In a period which has brought audacious films covering Shakespeare (Richard III, Looking For Richard, Romeo And Juliet), this, the first cinematic adaptation of Twelfth Night, may be the most outrageous. It somehow manages to render one of Shakespeare's liveliest, most thematically sharp comedies into precisely what every ruffian high-school student accuses his plays of being: boring. The problem seems to be that the filmmakers failed to realize they were putting out a comedy. Nearly every word is spoken in a manner dour enough to match the overcast 19th-century setting, suggesting what a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy might have been like. Despite this, the film is inconsistently content to keep the play's darker themes safely in the background. In small roles, Nigel Hawthorne and Ben Kingsley (in an engagingly peculiar interpretation of Feste) provide some interest, but not enough to compensate for the awkward handling of the main plot. The time invested in production design does pay off; it's gorgeous to see. But while that's enough to recommend someone's vacation slides, it's not enough to recommend a film, particularly one with source material this strong.