22) Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Director: John Madden

Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Wilkinson, Colin Firth, Ben Affleck, Rupert Everett, Judi Dench

This is a film I had been meaning to review for a couple of years now. After Miramax put a lot of financial support behind a marketing push for the movie coming into the award season, Shakespeare in Love managed to win seven Oscars, including the Best Picture over the much more fancied Saving Private Ryan. In the years since, that decision come to be considered as one of the big Oscar 'mistakes'. I remember seeing it on video shortly after it had come out and thinking it was ridiculous that this won best picture over Saving Private Ryan (which, it should be noted, I hadn't seen but had heard was very good). Over the years though I have begun to that maybe as a 14 year old I didn't fully appreciate the intricacies of the screenplay and perhaps a lot of what made Shakespeare in Love a good film went straight over my head. So yesterday, when I was reading a bit about the history of Miramax in which Shakespeare in Love featured quite prominently, I decided to give it another shot.

Talented playwright William Shakespeare (Fiennes), living in the shadow of the more respected Christopher Marlowe (Everett), is struggling for inspiration in the writing of his next play, a comedy called 'Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter'. A lover of the theatre and in particular the plays of Shakespeare, the wealthy Viola De Lesseps (Paltrow), disguises herself as Thomas Kent and auditions for a part in his new play. Despite being betrothed to Lord Wessex (Firth) Viola starts a secret affair with William and as their romance blooms he finds the inspiration he needs write what will become arguably to world's greatest love story, Romeo and Juliet.

The screenplay, by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, for this film is very clever. Regardless of whether you think it deserved the Best Picture Oscar (or whether Judi Dench deserved the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a role which consisted of only 8mins of screen time) you can't deny that it's Best Original Screenplay Oscar was well deserved. The screenplay has a number of levels to it, with little winks to those in the audience who are more familiar with Shakespeare and his works (I particularly liked the scene in which the uninspired Shakespeare sits at the bar in a tavern explaining to Marlowe that he has nothing for his play other than a title, at which point, off the top of his head, Marlowe rattles some off the key plot points to Romeo and Juliet just to get him started. This is obviously one for all those who think that a lot of Shakespeare's revered plays were actually written by Marlowe).

What I enjoyed though, was the way in which the writers sought to draw parallels between the theatre industry of the 1590s and the Hollywood of today. The writers have a thinly veiled dig at the Hollywood system in their presentation of the money men organising how they're going to put on the next Shakespeare play, offering the players a percentage of the profits as payment when they know perfectly well that there won't be any profits. There are also a couple of quite funny scenes where Shakespeare hires a boat to cross the river and has awkward encounters with the boat drivers (presented as the taxi driver of the time), one who recognises him having seen him in something but can't remember what, and one who has been working on a script of his own and would like him to read it. Much like the Heath Ledger film A Knight's Tale tried to present jousting knights as the rock stars of the day, Shakespeare in Love presents the theatre as the Hollywood of the day, but goes about it in a slightly more subtle way.

When Miramax bought the rights to make the film off Universal, part of the agreement was that Miramax could not use any A-list stars in the film (at the time Julia Roberts had been interested in the project) as Universal did not want the film to be competing with it's upcoming slate of releases. That being the case, Miramax did an amazing job in securing a quality cast, littered with familiar faces and a number of actors who would go on to become quite big names (this is the film that made Paltrow A-list, even if she has dropped off in recent years).

Whether it is a better film than Saving Private Ryan is still debatable, but Shakespeare in Love is a very clever, well written and well made film. If anything, the stigma of being considered an unworthy Best Picture winner has probably unfairly tarnished the legacy of this film.