8 / 10
Official trailer
I don’t normally go for teen romantic comedies, and I enjoyed this one from start to finish. It’s very funny, the leads are terrific, and the script is far smarter than the genre required in 1999. Gil Junger directed from a screenplay by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, who took The Taming of the Shrew and moved it to a Seattle high school. Heath Ledger plays Patrick Verona, Julia Stiles plays Kat Stratford, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik play the younger pair whose romance sets the plot in motion.
It cost about $16 million and made roughly $53 million, and it’s outlived nearly every other teen comedy of its era. It gets an 8 because it’s a good film with a great cast and a couple of sequences that are better than the movie around them.
The Setup
Bianca Stratford wants to date. Her father, an obstetrician who has seen where teenage romance leads, has a rule: Bianca can date when her older sister Kat does. Kat has no interest in dating, in her classmates, or in anything the school values. Cameron, the new kid, falls for Bianca on sight and works out the loophole. If somebody takes Kat out, Bianca is free. So he and his friend Michael recruit Joey, a vain model with money, to pay Patrick Verona, the school’s resident menace, to pursue Kat.
That’s Shakespeare’s plot, transposed almost intact, and it holds up because the money and the deception are still sitting there under the romance, waiting to blow up.
Heath Ledger
Ledger was nineteen and almost unknown to American audiences, and he walks off with the film. The script makes Patrick a rumor with legs, the kid who supposedly ate a live duck, and Ledger plays him as somebody privately amused at the myth. The serenade is the scene everyone remembers. He sings “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to Kat across the school stadium with the marching band behind him, dodging security guards the whole way. It’s charming, silly, and entirely committed, and that’s the whole trick.
The serenade is my favorite thing in the movie. Ledger throws himself at it without a trace of irony, and I think that’s the bravest choice a young actor can make in a teen comedy. Any hint that he thought he was too cool for the bit would have killed it. Watching it now, knowing what came after, it’s obvious why he became a star. He’s the most relaxed person on screen in every scene he’s in.
Julia Stiles
Kat could easily have been a joke: the humorless feminist who needs a boy to fix her. Stiles refuses that reading, and the script backs her up. Kat’s anger has reasons, her taste in music and books is real, and she’s right about most of the people she dislikes.
The film’s best decision is that Kat doesn’t change. Patrick changes. She keeps her opinions, her band shirts and her plan to go to Sarah Lawrence, and the romance happens on her terms.
The poem scene is where Stiles proves herself. She reads the ten things in front of the class, and it’s a painful piece of acting in a comedy about a prom. I didn’t expect a scene in a prom comedy to hit me that hard. Stiles doesn’t ask for sympathy anywhere in it, and I think that restraint is why it works.
For Writers
The film’s title promises a list, and the poem at the end delivers it as the emotional climax. A promise planted in the title or the first chapter gives the reader something to wait for. When you write, look for a structural promise you can make early and pay off late, and make sure the payoff costs your character something. Write down the one thing your title or opening sets up. Then check that your ending delivers it in a scene where your protagonist is exposed instead of triumphant. A promise kept cheaply is worse than one never made.
The Supporting Cast
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is all nervous energy as Cameron, and David Krumholtz is very funny as Michael, the friend who knows how the school’s social machinery works. Larisa Oleynik gives Bianca more spine than the part needed.
Larry Miller plays the father, and his terror of teenage pregnancy produces the film’s most quotable material. Allison Janney steals two scenes as a guidance counselor writing filthy romance novels between appointments. Daryl Mitchell’s English teacher gets the only lines in the film that take Shakespeare seriously. I’d have happily watched a whole film about Allison Janney’s guidance counselor. She gets two scenes and turns them into the biggest laughs in the picture for me.
Andrew Keegan plays Joey, the villain, as a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work, and that matters. The film needs somebody the audience wants to see punched, and it obliges.
Why It Lasts
Most teen comedies of the 1990s are unwatchable now because the jokes were about who was fat, gay or a virgin. This one mostly isn’t. Its targets are vanity, money and the boys who think they’re entitled to a yes.
The Shakespeare frame does real work too. The plot has a shape older than the genre, so the film never wanders into the usual sequence of parties and misunderstandings.
The Seattle setting helps. Stadium High School is a beautiful, strange-looking building, and the film’s grungy soundtrack and gray weather give it a specific place instead of the sunny nowhere most of these movies occupy.
For Writers
10 Things I Hate About You survives its decade because its jokes attack behavior instead of people’s bodies or identities. Comedy aimed at how someone acts ages far better than comedy aimed at what someone is. When you write humor, check the target of every joke, and ask whether the character deserved the mockery through a choice. Go through your funniest scene and list what each laugh is at the expense of. Rewrite any of them that depend on the reader’s contempt for a whole category of person. Those are the jokes that will embarrass you in ten years.
The Music
The soundtrack is pure 1999 Pacific Northwest: Letters to Cleo all over it, Semisonic, Joan Jett, Save Ferris covering “Come On Eileen” at the party. It dates the film in the best way, because it sounds like the place the story happens in. Letters to Cleo turn up on the school roof at the end, playing over the credits. That’s the kind of flourish a studio teen film of that period could still get away with. Music also does the character work. Kat’s taste marks her as an outsider before she says a word, and Patrick’s willingness to sing Frankie Valli in front of the whole school tells you he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him.
For Writers
Kat’s record collection tells you who she’s before she has a line of dialogue about it, and Patrick’s song choice tells you he’s unembarrassable. Taste is character, and it works faster than description. When you write, use what your characters listen to, read, drive or wear to carry information you’d otherwise have to explain. Pick one character and list five things they own. If none of them would surprise a reader, you don’t know the character well enough yet. Surprise turns a list of possessions into a person.
Where It Falls Short
The third act does what these films always do. The deception comes out, everybody is hurt in the correct order, and a big gesture fixes it. The beats are so familiar that the film loses the sharpness it’s had for an hour. Cameron and Bianca’s romance never quite justifies the screen time either. The film knows where the interest is, and every time it cuts away from Kat and Patrick you feel the drop. I’d have cut their subplot by a third and handed the time back to Kat. That’s why it’s an 8 and not higher. What’s good in it is very good. What’s conventional in it is completely conventional. None of that stopped me enjoying it. A film can follow the formula in its last twenty minutes and still be worth the first seventy, and this one is.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The film works because it lets Kat be right. The script gives her real opinions, then lets the romance happen without asking her to give them up, and the audience ends up liking her instead of waiting for her to be tamed. When you write a difficult character, give their difficulty a reason, and don’t cure them in the last act as a reward for being loved.
Is 10 Things I Hate About You worth watching?
Yes. It’s funny, well cast, and one of the few teen comedies of its era that hasn’t aged into something embarrassing. Ledger and Stiles are the reason, and the poem and the serenade are worth the ninety-seven minutes on their own. I don’t usually like this kind of film and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s an 8, held back only by a last act that does exactly what you expect.
