

The servants’ desires are more prosaic, more stolid, more worldly.

The ambition of Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne) is to marry Olivia, his employer, so that he can fully take charge of her household. This is cynical. He doesn’t love Olivia. Unlike the Duke, who at least is in love with Love, Malvolio aims nowhere near the heavens. (This isn’t to say that his ambition is any likelier than the Duke’s to be fulfilled.)

However, it’s Malvolio’s self-righteousness that Sir Toby and Sir Andrew exploit. Always wreaking havoc, they play a cruel prank on the puritanical steward. The prank is designed and executed by Olivia’s maid, Maria (Imelda Staunton), who also loathes Malvolio. It exposes the rapacity beneath his veneer of forbearance. But it goes too far.

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There are other Malvolios on stage and screen – Jud of Oklahoma! and Dwight Schrute of The Office, to name two – frustrated, social-climbing misfits tormented by the revelry of those above them, those secure enough to preoccupy themselves with Love-worship (if not with loving their fellows). Malvolio’s is a compelling plight because it exposes the callousness of this sort of “love.”

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Whose side is Shakespeare on? The romantic revelers’, or Malvolio’s?

I’m not sure that he takes a side. He merely observes a change.

There is one character in Twelfth Night who sees through all the others. He is Feste (Ben Kingsley), the aging clown who once gratified Olivia’s father. He continues to entertain but notices that his welcome is wearing thin.

Feste reads the signs of the times. He sees that a sterner, grubbier order is rising. His career is nearing its end.

Still, he’s an entertainer. His and the play’s last line is: “We’ll strive to please you every day.” And this movie is a pleasing version of the play, even if I don’t fully agree with its interpretation.

Like much of Shakespeare, the play is the sort of baffling work about which it’s hard to tell whether it’s appropriate to be happy or sad.