[In the following review, Scott characterizes Kenneth Branagh's film version of Love's Labour's Lost as entertaining but not particularly impressive.]

For every man with his affects is born.
Not by might mast'red but by special grace.

These lines are spoken by Berowne, a witty courtier played by Kenneth Branagh, who also directed Love's Labour's Lost, a whimsical, affected adaptation of Shakespeare's most forgettable early comedy. There is a great deal of dancing in the movie, which invokes the name of Stanley Donen and boasts a score packed with Broadway standards from Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin and the Gershwin brothers, but not much special grace.

Mr. Branagh has assembled a troupe of game, eager young stars, including Matthew Lillard, the gangly creepshow hearthrob from the Scream pictures, and Alicia Silverstone, the Bel Air Jane Austen heroine of Clueless, and sent them wobblingly forth to belt out show tunes, declaim pentameter and assay the leaps and twirls of Stuart Hopps's mercifully simplified choreography. He's even seen fit to include an Esther Williams-style water ballet sequence, complete with gold maillots and cabbage-leaf bathing caps.

If the cast were a sixth-grade class, and you were one of their parents, you'd burst out of your seat applauding madly, and rush backstage after the show, exclaiming: “But you were wonderful! Really, really great!” And then you'd congratulate the drama teacher (that would be the energetic English fellow with the blond hair and theatrical demeanor), who's so creative, the school is lucky to have him.

As a paying customer, your reaction may be more subdued, but the gee-whiz amateurism of this production is indubitably part of its charm. Watching Adrian Lester, as Dumaine, trying a half-successful split on a high wooden library table, you can only admire his effort, and be glad that Mr. Branagh did not demand another take. When Ms. Silverstone's voice skids and squeaks over the syllabies of words like “perplexity” and “lamentation,” you can't help but root for her in her struggle with the the tongue-tying perplexities of Elizabethan verse.

There is no doubting Mr. Branagh's sincere enthusiasm for the material, which is not only Shakespeare but also old newsreels, Casablanca and classic MGM musicals. He throws them together with the gusto of a man playing a tuba with a bass drum strapped to his back while his pet monkey leaps around with a squeeze box. It's not art exactly, or even music, but it's entertaining, albeit in an intermittently annoying kind of way.

For no particular reason, Mr. Branagh sets the play in a dreamy Technicolor Europe on the eve of World War II. The King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola) has persuaded his three best pals to join him in a vow of chastity, which is quickly tested by the arrival of the French princess (Ms. Silverstone) and her three luscious ladies-in-waiting. The mooning and swooning of the nobility is mirrored by the bawdier amours of Don Armado (Timothy Spall) and Jaquenetta (Stefania Rocca), whose cleavage inspires some of Mr. Branagh's most inventive camera work.

Mr. Spall, who looks like Peter Sellers inflated with a bicycle pump, delivers his lines with hilarious pixilation. Nathan Lane, as the clown Costard, provides another installment in his continuing salute to vaudeville. (I'm sure that the rubber chicken came from his personal collection.) He also sings a slowed-down, wistful rendition of “There's No Business Like Show Business” in top hat and tails.

And you know what? Even though Love's Labour's Lost is, in showbiz terms, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, you wouldn't trade it for a pot of gold. The film ends with a long, sweetly melancholic sequence set to “They Can't Take That Away From Me.” Even after the song is ended, the melody lingers on, and you leave the theater tipsy on Shakespeare's raillery and Ira Gershwin's wit, as though you'd had a glass or two of cheap champagne. There are worse ways to feel.