Shakespeare in Love Review
by Charles Ellis (cdellis AT access1 DOT digex DOT net)February 11th, 1999
Shakespeare In Love - review by David Ellis
http://www.magicstore.net/my_take.htm
Tom Stoppard goes to the "Shakespeare What-If" well once again, and why
not? Didn't Huntz Hall use the same gags every film? Is not Huntz Hall
remembered fondly by all?
There were Victorian writers who made up childhoods for Shakespeare's characters (little Falstaff...egads!), why not make up something about the Bard hisownself? His life story has many gaps.
It's peopled with theatrical contemporaries like Burbage, Marlowe and a
boy John Webster (a slightly later tragedian). Jonson and Bacon fans (all
eight of them) will be disappointed, they don't appear at all. Full of in
jokes, this romantic comedy delivers on both the romance and the comedy.
Ignore the history part, this is Hollywood!
While Will's sources for his plots are well-known, this film premises
that his new girlfriend helps him write Romeo And Juliet. She's the model
for Juliet in Will's "real" life. Shakespeare himself was been first to
really explore the lines between drama, play acting, and reality. His own
material is full of winks to the audience. This film follows beautifully and
entertainingly in that tradition.
Will is played by intense Joseph Fiennes, who also gets the girl in
"Elizabeth". I'm jealous...does it show? Intense, intense, intense. If he was
your shoe salesman, you WOULD buy shoes, OK? But you would fear to buy a car
or computer from this man. I hope I'm clear about this, he's no half-ass,
he's intense.
Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola steals the film in every scene she's in, even
the scenes with the intense guy. The rest of the cast does a good job of
pretending to be theatrical hacks and bad actors..<<sheesh this is meta>> so
she can come in and show them what a good actor does. An added treat, she
plays Romeo for most of the rehearsals. It's two or three roles in one and
she pulls them all off. If she wins the Oscar she should quit and start a
legend.
The film has comedy, romance, a play-within-a-play (a Shakespearian
invention? If only Romeo And Juliet staged a play for their parents and
friends, we could have had... oh, never mind!). There are pratfalls galore,
steamy sex, and culture...what more could you want?
Despite glaring chrono-illogics the film does a terrific job of
recreating details of Elizabethan life, from the bad teeth everyone but the
leads have to the poop in the unpaved streets. Will is as superstitious as
the rest of the lot. Nobody in the film except Queen Elizabeth really has a
clue, everyone else in the picture has their own crazed agenda. Nobody has
any money, not even Viola's noble suitor. All very accurate. The only over-
riding concern of the age left out is the Catholic-Protestant schism, see
"Elizabeth" for that.
We get wonderful supporting characters almost as colorful as Will's own.
The camera work is as ornate as the rest of the picture, but you hardly
notice it, it just seems so right. We swoop to balconies and behind-the-
scenes at the theatre with ease and no jarring "oh, it's a movie" to break
the spell.
See this movie!
PostScript -
Much is made in reviews of the fact that the Virginia colony referred to
in the film did not exist for twenty years after the film events take place.
I can't believe the filmmakers did not know this, or chose to ignore it. My
interpretation of the ending is that the sailed for it and shipwrecked thus
delaying the colony's start. Sole survivor Viola gets to walk off in the
sunset to an uncertain future on a vast empty continent...bet that wasn't in
her horoscope! I like to think she hiked to the Pacific and somehow ended
up in Japan, causing trouble the whole way.
More on 'Shakespeare in Love'...
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