Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Directed by John Madden
Written by Marc Norman & Tom Stoppard

I saw The Hunt for Red October twice in the theater—and fell asleep both times, regardless of how much I really wanted to like it. I fell asleep during Donnie Brasco. It's less an indicator of the film than of my narcolepsy (I've fallen asleep sitting bolt upright, resting my head on my hands, in the middle of meetings, at work, while on the phone, in airport waiting areas, and while waiting at stoplights, not to mention the time I fell asleep at the wheel in broad daylight and almost drove into oncoming traffic, or the time I fell asleep during rough truckstop sex).

So it's as unfair for me to review this film as it would be for me to, I don't know, pretend I heard everything my boss said during that meeting. But he never knew, and if I didn't tell you about it, neither would you.

The first part of Shakespeare in Love (B.N. = Before Nap) is a farce that introduces a humorous cast of characters, villains, wretches, love interests, etc. Blah blah blah. Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare as a youngish, boyish womanizer with an open shirt and "funny" angst.

Ho-hum. He's trying to write a play called "Romeo and Ethel: The Pirate's Daughter." He struggles with his play, and the fact that Christopher Marlowe (Rupert Everett) is a better writer.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Viola, a socialite who's essentially been sold by her parents to some prig with land in America. She likes the theater and dreams of acting. Somehow they meet when she auditions pretending to be a boy, with a very fake-looking mustache. She lands a role in the play, which is finally shaping up to be the "Romeo and Juliet" we all know and love (?).

Shakespeare figures out she's really a girl and they become lovers. It was at some point during this nonsense when I fell asleep. Eventually I woke up to a series of scenes in which Gwyneth has sex with Shakespeare, and for the first time ever presents her bare breasts to the world for what seems like at least a half an hour. Definitely glad I woke up for this.

The show eventually premieres, despite foo-faw and flibberty-floo, and is despite all odds a huge success. Surprisingly, the last half hour is quite engaging, regardless of the lack of nudity. They present the play as if it were in a real olde-timey theatre, and it actually is interesting. Pardon me for insulting the Western Canon of Literature, but I've never been able to tolerate reading Shakespeare, and I've only seen one or two productions of Shakespeare that held my attention (Branagh's Henry V, and Much Ado About Nothing). All the language and sets and words, all the bawdy humor and cross-dressing, it all just bores me to tears.

But presented here, "Romeo and Juliet" actuallyheld my interest—and I couldn't help but wonder if they would have been better off just running the play as if staged in the correct time period, and left it at that. Instead, they subject us to a boring movie that left me feeling cold and empty, like when you call those long-distance chat lines and get put on hold for an hour, or when you go to a girlfriend's junior prom five years after graduating high school. You know the feeling, right? Not like that ever happened to me, really.

Shakespeare in Love has a lot of that forced theater humor, the kind of "laughs" an "actor" projects across a full theater, whilst flinging his scarf across his neck with a wry look of bemused anger and storming off the stage, only to reappear seconds later through another door on the other side of the stage, whilst the maid runs looking for him at the wrong door, and someone brandishes a pistol. *Shudder*.

Sad thing is, Gwyneth is her usual good actress self, and Ben Affleck's supporting role all but steals the film from under Joseph Fiennes, one of the most lackluster "hunk" actors since … Jeff Fahey? No, Fahey's not nearly as lame … I mean, he was in Body Parts. With two films out in as many months (this and Elizabeth), someone is pushing to make Fiennes the next big thing. Too bad for him his brother Ralph is 8,000 times more interesting, even in hideous crap like The Avengers.

Tom Wilkinson from The Full Monty and The Ghost and the Darkness has a strong supporting role as well, and also proves what a better actor he is than the younger Fiennes. If Joseph were smart, he'd surround himself with talent worse than him so nobody would notice, kind of like how I hang around with the extremely obese to mask my own alarming paunch.

By the end, despite the upturn in quality, I walked away from Shakespeare in Love and planned on never thinking of the film again. Except pretentious asses like Ebert give the film four stars. Yeah and he liked Hurlyburly, too.

Maybe Shakespeare in Love really is a good film and I just don't get it. Maybe I missed the best parts while I was in and out of that coma. Maybe I need another nap.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Crimedog

–SECOND OPINION–

I would have to say Crimedog does seem to require additional sleep, but not me; I have no trouble sleeping … through his half-assed reviews. I was amused when I first read his review, then became increasingly confused as Shakespeare in Love continued to garner accolade upon accolade and talk of Oscar nominations.

Not that I take any stock whatsoever in mainstream critical opinion and especially not of Academy merit, but I have a theory that if something becomes very popular, it is usually because that thing has value, as much as some of the less populist film critics would have you believe otherwise.

I'm not saying that everything that gets popular is great (take "Lord of the Dance"), but rather that it's all too easy to dismiss things like The Full Monty or Home Alone as a knee-jerk response to their mainstream appeal. The big joke in all of that business is that most "alternative" cinema is just as mainstream in its alternative-ness … it's just aiming at a different mainstream.

So it was incumbent upon me that I see Shakespeare in Love to determine who's right, Crimedog or everyone else. Why me? Because I am the nexus. Wait, let me rephrase that: Because I am the Nexus.

And my judgment in this case is for the defendant, and I'm dismissing the plaintiff's countersuit for one million rubies. (?) Crimedog makes some good points in his review, but unfortunately none of them relate to the film, and on the whole I found it of more use as a shining example of the Loud Bassoon's inherent charm – that one of America's most popular movies is dismissed mainly with self-referential chatter and more attention payed to Gwynyth Paltrow's nudified breasts than to anything else.

And while Ms. Paltrow's breasts are undeniably appealing, they are displayed for only a minute or so, not the promising half-hour suggested by my cohort. Furthermore, there is a lot more to Shakespeare in Love than simple ham-fisted hijinks and titilating tit titillation.

The film is a charming fantasia with a lot of ideas and a certain amount of genuine weight to it, well worth seeing especially for the good performances of nearly everyone in the cast. It's not without problems, certainly—problems that mainstream America and its lame-ass critics of choice (that means you, Ebert) ignore while transfixed by the Big Love Story here. It's no great film, but it's far from the dismissable Titanic horseshit that Crimedog makes it out to be.

Okay, now that I've used Crimedog's supposed critical lapses to make myself seem more incisive and intelligent than anyone actually is, I should point out that I was not really bowled over by Shakespeare in Love, and did not think it was excellent. A good deal of it was as predictable as "Three's Company," much of it was very boring, and far too much of it was invested with a 90s sensibility that rendered its intentions dishonest.

I didn't like that the film presented a very imaginative historical fiction almost as though it were fact (I have no doubt that Middle America will accept this as a true story, as it did with Ace Ventura and The Toy (?; ?)), but it was done so intelligently it's hard to argue.

Tom Stoppard, author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (a better movie than this one, by the way), again dips into Shakespearean in-jokes, but rather than aiming for clever cynicism (as in Rosencrantz), he attempts to address love and the human condition in a sincerely romantic way.

The plot of the film is inventively interwoven with the plot of "Romeo and Juliet" (which has reached übercliché status, by the way. Advice for any writers out there—pick a different play to reference, please, the guy wrote a lot of them), and it is knowing and successful at engaging the audience with a lot of veiled intellectualism.

Stoppard is a great writer, and Shakepeare in Love is easily one of his best creations, all the more so because it seems that he has reached a maturity in which he can ferment his ideas in situations he previously might have avoided for being too "sappy." But you don't have to like John Tesh to appreciate the universality of love … specifically, the love of John Tesh. (?)

Some people inherently dislike Shakespeare, a character flaw I attribute to the pointless attempt of public school systems foisting the plays on high schoolers with no context that would engender real appreciation. Personally, I think Shakespeare has still never been surpassed as a writer of anything (besides graphic novels), but I agree that he can seem utterly dry in a bad production, but then I disagree that Kenneth Branagh is the shit.

(Isn't it great how I play one side of the fence, then the other, then the first one again? But you fall for it every time! My, how you will all miss me when I return to my home planet.)

In Shakespeare in Love Shakespeare is humanized (perhaps too much so, made into a bit of a buffoon, actually), and his works are seen as the fruit of inspiration from a man very much driven by passion. I don't think the film succeeds in elucidating the beauty and perfection of Shakespeare's language … it is depicted as pretty poetry, but you never get a sense of what makes it so great.

This is not helped by the script's pandering reliance on only the most famous lines from Shakespeare (not always his most powerful – the "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" sonnet is notable mainly for its first line, the rest is kind of awkward).

But as a meditation on Shakespeare as a writer finding inspiration in love, the film is successful in its depiction of the man. The performances are almost all good, especially Geoffrey Rush as a dimwitted theater owner … if anyone deserves an Oscar nomination from this film, it's him. I was surprised to really like Ben Affleck, whom I despise with a vitriol that nearly chokes me each morning when I awake, but he was quite good, no lie.

Gwynyth Paltrow is decent, playing the same role she always does with exactly the same plastic "depth" … but there is no doubting she is talented. (Note to perverts: If you choose, you may enliven this review by redefining "talented" to indicate "supple, perky breasts displayed prominently.")

Joseph Fiennes is not notably bad, although I would hardly say he was at all commanding as Shakespeare. He holds his own, and at any rate the role doesn't call for an actor of any greater stature—the opposite, in fact.

My principal objections were the tacked-on character traits that were drawn into certain characters to make them more palatable to 90s audiences: Queen Elizabeth is portrayed as a wisecracking tough woman who's seen it all, not unlike Bea Arthur's character on "The Golden Girls" now that I think about it.

These types of overtures to the 90s sensibility don't fit at all in a movie set in the 16th century, but at the same time they don't really hurt the film all that much. There is too much of the "comedy of misunderstanding" thing going around, but at least it is an intentional homage to Shakespeare as the principal subject of the film.

All that said, I didn't nap at all and I would suggest to Crimedog that he give this one another shot. That, and stop cranking reviews out at work, punk, it's starting to show! He even missed the obvious joke included in the fact that the director of this movie is named John Madden.

Review by La Fée