# Shakespeare in Love (1998)

### reviewed by
Charles Ellis

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..<> 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.

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