There are several ingredients to a great movie: plot, character, dialogue, certainly. Settings and photography, not far behind. Performances which relate, directly, to the script, and enhance it, which generally means actors of some sensitivity who are either browbeaten into submission by a director or who actually respect the script enough to want to perform it, rather than use it as a vehicle to enhance their own egos.
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE satisfies every condition. Indeed, it trumps them, by accepting and meeting the challenge of creating an almost totally fictional story in and around the life and work of the greatest and, hence, most intimidating dramatist of the English language. To create a great costume drama is worthy enough, in itself. To do so while honoring Shakespeare in his own terms, indeed, in, perhaps, rekindling the recently waning fire at his altar, is to reach heights rarely achieved in three quarters of a century of talking motion pictures.
This is a film which shines in virtually every aspect. It's wonderfully cast. Not a performance rings but true. Gwenyth Paltrow, the most notable of the few Americans in the mostly English cast, gives a fine, nuanced performance as the mythical mistress of a mythical version of Shakespeare, notable both for itself, and because so many American attempts to do period English roles seem to fall flat. Joseph Fiennes, in the title role, is barely less entertaining. And, the strength of the script is such that his limitations, notably, a markedly theatrical take on his role, are appropriate in context, where they might seem odd in a more conventional role. His expressions, alone, are priceless, especially his tortured and/or challenged poet look, an impassioned combination of outrage, astonishment, and constipation.
The casting, large roles and small, is excellent, and if it does run a trifle to stereotype, it's entirely in keeping with the context, as the drama of the age ran to stereotype, as well. Classics, after all, deal with eternal truths and there are only so many ways for people to act. One of the reasons Shakespeare holds up over four hundred years is because so many of his characters are recognizable, even in radically different times and places.
The film's greatest strength, though, is it's script. Is there another scenarist alive who was better suited to this, specific sort of effort than Tom Stoppard, whose early prominence was in no small measure based on his ROSENCRANCE AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, a play set behind and among the scenes of HAMLET? In an age when strong, classically based writing has fallen so far out of style as to be a rare curiosity, it's splendid to see work which is not merely "informed" by the works of Shakespeare, but which revel in them, and the history of that age, and which play with the canon like a singer descanting on a great melody.
Make no mistake, SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE is, above all, a writer's script. It looks like a work about the theater - itself, a hallowed tradition in movies - but it's really a script about writing and writers and the process of creation, in all it's dirty, shameless, improvised glory. There's more practical description of real writing in this script than in many a graduate program. For that reason, as much as to pick up the delicious satires on various bits and pieces of Shakespeare's best known lines, this is a movie which bears rewatching. Stoppard has both the language and, even, the rhythms perfectly. When's the last time you listened to dialogue which sang, as good Elizebethan drama, which was written as poetry, or quasi-poetry, sang?
This movie, incidentally, works beautifully as the first of a double feature with the Trevor Nunn/Imogen Stubbs/Ben Kingsley version of TWELFTH NIGHT, a work whose creation figures in the conclusion of SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.
