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'Twelfth' Delight

Trevor Nunn, director of the new film of "Twelfth Night," was for years artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he made a smashingly successful second career in glitzy musicals like "Cats" and "Les Miserables." He's directed only three movies, though, and his brilliant sense of stage movement and image doesn't translate to film -- as a movie director he's staid and goes for conventionally "pretty" effects. Filming the shipwreck that sets the plot in motion by stranding and separating Viola (Imogen Stubbs) and her twin brother, Sebastian (Stephen Mackintosh), Nunn throws waves around glamorously and becomes enamored of the fey beauties of underwater photography, and it looks like the beginning of a long evening. But then everyone dries off and the text takes over, and Nunn demonstrates how he got his reputation as one of the finest directors of Shakespeare in the world.

Wrongly believing her brother dead, Viola disguises herself as a young man and obtains service in the household of Duke Orsino (Toby Stephens), with whom she promptly falls in love. Orsino, however, pines for the lady Olivia (Helena Bonham Carter, as lushly beautiful as a Renaissance portrait). She in turn falls for the disguised Viola.

In the meantime Olivia's drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Mel Smith), is trying vainly to marry her off to his goofball pal Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Richard E. Grant). Belch and Aguecheek are high-living partyers and arouse the prissy wrath of the household major-domo, Malvolio (Nigel Hawthorne), upon whom they then plan revenge. With the help of the clever servant Maria (Imelda Staunton) and the lute-plucking fool Feste (Ben Kingsley), they manage to convince the poor prig Malvolio that Olivia is in love with him, and so engineer his humiliation and downfall.

Stubbs, Nunn's real-life wife, is a boyishly beautiful Viola, coltish and rangy but with a romantic, Pre-Raphaelite loveliness. She plays the role with the tact that's a form of grace: Her touch is light, her emotions translucent rather than glaring. For this Viola, alone in the world, the unlikelihood of ever having Orsino is devastating, and Stubbs's blithe playing has a stoical courage about it. She brings the character very near to tragedy.

Bonham Carter is not only a great beauty, she's finally learned to act, and her warm, womanly Olivia is more sympathetic and less capricious than the usual depiction of the character. The gangling Grant seems born to play that classic twit Aguecheek, and Smith has an undercurrent of sternness and disillusionment that makes his the best Sir Toby I've ever seen. Staunton's Maria is also, amid all the foolery, grounded in life and aware of its limitations, a mix of no-nonsense briskness and sadness.

The jewel in the crown of this opulent production is Hawthorne, who first pops into the scene led by his upturned nose, sniffing out wanton frivolity. The film is set in the late 19th century, and with his butler's regalia and aggrieved superiority, Hawthorne suggests P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves with a peptic ulcer. His sour nicety is the stuff of comic genius. And when Malvolio has to make a fool of himself, Hawthorne doesn't flinch: There's something a little scary in the character's lustful embrace of self-delusion, and something hard to watch in his comeuppance.

Nunn has assembled a strong cast, not a perfect one. Stephens is handsome but rather wan as Orsino, unlikely to arouse a lady's passion. Mackintosh as Sebastian and Nicholas Farrell as his devoted friend Antonio are merely serviceable. And Kingsley's Feste is a real problem. Feste is always to some extent a problem -- wandering between Olivia and Orsino's households and breaking frequently into song, he's more whimsical than the earthy Touchstone of "As You Like It" or the severe Fool of "Lear." It's easy to make him fey and all-knowing in a gooey sort of way, and that's what happens here. Kingsley has that great face -- the strong features and brilliant Anglo-Indian eyes -- and he's always been good at playing people who are smart and have an edge. In spite of his Oscar for "Gandhi," playing nice is not his strong suit: He gets sentimental. Some of his performance here is so self-consciously wise and sweet it makes your fillings ache.

Still, Nunn is the kind of director who can overcome a performer's limitations. One of the best scenes in the movie is Feste's song "O Mistress Mine," which Kingsley sings perched on a table in the darkened servants' quarters as Sir Andrew, Sir Toby and Maria listen. The two knights are drifting into the melancholy stage of drunkenness, and Nunn dwells on their faces, and on Maria's, as the sad little song goes on. We see awareness of mortality and of the brevity of pleasure pass across their features.

Like the Sinister "Midsummer Night's Dream," the Melancholy "Twelfth Night" has become something of a theater cliche. Nunn has set his production in the sadly beautiful season of autumn, but he's too great an artist to stoop to pathos or melodrama. Nothing so histrionic as sorrow sullies the proceedings. Nunn deals, and shows us that Shakespeare dealt, in common human unhappiness, our awareness of the flat morning realities that underlie our romantic dreams. For all its gorgeous settings and lavish costumes, this "Twelfth Night" is the opposite of emotionally grandiose: It's simple and piercing. This is the only time I've ever seen the play that I've been moved, rather than merely delighted.

Twelfth Night is rated PG.