Looking For Richard (1996)
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
LOOKING FOR RICHARD ------------------- Grade: C // Wait for Video
(Fox Searchlight)
Director: Al Pacino. Producer: Michael Hadge. Director of Photography: Robert Leacock. Music: Howard Shore: Starring: Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, Aidan Quinn, Harris Yulin, Estelle Parsons, Penelope Allen.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence) Running Time: 110 minutes.
Part English lecture, part behind-the-scenes documentary and part theater piece, LOOKING FOR RICHARD is an ambitious experiment created by Al Pacino as a sort of "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Shakespeare but Were Afraid to Ask." Motivated by a desire to make the works of William Shakespeare speak to a contemporary audience, Pacino spent several years (evidenced by his now-you-see-it, now-you-don't facial hair in the film) putting together a film version of "Richard III" which would combine performance of key scenes, observation of the actors wrangling over interpretation of those scenes, and historical background for the play. To that end he brought together a group of actors including Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder, Kevin Spacey and Aidan Quinn to make their "Richard III" a Shakespeare for the uninitiated.
It is a noble goal Pacino has set for himself, but there is something inherently contradictory about the way he has chosen to go about achieving it. As an educational tool, LOOKING FOR RICHARD isn't exactly pitched at those individuals represented in his person-on-the-street interviews, most of whom greet the word "Shakespeare" with a shrug or a grimace (the notable exception being a panhandler who speaks eloquently about how the Bard "instructed us how to feel"). It is a fairly academic piece of work, with lectures about iambic pentameter intermingled with talking heads describing the events in the play. Pacino employs rat-a-tat editing to cut back and forth between locations for rehearsals, descriptive narration and the play itself, resulting in a film which may have been made with the multiplex audience in mind but which seems destined exclusively for the art houses.
Yet LOOKING FOR RICHARD is likely to bore those same art house viewers, because the film does not offer much in the way of insight. The actors and academics who speak throughout LOOKING FOR RICHARD go to such lengths to make the basic plot of "Richard III" understandable that they have little time or inclination to dig deeper. Pacino may have wanted to foster the "appreciation" of Shakespeare, but he is willing to settle for people being able to describe what happened and who is doing what to whom, and that doesn't leave much for those who already know and love Shakespeare.
It is also likely that those same art house-attending, Shakespeare-loving viewers saw Ian McKellen's dynamic RICHARD III last year, a cinematic rendering which does far more to thrust the play into a 20th century context. Pacino himself plays the hunch-backed villain with his typical intensity, and he often shifts into his habit of indicating the significance of a given line by the volume at which he delivers it. It is a straightforward performance, but far better ones are turned in by Kevin Spacey (whose Buckingham seems so fiercely intelligent that he becomes like an advisor to a modern politician) and even Alec Baldwin (a surprisingly sympathetic Clarence). Winona Ryder is a bit less successful as Lady Anne, and Aidan Quinn is even less successful as Richmond; Quinn in particular is like a walking manifestation of John Gielgud's comment in the film that American actors become intimidated by Shakespeare because "they've been told they can't do it."
If LOOKING FOR RICHARD does one thing particularly well, it is to emphasize the interpretive process which makes Shakespeare a living text. There may be little inherent drama in a group of actors sitting around a table talking about what they see going on in any given scene, but the scenes of those conversations help to show the unique qualities of performed literature. It is one of the film's best moments when Pacino's collaborator Frederic Kimball explodes in frustration at Pacino's plan to ask an "expert" why a character might have acted in a certain way. "You know more about this character," Kimball bellows, and it is a perfectly succinct description of how a role is re-defined by every actor who performs it. That makes LOOKING FOR RICHARD an interesting supplement for a drama class, but it isn't nearly as worthwhile for an English class. With its snippets of scenes and specific historical asides, LOOKING FOR RICHARD doesn't exactly teach how to explore the Bard's texts. It is more like a filmed version of the Cliff's Notes.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 quartos low: 5.
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