Kenneth Branagh and The Art of the Adaptation: or, All The World's a Stage

Taking a look at his final Shakespeare films with 2000's Love's Labour's Lost and 2006's As You Like It.

After the daunting (and inevitably exhausting) task of directing his four-hour version of Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh took some time off from directing and worked solely as an actor. But this wasn't just to keep up his reps, he very clearly made a conscious decision to work only with the industry's most respected and highest-profile auteurs - in what is an obvious attempt to learn from the best, as they say.

First, 1998 brought two projects from '70s directors still doing their thing in the '90s: Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man and Woody Allen's Celebrity.

The Gingerbread Man is based on a discarded John Grisham manuscript. I guess by '98 they had run through all of his paperbacks, so they had to move to his trash can for inspiration. Every white boy in the '90s got their Grisham: Matt Damon in The Rainmaker, Tom Cruise in The Firm, Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill - so it must have been Ken's turn. Seeing as it was towards the end of the trend, the Branagh-Altman pairing didn't matter much to test audiences who trashed the film and forced distributor PolyGram to bury it without fanfare.

Regardless of your feelings about Woody Allen in the present day (I think he's a scumbag, personally), it doesn't change the fact that he had an annual blank check to do whatever he wanted for over forty years. Remake Annie Hall again? Sure. Remake an obscure Edward G. Robinson movie? Naturally. Musical? Why not? Celebrity is one of his least inventive features, so much so that Ken just plays his own version of Woody: whiny, nebbish, creepy. Hell, his character even talks about how he's a Sagittarius. Kenneth Branagh as Woody Allen, I never thought I'd see the day. I can't say that I recommend you do.

Finally, in 1999, he starred in the summer blockbuster Wild Wild West. Although this movie has been dogged for years, I think context here is important because this is a good career decision on paper. Director Barry Sonnenfeld was coming off of the mega-hit Men in Black, which he made with Will Smith - the king of July 4th weekend (a huge movie weekend, MiB came out on June 30, 1997) after 1996's Independence Day. Wild Wild West, a comedy-sci-fi-western mashup with big movie stars should have been a huge hit. Ken plays the main villain, a former Confederate soldier and now scientist who makes giant robot spiders or whatever. I don't know, ask Kevin Smith. Ken plays him very cartoonishly, a mix between Foghorn Leghorn and Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome. And you know what, I kinda like the movie.

Maybe they weren't the massive successes they were supposed to be, but Ken learned what he wanted to learn (he only agreed to star in The Gingerbread Man if a highly regarded director signed on) and he was ready to return to the director's chair with 2000's Love's Labour's Lost.