Love around Shakespeare

During one or another of the free preview weekends, I had the chance to DVR Shakespeare in Love. It's on often enough, including twice tomorrow on Starz Edge: at 7:41 AM and 11:16 PM. So I recently sat down to watch it and do a full-length post on it.

The scene is London in 1593. Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) runs a theater and is deeply in debt to some people who want to be paid off now. Philip, of course, doesn't have the money, leading the creditors to try to injure Philip much the way latter-day loan sharks would do. But being a bit of a schemer, he has an idea. He works with a young, up-and-coming playwright named Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), and tells his creditors that Will is working on a great new comedy tentatively titled Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.

Now, as we all know, Shakespeare never wrote a comedy about Romeo and Ethel. Indeed, in the movie, he hasn't even begun to write one. Worse, he seems to have a case of writer's block, which is bad enough for him, but think about his friend and nominal boss Philip! Still, the show must go on, so Shakespeare writes a few things for Romeo and starts holding auditions.

Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) has always been interested in the theater, to the point that she wouldn't mind actually acting in plays. But there are a couple of obstacles. One is class: she's the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, and she is betrothed to be married to Lord Wessex (Colin Firth), with the Queen's (Judi Dench) blessing. There's no way such a person could take part in a low-status profession like acting. But even with that, there's a second reason, which is that in the 1590s, acting was exclusively a male profession, with men even taking the female roles.

Still, Viola decides to go to the theater dressed as a man, calling herself Thomas Kent, and trying out for the play. Shakespeare likes Thomas Kent, not realizing this is Viola. That's a problem because Shakespeare has already seen Viola at a performance put on for the Queen. When Shakespeare follows "Kent" home and finds out that Kent is also Viola, he starts a passionate relationship with her, including some unnecessary love scenes. (Shakespeare, you may recall, still has unseen wife Anne Hathaway and some kids back in Stratford.)

Shakespeare's love for Viola prompts him to write not a comedy about a pirate's daughter, but a tragedy about two young lovers whose love can never me. Meanwhile, Wessex realizes something is going on, and the Queen agrees to be the judge of a wager over whether a playwright can really capture the nature of true love. All of the plotlines are going to come together in the premiere showing of Romeo and Juliet....

Shakespeare in Love won a ton of awards, but even with that, there were still some things I didn't quite care for. The direction and camera movement reminded me of some of the things that irritated me watching a movie like Chocolat. Additionally, some of the characters come across as being a bit off in the wrong way, as though they all have late 20th century sensibilities.

On the other hand, the acting was mostly quite good. Ben Affleck shows up as the actor playing Mercutio, and despite being in a British movie about the 16th century, didn't stick out like a sore thumb. Dench was also quite good as Queen Elizabeth; Firth made me think of his character from Valmont; and the rest of the cast does quite well with the material.

If you haven't seen Shakespeare in Love before, it's definitely worth a watch. There are several DVD and Blu-ray releases, but looking at Amazon, only on of them still seems to be in print. The movie is also currenty available on Amazon Prime streaming.