Richard III (1995) starring Ian McKellen

Directed by Richard Loncraine

Starring Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, Jim Broadbent, and Robert Downey Jr.

Bunch-Back’d Toad

Audiences nowadays most likely know him as either Magneto from the X-Men movies or (if you have better taste) as Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He’s known to a smaller but equally devoted crowd as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the age. A good friend of mine is currently seeing him on stage in London as—wait for it!—King Lear. Put money in my purse!

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that a little over ten years ago Ian Mckellen starred as that “poisonous bunch-back’d toad” Richard of Gloucester, alias Richard III, one of the Bard’s most memorable and entertaining hero-villain sociopaths, and his performance has been recorded for posterity in an entertaining if not wholly satisfying film production.

Adapted from the award-winning RSC stage production directed by Richard Eyre (helmer of Ian Holm’s King Lear), this version of the perpetually popular play updates the text from fifteenth century Tudor England to a 1930s fascist state. The main thrust of the story remains: Richard of Gloucester, brother to King Edward IV, will stop at nothing to gain the Crown of England.

The movie opens with a sequence more Spielberg than Shakespeare: the rumbling of a tank, the rattling of a wine glass, dogs barking at unseen threats, and then – BOOM! The thunderous crash of a military tank through a wall. Richard emerges from the tank like Darth Vader, the ominous sound of his heavy breathing behind a malevolent-looking gas mask filling the soundtrack. It’s a striking beginning but sets an unhappy precedent: immediate effect over sustained involvement in the drama. The filmmakers, perhaps afraid of losing an attention-deficit audience, allow a full ten minutes of screen time to expire before a single line of Shakespeare is spoken.

With its sex and violence and the text generally silenced, Richard III might make a good introduction to the play for those disinclined towards the Bard. That said, the fascist trappings actually obscure much of Shakespeare’s original meaning, and confuse the already complex relationships between the characters (“who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out…”).

Though many viewers may feel gratitude to the filmmakers for streamlining a long play to 105 minutes, the results are anemic. Radically shortened scenes feel stifled, airless. There’s no rhythm, no drama, and surprisingly little humor, as if the filmmakers were rushing through scenes so famous they saw little point in dwelling on them. For example, Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne, the wife of a man he’s recently killed, should be a highlight in any production. It’s a bravura scene, and certainly the cheekiest marriage proposal in the history of English drama. Here, however, the scene seems a shapeless afterthought, and pales by comparison to Olivier’s sexy, surprising, and unapologetically salacious treatment of the scene in his 1956 version.

Even if the film’s a little fuzzy, the cast is top-flight: Robert Downey Jr., Annette Bening, Maggie Smith, Nigel Hawthorne, Jim Broadbent and Dominic West, to name a few. The Americans acquit themselves admirably, but the Brits – veterans of the boards like Broadbent as scheming Buckingham or Hawthorne as gentle Clarence – make a deeper impression.

Of course, no actor is more compulsively watchable than Ian Mckellen, and he’s the real reason to give RIII a viewing. Richard commands attention, the hottest-burning star in an otherwise dim firmament. Appropriately, perhaps, only Mckellen seems to know who he’s playing and why. He’s a man enamored of himself: “I may smile and murder while I smile.” And, God help us, we’ll smile as we watch him do it.