Mr. Madden moves past "Mrs. Brown" with young Mr. Shakespeare
"Shakespeare in Love" is brilliant piffle and audacious, spirited entertainment, a display of the kind of seemingly effortless craft that masks both deep erudition and prodigious wit. It's a romp, in love with theater, language, and well, love. But as jokes both low and high jostle, the fires of history and literature also burn in the devious, playful structure designed by screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. John Madden's delightfully sure direction finally matches his theater and television chops (which have included such shows as "Prime Suspect"). The richly acted, but modestly produced Royalist fanfare of his "Mrs. Brown" was only a teaser for the winning "Shakespeare in Love."
Without having seen the film, one local critic dubbed the film "Miramax's latest effort to corner the sex 'n' literature market," but in fact, there was an earlier attempt to mount "Shakespeare in Love" in 1992 at Universal, starring Julia Roberts and Daniel Day-Lewis, which came to naught. (Then-director Ed Zwick lent a hand here as one of several supportive producers.) And, Tom Stoppard, as both playwright and occasional screenwriter, is not new to the kind of mind-bendingly smart comedy that shines with surface wit yet percolates with greater complexity beneath. Stoppard's aim, says the genial Madden, was to follow the construction and form of "a mature Shakespearean comedy. It begins with love at first sight and romantic infatuation, then passes through a period of complication and then mortality rears its head, and that changes the experience of love into something different." He's quick to laugh, "That's not trying to be clever, it's just it's a rather good model if you're going to follow any model! Those pieces are so glorious, and the bawdy, extreme, almost vulgar moments brushing right up next to something much more elevated."
While following those contours, the story imagines the goings-on that surround the life of young Will Shakespeare in 1593 London, toiling over the blank pages of some unwritten, yet-to-be-imagined melodrama called "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." Joseph Fiennes is Shakespeare, saucer-eyed and ears alert to all about him; he spends time he could be writing dodging the entreaties of his dodgy producer, Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush, a dancing bear of misplaced passions and hilarious umbrage).
"One of the biggest hurdles in finding our lead, if you can believe it," Madden says, admitting that Fiennes was not his first choice, but eventually his only one. "Besides seeming romantic and witty and charismatic, the real trick was to find someone of whom you could believe he had written this work. And despite the fact that the piece is quite mischievous in tone, it nevertheless takes the work incredibly seriously. Joe, alone, had that quality. He's got some kind of private quality, a hidden quality that when you see him on the screen, you can see he's thinking. In negotiating the rapids of this material, he's believably romantic and passionate at the same time outrageous jokes are being cracked all around him. Keeping that integrity scared some actors off, they were afraid they'd be acting on a banana skin all the time. Joe has energy, and that rapidity is part of what the movie truly required."
When stage-struck Lady Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow, her ethereal and wanly patrician qualities used to full and proper effect) auditions for the play-in-the-making as a boy, the intricate levels of narrative play kick into motion. But Madden didn't take his job as simply helming a star vehicle. "I was terribly aware of having, say, an actor like Geoffrey Rush hanging around on the edge of a scene to say just one line at the end. Everybody who did the movie, to a person, did it because they were thrilled with the script and everyone wanted to be a part of that world. I have to be honest; this was a grueling film to make because you had to hit the target."
While the tale's irreverence might offend some historical purists, Madden says, "The point about Shakespeare's life is that nobody knows anything. My theory is that he was just a jobbing actor and writer with a knack, a true gift, but no doubt he also had money troubles and suffered from all the rivalries of the theater world he lived in. People assume he was always this great revered man and he probably wasn't."
There's another level of spoofing as well, an ongoing thread of anachronism that conflates the summer of 1593 with the winter of 1999. "Tom felt that the parallel between what was essentially the beginnings of show business in the late sixteenth century and modern show business was so irresistible," Madden says, chuckling as he continues. "They aren't parallels you particularly have to force! We now think that what Shakespeare has written as literature, but it was entertainment at the time it was being made." Stoppard, who trained as a journalist and who relies on intense research to write his plays, also presents Shakespeare as a reporter in the sense that he has to experience a thing in order to write about it, in effect, a portrait of his own method up on screen.
"Well, it's written by a writer about a writer, and the insights throughout are sound."
by Ray Pride
"Shakespeare in Love" is now playing.
For theaters and times see Movie Clock.
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.