Shakespeare in Love

http://www.film.com/film-review/1998/10782/100/default-review.html

Masters on Display  |   Peter Brunette


Though it's hard to imagine something new being said about or done to
the Bard of Avon after all these centuries, the delightful Shakespeare
in Love proves that when talented people work this vein, there's still
plenty of gold left. I had high hopes going into this film, since it
was written by the brilliant Tom Stoppard (author of "Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead," and a host of other witty plays that utilize a
postmodernist approach to classic literature, for laughs as well as
for more serious matters), and directed by another Britisher, John
Madden, who gave us the very well-done Mrs. Brown two years ago. These
talented men do not disappoint.

The central conceit of this occasionally profound and frequently
hilarious film is that William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) was once a
young, unknown playwright, an ink-stained wretch fully engaged in the
day-to-day struggle to make a buck, working on a play called "Romeo
and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." The theater manager (the ubiquitous
Geoffrey Rush), wants him to work as many crowd-pleasing pratfalls and
funny dogs into his opus as possible, but Will just can't get the words
down. Along comes the ever-lovely Gwyneth Paltrow in the person of
Viola, a rich but bourgeois young woman who is slated to marry a
piggish, impoverished but heavily titled duke, but who would rather
embark on an acting career, despite the period's strictures against
women on stage. Not surprisingly, romance flares between the Will and
Viola, and Stoppard has a grand old time interweaving the plot of their
love story with the emerging masterpiece, now happily re-titled "Romeo
and Juliet."

Madden keeps the editing and movement at and beyond an MTV pace,
accompanied by a nonstop flurry of sight gags and restrained slapstick,
and my guess is that this film is going to be popular among high-school
English teachers searching, as ever, for ways to make the Bard relevant
to their image-addled, print-challenged charges. The director also gets
a lot of comic mileage out of the cross-dressing that was an
unexceptionable feature of the Elizabethan stage. Stoppard's luxuriant,
richly comic language cascades and washes over you, and, for once, more
than keeps pace with the sprightly pictures. The constant, purposeful
anachronisms, both verbal and visual, are wonderful and the usual
problem with mounting Shakespeare--how to handle the famous bits of
dialogue--is here wittily milked for its rich comic potential. The
playwright also indulges himself in some in-crowd jokes (for example,
having John Webster, the notorious author of some very grotesque plays,
pop up throughout the film as a sicko teenager who likes "the bloody
parts"), but that's just added pleasure for the cognoscenti that others
won't even notice.

Fiennes, Ralph's younger brother, is convincing and utterly charming as
the feckless but promising playwright, though he needs to do something
contemporary if he's not to be typecast as an Elizabethan (he was
Elizabeth's lover in the recent film about her early days as monarch).
Paltrow, on the other hand, has such a classic physiognomy and beauty
that she seems more at home in period than contemporary roles. Here,
she's fine as Viola, but when she actually acts Shakespeare (sporting a
cute, pasted-on moustache) she is less than convincing. The same can be
said for Ben Affleck -- who plays an egocentric actor whom Will
Shakespeare entices into the role of Romeo's famously slain kinsman by
telling him that the play is to be called "Mercutio" -- but his
American-bred robustness and affability carry the day anyway.

The action does drag a bit on occasion, and the film could have been
nipped and tucked here and there, but when Stoppard and Madden contrive
to make a happy ending out of a sad one, by segueing magnficently from
"Romeo and Juliet" into the Bard's next play, "Twelfth Night," you know
that Shakespeare is not the only master on display here.





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