Best Picture: #71
Original Release Date: December 11, 1998
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Director: John Madden
Quick Impressions:
The summer before my senior year of high school, I decided that Queen Elizabeth I must have written at least some of Shakespeare’s plays herself. Why? I think the real answer is that I just liked her, and I was sure she could have done it if she’d put her mind to it. I had just learned about the Oxfordian theory of authorship (you know, the idea that the Earl of Oxford actually wrote the plays, not a man from Stratford-upon-Avon). I found one of its underlying premises strange.
“If Oxford was more likely to have written the plays because he was of noble birth,” I reasoned sarcastically, “then surely someone of even nobler birth is even more likely to have written them!”
I thought it would be hilarious to write a pretend essay about this and began searching Elizabeth’s speeches and letters for fake evidence. The problem was, once I started combing through her prose carefully, my theory suddenly no longer seemed so crazy. I thought, “Oh my God! It’s true!” (It wasn’t.) For about a week and a half, though, I was convinced that the real William Shakespeare was none other than Queen Elizabeth I.
I stopped believing my crazy conspiracy theory pretty fast. Instead of persisting in that line of ridiculous thought, I wrote a YA novel that incorporated the (fictional) idea into its time traveling premise (which got the attention of an editor at Simon and Schuster and led to the publication of the next book I sent them, Night of the Pompon).
But I guess I didn’t tell my dad that I had dropped the whole Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare thing. A few months later, my parents and I were invited to a banquet for prospective students at the University of Houston. We were seated at a table with several professors. An English professor was sitting right next to us. Trying to help me open up, my dad said to him conversationally during the dinner, “So Shakespeare…was he a man? Or was he a…queen?” He kept raising his eyebrows higher and higher, and the professor met his gaze and stared back looking more and more confused.
I said nothing. Nothing. My poor dad!
Well, actually, he didn’t care. I, however, was mortified and decided, “Okay, I will never be showing my face around that English department ever, ever, ever again.”
And I never did.
The point is, I’m exactly the sort of capricious lunatic who should be really into a movie about a fictionalized William Shakespeare falling in love. Not only did I dream up this and other crackpot theories about Shakespeare in my spare time, but I also did my junior thesis on Shakespeare’s lyric poetry and wrote my master’s report on the Bath Sonnets. Plus in college, I used to read Shakespeare’s plays aloud as a method of calming myself. There was something so soothing about the iambic pentameter. My thoughts and emotions were always a tangled, overwhelming jumble, but Shakespeare’s writing felt so orderly and measured. (You can’t say these kinds of things to people in casual conversation, or they’ll be like, “Whatever, you pretentious weirdo!”) (especially if you say them in iambic pentameter). But I think it’s far to say that I spent quite a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare and his work when I was younger.
Shakespeare in Love, though, has never been one of my favorite movies. Because the film has so many excellent elements, I find myself wishing that I liked the whole thing far more than I do. The premise seems so unadventurous to me, so obvious. If you’re going to make up a story about William Shakespeare (not even attempting to pretend it’s true) couldn’t it be a lot more fun and surprising than this? (Of course, this is coming from the person who thought it was a great idea to retell the story of Lady Jane Grey from the point of view of talking cats and also penned a truly awful five-act musical comedy about Anne Boleyn.) (That my younger sister adored these works (and also wasn’t that into Shakespeare in Love) shows only that we both have questionable taste.) I feel like Tom Stoppard, who co-wrote this screenplay, has had just a tiny bit more success as a writer than I have, so you probably should take everything I say in this review with a grain of salt.
The Good:
I can never resist metadrama. (In fact, I used a series of short papers on metadrama as my admissions essay for grad school.) So I do enjoy the play-within-a-play aspect of Shakespeare in Love, and I will admit that given Shakespeare’s fondness for metadrama (as evinced by how often it shows up in his work), using metadrama to tell a love story about his real life does make sense. (It actually makes substantially more sense than some other methods of constructing biographies for him I’ve seen. Why grasp at straws to flesh out his scant biographical details when you can discover his identity instead in his abundant work?) (It also seems like a pretty Shakespearean flourish to make the film’s whole tone, “Oh you don’t believe this was his real life? Well, the entire thing’s just a joke, anyway!”)
There’s something very satisfying about the idea that falling in love in real life is inspiring and enabling Shakespeare to create Romeo and Juliet while, at the same time, writing and performing Romeo and Juliet is teaching him how to navigate and process his real-life love story. And as this is happening within the world of the movie, it’s happening in reverse outside the movie. Writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, director John Madden, and the entire cast have fallen in love with Shakespeare, so they’re using what they’ve learned from reading and interpreting his writing to create a love story that could have inspired him to create that writing.
Besides being about a love affair between two people then, Shakespeare in Love is also a film about (falling in love with) the creative process. It shows us that like a romantic relationship, the creation of a play is a collaborative undertaking.
Far more than the love story between Will and Viola, I enjoy the way Shakespeare in Love uses these characters as only a film so grounded in metadrama could. As the story opens, Will can’t seem to write or to love in the way that he wants. By the end, he’s playing Romeo both on and off stage. But Viola plays Romeo first. (Well, actually, she plays Thomas Kent playing Romeo because, of course, if on the Elizabethan stage, men must play the women, then off the Elizabethan stage, the women must play men!) (Judi Dench gets a line near the end of the movie that emphasizes this for us.) (So it’s not such a surprise that at one point, Will has to dress up like a woman when he’s off-stage, hanging around with Viola in the real world.)
But I don’t just mean that Viola plays Romeo on stage. I mean in a broader sense, Viola behaves like Romeo. She is first stricken by the beauty of Shakespeare(’s writing), so she pursues him and performs a balcony scene of sorts. (She goes to the playhouse and auditions for him while he sits high above her, looking down and listening.) Then he plays Romeo back by going to her house and performing a more familiar balcony scene. As the story progresses, this shifting (and sculpting) of roles continues. By the end of the film, they’ve created Romeo and Juliet together. He’s playing Romeo. (He should have no trouble in the part. He’s watched her do it a million times.) She’s playing Juliet (probably receiving exactly the sort of courtship she’s always wanted from Romeo since she either said or inspired all the lines and then performed them for him on the stage again and again to show him how to deliver them).
I do really like this aspect of Shakespeare in Love. (It’s fun to watch the two rival theatre companies come together, too, and to see all the little John Webster jokes, the incorporation of Marlowe’s death, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. All that stuff is great.)
I also love the performances, particularly the supporting performances. In fact, as I watched this time, a part of me kept wondering to myself, “Would I like this film better if we got rid of a layer? Would I prefer to watch this same cast simply perform Romeo and Juliet?” Possibly. It’s hard to beat Romeo and Juliet, and that performance of the play we get near the end of the movie is more captivating than anything in the rest of the film.
But Shakespeare in Love refuses to let itself be dissected in this way because (according to the film’s premise) the material that is not Romeo and Juliet is the very stuff inspiring and creating the material that is. The whole thing is Romeo and Juliet. Plus (a more practical consideration) without the metadramatic layer, you’d lose most of Geoffrey Rush and all of Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton, and without a doubt, getting rid of them would make the movie worse. I do like the way Shakespeare in Love makes the metadrama integral. It practically lifts the character of the nurse right out of Romeo and Juliet and puts her into the main story instead. (You know what’s kind of cool, too? Imelda Staunton who plays Viola’s nurse and Jim Carter who plays the nurse on the stage are married in real life.)
As far as my daughter was concerned, Staunton stole the movie as the nurse. The moment when she sat and rocked in her chair to prevent anyone from surprising Viola in her bedchamber (with Will) had my daughter on the edge of her seat, constantly crying out with noises (and occasionally words) of concern. Finally, she exclaimed, “Oh come on! Please! Your poor nurse! She died!” Later when the nurse stalled Wessex by the carriage, my daughter exclaimed in delight, “That nurse is so amazing! She’d be like the cool mom!”
I think Tom Wilkinson gives my favorite performance of the film (which my daughter found ridiculous because he has a relatively small part. I’ll admit that I loved Wilkinson’s performance in Michael Clayton so much that I just kind of love him in everything, but I really did enjoy him as Fennyman (so earnestly captivated by the play and eager to play the apothecary).) The Oscar-nominated Geoffrey Rush is good, too, as Philip Henslowe. (It helps that he gets a lot of the best lines and a mouthful of the worst teeth, teeth that look like they did indeed see the Elizabethan period and would look equally at home in the mouth of a cursed, undead pirate. Is make-up applied to the teeth, or are these false teeth?) And I had forgotten Martin Clunes is in the film (probably because my mother was not yet a Doc Martin fanatic back when it first came out). At the time, I found the casting of Colin Firth amusing in and of itself because Wessex is like the (extremely ridiculous) anti-Darcy. This time, my daughter and I joked about how he keeps losing all of his wives to the Fiennes brothers in 90s Oscars films.
Judi Dench doesn’t convince me she’s Elizabeth I. Instead, she seems like Judi Dench pretending she’s Elizabeth I, but that’s fine. I think it’s delightful to see Judi Dench pretending to be Elizabeth I. I’m not saying her performance isn’t Oscar worthy. (If anything, her performance in Mrs. Brown was so conspicuously Oscar worthy that the Oscar she deserved for it eventually found its way to her.) It’s like when Miranda Richardson plays Elizabeth I in Blackadder. You don’t think, “Wow! History is coming to life right before my eyes!” But Richardson still makes a pretty memorable Elizabeth I. To me, it doesn’t seem like Dench is trying to play the real Elizabeth I so much as the Elizabeth I who would show up in this romantic comedy about Shakespeare.
As Shakespeare himself, Joseph Fiennes is pretty good. (I told my daughter as we started watching the movie, “This is embarrassing to admit, but I used to have such strong opinions about which Fiennes brother I preferred, and now I can’t remember which one I liked better or why.” Fortunately my sister cleared that up for me. “It was Joseph,” she told me. “You liked Ralph less.” (That certainly makes sense given my strong antipathy for Ralph’s character in Schindler’s List and my inability to warm to him as a romantic lead in The English Patient.) (He’s pretty shady in Quiz Show, too, now that I think of it!)
I’m glad she jogged my memory there. What I’ve always liked about Joseph Fiennes is his intensity. (In the 90s, he also consistently played more sympathetic characters than his brother.) I will confess that I don’t really care much about Will’s relationship with Viola. But I like the way he kisses her. Every time, Fiennes looks like something is compelling him toward her, like some unseen force within her is yanking him forward, like he’s not the originator of the action. He moves so quickly, and it always seems kind of amazing that he stops at her lips because it looks like he’s trying to slam through the barrier of her body, desperate to return to his true home within.
I remember my sister liking Gwyneth Paltrow for most of the 90s (because she had basically a shrine to Brad Pitt in her room, so for a while, Paltrow got roped into her affections by association). As I think back over Paltrow’s performance, what jumps out at me are all the moments when she thinks she’s about to be caught or found out. She makes a really good, “Oh no! They’re onto my shameful secret, and my heart is about to be ripped in half!” face. And she delivers her lines well, too, especially as Juliet.
I remembered Ben Affleck’s part being bigger than it is. Maybe I’m not the only one. I do recall now that the trailers featured him very heavily in what we decided was an extremely misleading way once we saw the film. (Maybe that’s another meta joke. I’m sure there’s some kind of joke sneaking around in there.) (And another thing I can’t remember—who preferred Ben Affleck to Matt Damon and vice versa. I’ll have to consult my sister. I feel like we’ve flip-flopped on this many times through the years. She’s more likely to be the original Affleck fan because I’ve always preferred him as a director.) (I did like Mallrats but mainly because of that kid in the escalator joke, not Ben Affleck.)
Best Scene:
The performance of Romeo and Juliet at the end of the film is surprisingly captivating. (I say surprisingly because as my daughter and I watched the movie, I found it pleasant and well-acted but not particularly captivating. Finding a comfortable place to stop watching was never hard because I could have stopped watching at any point and never gone back.) Then suddenly when the play was about to start, I felt far greater urgency to continue watching. Possibly this is because I’m just naturally more emotionally invested in Romeo and Juliet than in Will and Viola’s relationship. (That love story between them has never felt very real to me, but there’s just some part of me that’s like, “Oh no! I don’t want the play to be ruined!”)
Granted, this scene probably works so well because the film is well written, and the entire thing has been building to this point. (Also, Romeo and Juliet works better as a tragedy than a comedy, which, again to be fair, is what Will discovers while writing this play.)
For whatever reason, the performance of Romeo and Juliet at the end is compelling enough to make me wish I could see this cast do the entire play.
Of course, it’s not just the play itself that’s good. We also get the pleasure of watching all the scrambling around to make it come together at the last second. And then at the end, we get the (non) surprise of Queen Elizabeth showing up. (It’s a surprise to the characters in the film, but surely not to us because we’d be extremely disappointed if it didn’t happen.)
Best Scene Visually:
Well Queen Elizabeth’s peacock dress steals the whole movie. My daughter and I simultaneously gasped in awe, “That peacock dress!” As a rule, I don’t even notice what people are wearing. But you can’t help but notice what Elizabeth I is wearing.
What really caught my eye on this watch was Gwyneth Paltrow’s hair. Somehow it seems to coordinate with everything around her—the accents on her gown, the wood paneling on the wall, nearly every tapestry she wanders near. Both the costumes and the sets in this film are incredible. To be honest, they’re so good that I have mixed feelings about them because I find them distracting. It must be hard enough to follow all the court intrigue and parse out how to avoid your own untimely demise. Can you imagine trying to make sense of all the whispers and plots and crucial conversations when the Queen is dressed like a resplendent peacock (and a random lady of the court is dressed like a man whose hair happens to coordinate with everything) (even your own dress–how did she do that???).
Best Action Sequence:
I know my daughter was very vocally not a fan of the many sex scenes. At one point she cried out, “Guys! Please stop! You’re giving me second-hand embarrassment!” I don’t think she found their relationship very compelling, but she did love the nurse who really has to stay on her toes to keep up with Viola and Will.
The Negatives:
I think I would like Shakespeare in Love better as a play. I’m aware that it was written directly for the screen by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, and I know they won an Oscar for the screenplay. Stephen Warbeck’s score won an Oscar, too, and there’s nothing wrong with the music itself. But the score frustrates me because the main theme always seems to be sweeping in and interrupting everything. I’m nearly positive that the jokes in this would be funnier if the momentum of the dialogue weren’t constantly broken up by all the swelling music and location changes.
Even though the story never slows down, the film’s pacing feels off to me. I’m not talking about plot progression or general eventfulness. I mean that the dialogue itself would work so much better (for me) if there were fewer distractions breaking up the flow of it. So many lines in Shakespeare in Love are so clever, but they get swallowed up into a sea of needless pageantry. I’m sure they could be delivered more effectively, in a way that made us actually laugh instead of merely smile. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with the actors’ delivery. As a rule, the cast is superb, particularly the supporting cast. They deliver their lines well. I mean that the film doesn’t showcase those brilliant lines in the way that it could. The scenes lose tension or something because we’re always looking around at the set. This doesn’t affect the dramatic elements of the story, but it prevents the comedy from working as well as it could. At least, that’s what I think. Otherwise, I can’t explain why the movie always feels sort of slow and dull to me when many lines are conspicuously clever, and eventful things are happening constantly.
The first time I saw the film, the main thing that bothered me was something that’s not really Shakespeare in Love’s fault. To me, it suffered so much by comparison. The movie Elizabeth came out the same year. Of course, I was massively intrigued. I literally gasped out loud when I saw the first poster, to the amusement of my friends. A new movie about Queen Elizabeth I! I almost got hit by a car wandering through the darkness to take a closer look at that poster (which we happened upon outside the movie theater one night). When I actually saw the film, I was both horrified and amused by its whole, “I know this isn’t how it happened. So what?” approach to history. From my point of view at the time, that film was kind of a spectacular train wreck. But Cate Blanchett was magnificent. A lot of people said she should have won Best Actress, not Gwyneth Paltrow, and I was one of them, and I still think so. The ghost of Elizabeth overshadows this film. And you can’t just shake it off because Paltrow plays all of her love scenes with Joseph Fiennes (who also played Robert Dudley opposite Cate Blanchett). (Geoffrey Rush is also in both films.)
Now I don’t dislike Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance (and I don’t dislike Gwyneth Paltrow. In fact, around that time, she was on an episode of Saturday Night Live that my sister and I found so hysterically funny that I wasn’t even upset that she won the Oscar). But I still find the performance itself a little underwhelming (because I can’t help comparing it to Cate Blanchett’s). There’s nothing wrong with the way Paltrow plays Viola/Thomas Kent/Romeo/Juliet. (You know, actually now that I write out all those names, I do have to admit that the part does ask a lot of her…sort of.) I just wish she were as funny in this movie as in that SNL episode. I do find her interaction with Geoffrey Rush just before she rushes down to play Juliet quite funny. I remember thinking as I watched with my daughter, “All of her scenes should be with Geoffrey Rush, and then she’d be much funnier in this film.” I know that the female romantic lead is not necessarily supposed to be funny. It’s just, I like her better as Juliet…and Romeo…and even Thomas Kent, actually, than as Viola. Of course, maybe that’s the point.
The other thing I don’t like about this movie is that although Joseph Fiennes makes a very intense William Shakespeare, I find that for some reason I just don’t care that much about William Shakespeare running around having predictable adventures. I might care more if the movie were trying to suggest that these things actually happened (if for instance, it chose one of the possible Fair Youths of the Sonnets and put together a potentially true story about Shakespeare). The thing is, Shakespeare’s writing is so rich and fascinating. Why make up a life for him that’s so prosaic? (It just seems weird to have the luxury of completely fabricating the life of such an intriguing person and coming up with a narrative that’s so mundane.) (To be fair, I’ll admit that I’d rather watch a film about the life of Shakespeare that focused on Essex’s Rebellion and Richard II, and how can I blame a movie for not being some other imagined movie I’m just dreaming up myself?)
I also wish the movie’s humor didn’t rely so much on the audience’s familiarity with Shakespeare. It is fun to watch how Romeo and Juliet might have come together. Too late, I realized that I probably should have read that play with my daughter before watching this film. To get the most out of Shakespeare in Love’s humor, you should go in familiar with not only Romeo and Juliet, but also Shakespeare’s other works, the Elizabethan era, and what’s it’s like to put on a play in general. This film is peppered with so many little inside jokes. (If it had its origins in a comic book universe instead of Shakespeare’s plays, you might even call them Easter eggs.) This sort of pleasant, wink-and-nudge humor is pervasive and not terribly effective for people like my twelve-year-old who haven’t read much Shakespeare or even taken a high school drama class. Watching this time, I discovered that these jokes don’t work well if you have to stop and explain them. They’re meant to be tossed out for a quick laugh, then just as quickly forgotten. If you do have the background to understand them in real time, then they’re pretty funny. If not, the humor quickly gets sapped away by explanations. (She’s young enough that I’m pretty sure she even missed some of the sex jokes, but as her mother, I hesitate to be like, “Hey, did you get that dirty joke?” because…that doesn’t seem like great parenting necessarily.)
I should note that you don’t have to be a twelve-year-old not to get these jokes. I remember when the film came out, reading some magazine article in which the author pointed out that they felt less bad for not getting a John Webster joke when Hillary Clinton herself also didn’t understand the reference. I remember thinking that was so bizarre, the idea that even Hillary Clinton didn’t get the joke. Why in the world should Hillary Clinton be expertly acquainted with the works of John Webster? I remember thinking, “This makes Hillary Clinton sounds quite sensible because at least she knew to ask a question when everyone was laughing, and she didn’t get the joke, but why exactly should she be an expert in Jacobean drama?”) But the point is, some of the very best jokes in Shakespeare in Love are not necessarily terribly accessible to a general audience.
Overall:
“I feel like the movie just seems very 90s,” my daughter says. “It seems unoriginal.”
My husband teased, “But what about the love?”
With a sigh, she answered, “It was very generic and boring. The whole movie was built around that love story, and it was just as stereotypical as it could be. I don’t even see why that was nominated at the Oscars, let alone why it won. I feel like it could have been seen that as something on TV, and I would just change the channel.”
She now continues, “I figured out the vibe of the movie. It seems like something you would have on mute while you have family over. That would be its entire reason to exist.”
My opinion of the film is somewhat higher, but I do think it’s one of the weaker Best Picture winners of the 1990s. It did, however, make me want to read Romeo and Juliet with my daughter. Maybe we should also watch Elizabeth, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and that Gwyneth Paltrow episode of Saturday Night Live from 1999. Next, however, we’ll be watching American Beauty.