Struggling playwright, William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), has hit writer’s block. But his theatre agent, Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush), is putting a lot of pressure on Shakespeare, because debt collectors are after Henslowe. So Shakespeare starts to write and rehearse an incomplete play about two star-crossed lovers in a tragic romance. Little does he know, that a young, upper-class woman, Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) has disguised herself as a boy to perform as Romeo, and she and Shakespeare start to fall in love themselves.
Doug says...
A slightly unexpected winner, Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan and Everything is Beautiful, and delivers a well-told fiction about how a dashing young Shakespeare once had an affair with a noble lady — which in fairness could be entirely true given the stories of Elizabethan playwrights and their torrid love-lives. Like last week’s Titanic, this is a film from my childhood and again I was slightly wary of approaching.
And unfortunately in this instance, time hasn’t been as kind. Shakespeare in Love hasn’t aged quite as well, and although the clever aspects that writer Tom Stoppard imbues it with (it has a five act structure, as do all Elizabethan plays; it plays with cross-dressing and provides entertainment of both high wit and crude roughness etc. etc.) are good, I found myself finding it thinner and a bit more trite that I remembered.
The main issue is that I can’t really get behind either of the lead performances. Paltrow does a decent job showing a love for the theatre and a desire to be free of the social norms that bind her but her infatuation with Fiennes’ Shakespeare isn’t particularly engaging or enthralling. Fiennes is just painfully thin. It’s particularly noticeable next to Titanic where Kate Winslet & Leonardo DiCaprio deliver brilliant performances alight with crackling chemistry. This feels like a wash out.
I think this is a film where the ‘80s love of melodrama is tying up with the ‘90s overdone scripts and while it’s by no means a car-crash, it doesn’t result in a film that particularly rises above average. Judi Dench storms onto the screen and although it’s a testament to her talent, it’s also slightly telling that in twelve minutes, she so dominates the film that she nabbed an Oscar.
Highlight
The final shot of a fictional Viola escaping a shipwreck to walk the beaches of an unknown land is stunning, and made me wish the film had really been an adaptation of Twelfth Night.
Lowlight
The two leads lack a certain something and as their fame fades (Paltrow now sells weird non-approved health stuff and Fiennes has all but disappeared), the thinness of their on-screen chemistry is suddenly more obvious than ever.
Mark
5/10
Paul says...
Unlike Doug, Shakespeare in Love is a film that, for me, has displayed more depth, complexity and thought on repeated viewings throughout my life. My first viewing came before I had a strong knowledge of Shakespeare, and so I enjoyed it as a lively love story across class boundaries. As Shakespeare’s plays and words have become clearer to me over the years, the cleverness of Shakespeare in Love has become more and more pertinent, making it one of the most meta-theatrical and intelligent pieces to have ever won Best Picture. It’s essentially a film that is written in the style of a Shakespearean play, about the production of a Shakespeare play, involving a romance that parallels that very Shakespeare play.
Let me explain… I lost count of the number of Shakespearean tropes and references that writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard have managed to segue into the action, and most of my enjoyment comes from spotting them. There’s obvious ones such as Viola being based on her gender-bending namesake in Twelfth Night and having the characteristics of other Shakespearean heroines such as Rosalind, Juliet, Portia, Perdita and Miranda. There’s a play-within-a-play, and it skilfully augments and mirrors the action of the film, as well as showing the potential ending for our lovers should their romance take a more tragic turn. There’s the serious main players in the action, as well as a troop of “Mechanicals” who provide comic interludes and there’s even an amusing Nurse.
But there are more subtle, structural references thrown in for the more intense Shakespeare readers. The film opens with a scene between subsidiary characters, while the title character doesn’t appear until the second or third scene- something which Shakespeare did more often than one might think. The very language used by the characters, especially Viola who proves to be the most poetic and soliloquy-loving, is heavy on iambic pentameter-esque-ness (I literally couldn’t think of the right noun here). And the film concludes with the most high-ranking character (in this case, Judi Dench’s inimitable Queen Elizabeth I) sorting out all of the squabbling underlings’ meagre troubles.
Finally, most interesting of all, the ending is not the happy, euphoric one that we expect. Viola and Shakespeare never make it together, and Viola must embark to the Americas with a deeply unpleasant husband (Colin Firth shaking off his Mr Darcy-in-the-pond image). Many Shakespearean comedies end with marriage, but some of these marriages are famously problematic- see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale for prime examples of this.
It’s true that the love story itself has become a little outdated over the last 20 years. Gwyneth’s lengthy speeches on the true nature of love become tedious, and remind you that Shakespearean comedies are not always as funny nor involving as you might think from the most famous of English writers. Modern film-making generally prefers to “show not say” its feelings, with this year’s If Beale Street Could Talk being a good example of how sparse dialogue and imagery can establish the thoughts and themes of the film much more succinctly.
But what I love most about Shakespeare In Love is its celebration and homage to Shakespearean writing and theatre. It’s written and created by people who “get” the Bard on a level much higher than even the most pretentious of academics, because they see how his language and structures have influenced story-telling even today. Whilst it’s not the most emotional piece, it’s one of the cleverest, and after a long string of 3-hour historical epics, it’s a breath of fresh air.
Highlight
Pretty much all 12 minutes of Judi Dench’s magnanimous screen time.
Lowlight
Some of the love speeches could have been chopped. There’s one in a boat between Viola and Shakespeare that left me cold and disengaged.
Mark
8/10
Bonus Spoof 'Art' Movie Poster That We Found Online
Bonus Spoof 'Art' Movie Poster That We Found Online
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