DEAD AGAIN
With Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi, Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla, Robin Williams, Campbell Scott, and Wayne Knight.
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Why bother about whether Dead Again is English or not? I think it matters, finally, because the line that’s drawn between art and entertainment in this country is different from the one drawn in England. In this country any distinction–specious or otherwise–that may have existed between art and trash up through the 50s was torn asunder in the 60s by the combined forces of movie auteurism, artistically self-conscious rock, and camp taste (among other influences), followed by the Mixmaster blends and confusions of postmodernism in the 70s and 80s. The result is that now practically everything from Barton Fink to MTV is treated like “high art” and “entertainment” is used strictly for things like TV game shows and sitcoms. But in England simple entertainment is given a somewhat wider berth. Diversion doesn’t require the trappings of “serious” art in order to be treated with deference. Graham Greene may have divided his novels between his more “serious” ones and his “entertainments,” but both have tended to be valued by English readers for their entertainment value, and the thrillers aren’t disparaged because they don’t aspire more to “art.” I doubt that many of the people in Noel Coward’s audience were bothered about whether or not what they were watching was “art,” either.
Clearly Branagh has arrived on our shores weighted with the baggage of his associations with English theater and Shakespeare. For people who consider his Henry V an art movie simply because it’s Shakespeare, there’s something rather disconcerting about his turning next to material that’s closer to Daphne Du Maurier (in atmosphere) and Agatha Christie (in trickiness). This uneasiness is related to our peculiar 20th-century notion that Shakespeare belongs to rarefied “high” culture rather than to popular “low” culture (a bias that, as we’re reminded by Lawrence W. Levine’s fascinating Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, is very different from the way Shakespeare was experienced here during the first half of the 19th century). The fact that the English are more able than we are to relish the pop side of Shakespeare–the low comedy and the hammy grandiloquence that was enjoyed more readily by our American ancestors–suggests that Branagh may be more of an entertainer and less of a highfalutin artist than our built-in cultural biases automatically assume him to be. From this point of view, apart from Henry V’s infinitely better script material, Branagh’s two movies are reasonably compatible.
What ensues involves reincarnation, the eventual reduction of at least three of the more interesting characters to simple narrative props, surprises involving the identities of three other characters, a cornball love story, and a lot of stylistic fancy footwork–particularly intercutting between the two plots–that alternately serves to obfuscate and elucidate what’s going on. Some of this climactic intercutting is impressive in terms of narrative economy but ultimately rather superfluous in terms of both exposition and drama; it registers as virtuosity taking place in a void. By the end, we’re more likely to be exhausted by the formal gymnastics than moved or persuaded by what the story is saying. This is because Branagh has basically been treating the story as one would a libretto–a disposable vehicle designed simply to inspire and showcase melodies (i.e., the performances and the mise en scene). The fact that Emma Thompson is married to Branagh in real life adds a strain of subtextual meaning to the stories of both of the movie’s romantic couples that ultimately counts for more than the stories themselves, and there are other in-jokes that function even more esoterically.
