The Hollow Crown: Richard II

(Movie Review)

Why I Saw This Movie
Ever since I was in college, and found out about Shakespeare's Henriad (W)--a series of Shakespeare plays that form one long interconnected history saga--I thought: "Wouldn't it be cool if someone did all these plays as one series of films," and then I came one day to find that the BBC actually was doing exactly this project (W).

My History With This Play
* The memory is regrettably not so sharp on this point, but at least some of these scenes and dialogue is familiar--I may have read this in college.  (At any rate, I definitely remember reading the sequel Henry IV Part 1 in college.)

Positives
* For us history geeks, there is the historical interest of Shakespeare's history sagas.
* As always when watching Shakespeare, the constant: "Oh, so that's where that quote comes from" moments.
* Something like this might be mostly broccoli [SEE HERE], but broccoli movies have their uses--we all have these classics we're meaning to get around to someday, and it's good to knock another one off your list
* Any Shakespeare adaptation by definition has  to be a broccoli movie--you'll never get a popcorn movie out of Shakespeare--but that caveat aside, the directing, acting, and production values of this film are about as good as you could possibly hope for.

Negatives
* Oh man, I had forgotten how talky Shakespeare is--for those of us interested in this story primarily because of the history, it takes forever to get to its point!
* Long

The Review
So, there's no getting around it, the expectations of the Elizabethan stage audiences are different than the expectations of modern movie audiences.  Back in Shakespeare's day, characters were supposed to go off on long poetic monologues--it was how you filled time on the stage in the days before special effects.  So be forewarned.
But the acting, directing, and general production values of this film are great.  Even if it did drag a little bit into the long side.
Also for us history geeks, there is interest in seeing a key moment of England's history dramatized.

External Links
The avclub does a good job of reviewing this film:
Among other things that caught my eye in their review:  this play is not only a prequel to the first history tetralogy, but also a prologue to the relationship and rule of the Henrys Bolingbroke and Monmouth.If you’ll allow for a ridiculous analogy, the other prequel that flashed into my mind when watching this production of Richard II was The Phantom Menace. Not because of quality—this is so much better than trade federation squabbling that ruins compelling mythology. But the pressure on Richard II is to set in motion the dominoes that fall across seven subsequent plays.
Agreed.  If memory serves, the story gets more interesting as the plays go on, and we get to better characters like Prince Hal and Falstaff.  But tetralogy needs this play to set up the whole thing first.
The avclub also did a good job of hitting the film's faults:
The martyrdom imagery isn’t just thick. It’s oppressively omnipresent. A few minor suggestions of Richard’s belief in divine right to rule and his willingness to die for that line of thought would have sufficed, but instead the Jesus parallelism hits hard and fast once the usurpation plan has been stated. The callback to the painting Richard admires in the first act during his unfortunate and brutal assassination in prison doesn’t carry the same weight after the audience is numb from biblical imagery.

Agreed.
The avclub review also highlights some of the stuff that got cut out of this film.
As per usual with the histories, the limited female characters get short shrift. Clémence Poésy as the Queen—a composite of Richard’s two wives, one of which was a child at the time of his death—has her part significantly reduced in the edited script, which already runs well over two hours

and  This production also skips over the parts of the text that closely examine the nature of Bolingbroke and Mowbrays squabble. It involves the sudden death of another man, and it’s strongly suggested that Bolingbroke was the culprit, which sours his supposedly rightful claim to the throne in order to better serve the people.

I know I've already complained about the movie being too long, but I confess being a little bit conflicted on this on--the completeist in me is upset that stuff got cut out of this adaptation, but the short attention span addled 21st century guy in me thought the movie was too long already.  (This is a contradiction, but since most of us are just masses of contradictory thoughts and emotions anyway, I'm going to allow myself this.)  I guess the best of both worlds would be for a complete unabridged film version of Richard II, but one which I didn't have to watch all in one sitting, and could break up over a couple nights.

Links

Ben Whishaw is perfectly cast as Richard II in this movie--I had previously enjoyed him as Q in Skyfall and Freddie Lyon from The Hour.

Watching Richard II, I was reminded of comments I had made reviewing the book Rubicon.  To quote myself: "the ancient Romans put such great faith in their republican traditions, institutions and laws that many of them never seemed to realize that laws and constitutions do not enforce themselves. The Roman Senate never realized that whoever controls the largest army ultimately gets to decide the law. As long as the army’s leaders agreed to play by the republic’s rules, the republic could exist. But as soon as someone at the head of a powerful army decided they didn’t want to play by the rules anymore, then there was little the Senate could do about it."
Flip the politics from Republican government to Monarchical government, and this is exactly the tragedy of Richard II.  Richard II had such faith in the system of monarchy that he never really realized that power does not necessarily go to the King, but to whoever has the largest army.
Ironically enough, even after Shakespeare's time, English kings continued to make this mistake.  This was also the exact same mistake that got Charles I beheaded.  (You have to wonder if Charles I ever read Richard II, and what he would have made of it.)

The BBC radio show This Sceptred Isle mentions this play as as performing a role in British history at one point.  Supporters of the Earl of Essex (including Shakespeare's patron) paid to have this play performed during the Earl of Essex's planned revolt.
And actually, speaking of that same show, the very name, This Sceptred Isle, comes from a line in Shakespeare's Richard II.  

Lastly, for my review of the Shakespeare play at the exact end of the history saga, see Richard III here.

Rating :

7 out of 10.  (I suppose whenever you attempt to rate Shakespeare, you're rating yourself more than you're rating the play--if I were a more intelligent person I'd give it 10 stars, but as a philistine I found it hard to sit through the whole thing, so I'm knocking 3 stars off on the "watchability" factor.)

Link of the Day
The Concepts of Language