Shakespeare in Love (1998, R)

*Disclaimer: I remember that I’d had it in the back of my mind when I watched this movie that Harvey Weinstein was involved in some way, but when I didn’t see the Weinstein Company Logo in the opening credits, I assumed I was wrong. Turns out, he did produce it – the film just predated the Weinstein Company. Additionally, the cast includes Geoffrey Rush, another alleged sexual harasser. That’s something I ought to have mentioned when I wrote the review.*

 

This movie has been my list for quite a while, because of both my general love of Shakespeare and the fact that it’s one of the few Tom Stoppard projects I hadn’t yet consumed. However, it was one that kept getting pushed down my queue by other things… until now! I wasn’t prepared for just how delightful it is (premise spoilers.)

Up-and-coming playwright Will Shakespeare, a masterful poet who yet finds himself farming out plays to whatever theatre will have him to buy his bread, is afflicted with writers’ block. This is, naturally, a problem, especially given that he already has a theatre waiting for his new play: Romeo & Ethel the Pirate King’s Daughter (good title.) He searches for inspiration in the form of a new muse and finds it in one Viola, a beautiful lady stifling under the expectations of her parents. Viola has been promised to a grasping lord, but she’s a romantic who’s drawn to the stage and moved by Shakespeare’s words. When she gets wind of his new play, she disguises herself as a young man in the hopes of treading the boards herself, kicking off a comedy of errors crammed with cases of mistaken identity, deadly danger, and true love.

Really, an invented tale about the life of William Shakespeare is right up Tom Stoppard’s alley. I’ve always loved his talent for writing about history while simultaneously undermining its “accuracy” – in a sea of barely-true biopics that pretend fidelity to the facts, Stoppard’s works based on real people often proudly declare that we have no reason to trust what we’re seeing. In Shakespeare in Love, he does this cheekily, audaciously, through a steady stream of gags and references that are patiently false. Shakespeare has regular “sessions” with his apothecary like a psychiatrist, he evidently owns a souvenir coffee mug from Stratford-on-Avon, and a scene of him doing the classic “writer toiling over his words, ankle-deep in crumpled papers” thing pulls back to reveal that, instead of laboring at his next masterpiece, he’s been practicing his signature.

I’m generally not a fan of stories in which writers mine their real lives for their plots (I can’t help but feel it diminishes the impression of their creativity,) but I don’t mind it here because it’s so blatant and tongue-in-cheek about it. If the summary wasn’t enough to suggest the theme of “what if Shakespeare’s life was just like one of his plays?”, try this on for size. Shakespeare meets Viola at a party he crashes after he’s been jilted by another woman, they have a tête-á-tête at her balcony, and someone storms into the rehearsal of the Mercutio-Tybalt-Romeo fight to have a duel with Shakespeare. It’s on the nose, is what I’m saying. But it does so in a fun way, signposting the references with a wink and a nudge.

When it comes to the acting, let me start by saying kudos to Joseph Fiennes in the title role: I watched this movie while in the thick of The Handmaid’s Tale’s newest season, and I didn’t think of Commander Waterford once. He’s every inch the romantic poet, the charming hustler, and the madcap all in one, and he has splendid chemistry with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola. Emma gave me residual goodwill for Paltrow in period pieces, and she’s really charming here. Filling out the cast in smaller roles are Colin Firth, Ben Affleck, Imelda Staunton, and Judi Dench as Elizabeth I.

Warnings

Sexual content, scenes of violence, language, drinking, and some thematic elements.

The Hard Problem (2015)

I stumbled across this National Theatre Live event completely by chance:  I was doing recon on their website, getting an early scoop on Hamlet showings (yes, it’s not until October, but it’s Benedict Cumberbatch – when tickets go on sale, they’ll go like gangbusters, and if I want to see it, I need to be ready,) and there, among the upcoming showings in my area, was a brand spankin’ new play by Tom Stoppard.  Do I really need to say I was so there?

So, what’s the subject of this, the first Tom Stoppard play that I’ve ever seen before reading?  It follows Hilary, a young psychology student with the aim of working for a prestigious research institute.  Unlike many of her fellow brain scholars, Hilary doesn’t hold with the idea that all the answers to who we are can be found in the hardware, that all our actions can be divined by evolutionary biology and observed by the sparks in the gray matter.  She fumbles when she tries to articulate it, but Hilary believes in something larger and unquantifiable.  Whether she calls it the mind (separate from the brain,) the soul, or the existence of God, she stands alone among her colleagues as she searches for proof of it.

In other words, it has lots of fun playing keep-away with my understanding.  It’s an interesting experience to see a Stoppard play without having read it first.  There are brilliant illuminating flashes where everything crystallizes, and for a moment, you feel intellectually invincible.  There are stretches where you think you’re following it just fine, but then you turn a corner and realize you’re utterly lost in the woods of it.  There are times when you know you don’t understand what’s being said and you don’t even mind, letting it break over you like a philosophical, semantic wave.  I definitely felt further behind than I do when I read his plays, but this order has its own excitement and immediacy.

This play feels a bit more lecture-y than many Stoppard works I’ve read, more straight-up academic discourse with less poetic wandering.  I’m not sure if that means it actually is, or if watching it sight unseen made it harder for me to access that startling Stoppardian beauty.  Undoubtedly, there are exquisite moments, but it’s not like Arcadia or The Invention of Love, where my breath catches in my throat for entire glorious speeches.  But then, they can’t all be Arcadia or The Invention of Love, or what would be the point of the ones that are?  (To take a page from Sondheim, “If live were only moments, / Then you’d never know you had one.”)  Plenty of Stoppard’s works fall short of his best, but that only means they’re not transcendent – not exactly a scathing indictment.  And of course, the wit is still there.  I’m pretty sure Stoppard can’t even help that.  As the characters discuss egoism vs. altruism, evolution vs. theology, and the possibility of artificial intelligence, they weave in any number of glittering aphorisms, cheeky or sly or insightful. 

I’m not terribly familiar with any of the actors from the production (the most familiar faces are Anthony Calf, who played Col. Fitzwilliam in the Ehle/Firth Pride and Prejudice, and Lucy Robinson from Suburban Shootout,) but they all do a commendable job with the difficult script.  Special mention goes to Damien Molony as Hilary’s tutor and sometimes-lover, who’s somehow passionate and jaded at the same time, and Parth Thakerar who, as Hilary’s would-be rival, takes full advantage of a role that’s much complex than it seems on the surface.

Anna Karenina (2012, R)

First things first – I’ve never even come close to reading Anna Karenina, so I have no idea how this movie is as an adaptation.  I found the story to be fine but unremarkable – I think maybe I’m just not a Russian classics person.  While it’s a perfectly serviceable narrative, I couldn’t really connect with it.  However, purely as a film, I have huge admiration for it.

The Anna Karenina of the title is an aristocrat from 19^th-century St. Petersburg – faithful wife, devoted mother, and caring sister.  When she travels to Moscow (her philandering brother needs help convincing his wife to forgive him,) her fate is sealed by an encounter with the passionate Count Vronsky.  One meeting is enough for her to captivate him, and he ardently pursues an affair with her.  Anna’s better judgment gives way to her desire, and she risks everything for her dashing lover.  It’s a tale of forbidden fruit, societal pressure and judgment, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Once again, I haven’t read Anna Karenina, so I don’t know how much dialogue was lifted and how much was invented by the glorious Tom Stoppard, but the script offers plenty to feast on.  I also don’t know how much to thank Stoppard, versus director Joe Wright, for the striking use of theatrical imagery and staging.  My money’s on Stoppard for the concept, because drawing attention to the fourth-wall framework of his story is totally up his alley; either way, Wright executes it stunningly.

The film, without any explanation why, unfolds largely as a play.  It opens with the curtains coming up on a stage, on which much of the action is performed.  The story follows the actors into the wings and up to the flies, and some of it is placed in a more concrete real world, occasionally augmented by blatantly false backdrops or confetti snowflakes.  The extras move in time, carefully choreographed, and when Anna dresses, she does so balletically.  There are a number of onscreen set changes, and sometimes the real world mentioned above makes its way onto the stage (such as a field of grass adorning the floorboards.)  I’m not entirely sure why the film is made this way – my best bet is that it’s a metaphor for the fishbowl of the gossiping Russian aristo society, in which people’s lives are little more than spectacle for others to observe – but it’s gorgeous, audacious, gripping.  I’ve seen tons and tons of costume dramas, but not one of them looks like this.

Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (soon to be Quicksilver in The Avengers) all deliver in the lead roles.  Knightley’s Anna is messy but sympathetic as a woman on the verge of tearing down her world, Law’s Karenin is equal parts determined ignorance, furious judgment, and quiet compassion, and Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky is every bit the smoldering conquistador.  The film also features Matthew Macfadyen, the sublime Kelly Macdonald, Ruth Wilson (a former Jane Eyre,) Michelle Dockery from Downton Abbey, Emily Watson, Emerald Fennell from Call the Midwife, former Weasley sibling Domhall Gleeson, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit role from Luke Newberry (Kieren from In the Flesh.)

Warnings

Sexual content (including several artfully-shot sex scenes) and a few scenes of violence.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)

 

(Although the above picture is from the 1990 film adaptation, this post is about the play itself.)

 

This extraordinary play introduced me to Tom Stoppard years ago.  I’d rented the movie sight unseen, knowing that I liked Gary Oldman and it presumably had something to do with Hamlet, and immediately fell in love.  I was quick to seek out the script and check out more from Stoppard.  After reading the Coast of Utopia trilogy next, I definitely had a favorite playwright.

 

The story of Hamlet is turned inside out here, told through the eyes of his old school friends.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, enlisted to “glean what afflicts” the mad young prince, play minor roles in Shakespeare’s play but still meet messy ends.  In this tale, they’re given center stage, muddling uncertainly through their task and heading inexorably toward their tragic finish. 

 

It’s an interesting viewpoint.  I’ve seen this technique before, although it’s more typically a story reworked from the villain’s perspective.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren’t nefarious, and in Hamlet, they’re far from dynamic.  Essentially, they’re pawns in a royal game with little agency of their own.  However, both are of course the protagonists of their own lives, and as such, the play reframes Hamlet to be entirely about them.

 

The play has a strong absurdist bent, part of which comes from their unconscious knowledge that they’re minor characters in someone else’s play.  Left alone onstage too long, they grow antsy for someone more important to appear.  They despair at how little impact they seem to have on events and yearn for something meatier to work with.  “All we get is incidents!” Rosencrantz exclaims.  “Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!”  Additionally, their generic interchangeability in Shakespeare’s play is magnified here – no one can tell them apart, to the point where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves are no longer sure which is which.

 

Besides this nudging of the fourth wall, great absurdity and surrealism can be found in the incidental dialogue.  The pair’s actual scenes from Hamlet play out fairly verbatim, but between these scenes are long segments of the two of them basically waiting for something more to happen.  In these sequences, they obviously discuss their situation and try in vain to influence the proceedings, but that just scratches the surface.  They also play word games, philosophize, pick fights with tragedians, tell jokes, and challenge the laws of both probability and fate.

 

This is where the play truly lives.  Stoppard’s sparkling, whip-smart wit comes fast and furious, dancing nimbly between wry, outrageous, and reflective.  There are so many excellent scenes worth mentioning – the game of questions, roleplaying their confrontation with Hamlet, and Rosencrantz’s “dead in a box” speech are a few highlights.  The hapless leading men have an easy, bickering back-and-forth that rival any comedy duo alive or dead.  Rosencrantz’s eager-but-dim logic complements Guildenstern’s penchant for overly-complicated chains of thought, and the two squabble their way through the play with pitch-perfect timing.  Yet, for all that they get on one another’s nerves, they both know that they’re in this impossible, inscrutable situation together, and they always have each other’s backs in the end.

 

Warnings

 

Sexual references and a little swearing.