SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

INTRODUCTION: Widely tipped for Oscar honours, head of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, who pioneered the idea of sending out 'screener' tapes to every member of the academy, has apparently extended this aggressive marketing concept by sending out 'screener' tapes to everyone even us lowly critics at the Lair.

I am eternally grateful to him, as I concluded my review of "Elizabeth" with the wish that they would make a sequel looking at the later years of Elizabeth's reign, so obligingly Fiennes & Rush re-don their cod-pieces for this wry look at the Golden Age of the Elizabethan era.

AWARDS & HONOURS: AP Online Top 10 Films Of '98. Broadcast Critics Awards '98: Best Picture (Nominated). National Board Of Review Awards '98: Best Picture (5th Place). National Society Of Film Critics Awards '98: Best Supporting Actress; Judi Dench. Online Film Critics Society Awards '98: Best Film (Nominated), Best Actress; Gwyneth Paltrow (Nominated), Best Original Screenplay; Marc Norman & Tom Stoppard (Nominated). Premiere's Top Ten Movies Of 1998 (Honourable Mention). Golden Globe Film Awards 1998: Best Musical Or Comedy Picture, Best Actress In A Comedy Or Musical Picture; Gwyneth Paltrow, Best Supporting Actress; Judi Dench (Nominated), Best Supporting Actor; Geoffrey Rush (Nominated), Best Director; John Madden (Nominated), Best Screenplay; Marc Norman & Tom Stoppard.

SYNOPSIS: England, 1593; the theatres have been closed by the plague and Philip Henslow (Rush) proprietor of The Rose Theatre finds himself in debt to local face Hugh Fennyman (Wilkinson). Henslow is given a stay of execution when Master of the Revels, Sir Edmund Tilney (Callow) orders the theatres re-opened. Henslow must recoup Fennyman's money but Ned Alleyn (Afleck), Will Kempe (Patrick Barlow) and the rest of his players are on tour, and he is under stiff competition from The Curtain Theatre whose proprietor Richard Burbage (Martin Clunes) has commissioned a new play from celebrated word-smith Christopher Marlowe (Everrett).

Henslow turns to struggling young play-write & actor William Shakespeare, but Bill is suffering from writers block and is unable to complete his latest comedy "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirates Daughter" until he find a muse. At first he turns to Burbage's wife Rosalind (Sandra Reinton), but then at the court of Queen Elizabeth (Dench) he spots young heiress Viola De Lesseps (Paltrow) but she is betrothed to down on his luck noble, Lord Wessex (Firth), who is poised to whisk her off to Virginia.

Viola herself longs to be a player, but is not allowed under Elizabethan law, so she dons a false moustache and passes herself off at the Rose as one Thomas Kent, where she meets and falls in love with Bill.

REVIEW: This is not your run-of-the-mill costume drama, it is also a genteel romantic comedy, and a bawdy bedroom farce, and a biting satire on the film industry. It is this multi-layered approach that establishes this films post-modern credentials as well as making it entertaining. The film, as Emma Forrest wrote in the Observer, "makes dumb people feel smart, and smart people feel like they're slumming it". This cross-culture appeal has already established it as a word-of-mouth hit in middle America as well as garnering it a shed-load of awards and honours, some of which are listed above.

Fiennes and Paltrow blandly play-out their romantic comedy roles as they have many times before, but a truly world class supporting cast rush to their rescue, Wilkinson, Everrett, Clunes and even Rush put in truly magnificent performances. The ensemble is filled out with numerous guest stars sending up there own images, Dench (whose appearance is sadly far too brief to warrant the awards bring heaped upon her) is the caustic Virgin Queen, Afleck the star player, Firth the noble suitor, Callow the theatrical Master of Ceremonies, and "Fast Show" stalwarts Mark Williams and Simon Day try to milk as many laughs as possible out of a couple of one-joke characters.

Script-writers Stoppard and Norman would seem to have the easiest job in the world, making a script out of dialogue pilfered from the greatest playwright in history, but they give the concept a post-modern slant by showing how all writers even the bard himself pilfer dialogue from all around them. "Romeo and Juliet" was itself 'adapted' by Bill from an earlier play "The Tragic History of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brookes, and he would regularly 'borrow' from the likes of Plutrarch and "The Hollishead Chronicles".

Norman's script originally surfaced in the early 90's with Julia Roberts and Daniel Day-Lewis attached, the project fell through, but one quick re-write by award winning play-write Stoppard later, and it finally gets green lighted. Stoppard, who has previously played around in the margins of Shakespeare with "Hamlet" spin-off "Rosencrantz & Guildernstern Are Dead", takes Norman's re-telling of "Romeo & Juliet" and adds layer upon layer of other borrowed references. There are anachronistic joke of the sort Woody Allen pioneered in "Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex*", "Love And Death", etc., Carry On style cross dressing, and a series of historical references and in-jokes such as a brief appearance by Joe Roberts as the gore-loving John Webster who would later go on to write gothic horror "The White Devils".

Despite these historical trapping and real-life characters this is not an historical drama. It concerns itself very little with historical accuracy, e.g. placing Wessex's estate in Virginia years before it was colonised, and as such should not be viewed or re-viewed as one. It is instead a post-modern film and that confronts modern concerns, such as the nature of authorship, and the glass ceiling of sexism in the workplace, by placing them in a pseudo-historical setting.

Weinstein's seemingly magnanimous gesture of sending out these tapes has, according to 'NY Times' critic Frank Rich, a political agenda. Promoting this movie "drenched in sex (and lies about sex) whose loveable hero shamelessly cheats on his wife and kids he's left at home" over the patriotic "Saving Private Ryan" is allegedly a way of supporting Clinton and his liberal values over the more traditional values of his Republican persecutors. If this is true and I am being manipulated, well it just goes to show how cheaply I can be bought, as I much prefer this ironic re-write of history to all of the Berg's po-faced and manipulative re-writings of history. Besides who can blame our Bill for wanting to get out of Stratford, the town only has one two-screen cinema.

Political manipulation and historical revisionism has never been so entertaining.

Mutt's Rating: ****

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