By Andrew O’Hehir for Salon, 10 March 2015
“Every good servant does not all commands,” muses Posthumus, the tormented young British warrior in Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” played by Penn Badgley in Michael Almereyda’s eccentric but addictive zero-budget, gang-war adaptation. He means that the best way to follow the orders of a lord or king is to follow your own conscience instead – “No bond but to do just ones” – which gets at the heart of what this tangled and unloved play is about. These are core Shakespearean questions, to be sure: How do we decide what is true morality, and what is social convention? Whom do we trust? And how do we make amends when we have done wrong? I don’t know if I’m supposed to issue a spoiler alert for a play first performed in 1611, but Posthumus – who thinks he is a cuckold, a wife-killer and a traitor, and is going into battle in search of death — doesn’t know yet that his loyal servant Pisanio (John Leguizamo) has followed this advice to the letter.
It’s easy to beat up on Almereyda’s restaging of “Cymbeline,” a work nominally set in Roman Britain around the time of Christ, as a cheaply made gangland drama with motorcycle jackets, pickup trucks, iPads and automatic weapons. There’s no question it demands considerable suspension of disbelief. There was an unfortunate critical pile-on after the film’s premiere at Venice last fall, and even with a crackling cast that also includes Ed Harris as the hotheaded King Cymbeline, Ethan Hawke as the duplicitous Iachimo, Dakota Johnson as the wronged princess Imogen and Milla Jovovich as her diabolical stepmother, this is a tiny release with minimal box-office prospects. But there’s a certain conceptual purity to this film – the purity of exploitation cinema and community theater, swirled into a strange combo – that leaves me indisposed to mockery. If John Carpenter had ever done a Shakespeare film, this might be it. Almereyda, a veteran indie warrior who has never chosen the easy road, made me feel the moral passion and emotional risk beneath the surface of a play that is often considered a failure.
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