Shakespeare in Love (1998) Review
7/10
Official trailer
A playwright with a deadline, no plot and a company expecting a comedy called Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter. A young woman of good family who wants to act, which is illegal, and auditions in disguise. A theater that will be closed if anybody finds out.
The 7 is for a well-made comedy that’s considerably better than its reputation permits. Stoppard’s screenplay is the best thing in it and is doing real work about how a play gets written under commercial pressure.
I enjoy this film a great deal more than its reputation says I’m supposed to. The Stoppard dialogue is quick and clever, the theater jokes are the kind anybody who’s worked to a deadline will recognize, and Judi Dench walks off with the film in a handful of scenes. My reservation is that the romance at its center is the least interesting thing in it, and Joseph Fiennes doesn’t give me much reason to care whether Will gets the girl.
What the film can’t escape is the result. Of all the films on this page, this is the one least at fault and the one whose campaign is most documented, and the two have become inseparable. I find that a little sad, because the screenplay deserves to be talked about on its own.
Stoppard
The screenplay won and is the reason the film works. Marc Norman had the premise and Stoppard rewrote it, and the finished script is about theater as a business. The good material is entirely procedural. A playwright owes a script, two rival theaters are competing, the financier wants a comedy with a dog in it, an actor has to be persuaded, and the play changes shape according to who is available.
That’s the film’s real subject, and it’s an unusual one.
The play turns tragic because Will’s own love affair goes bad, and on opening night Viola ends up playing Juliet because the boy cast in the part has his voice break. The film’s argument is that people solving practical problems as they came up produced the canon. That idea is sharp. Anybody who’s written to a deadline knows it’s closer to the truth than any story about a muse.
The Stoppard specifics are also there. A psychiatrist figure who charges by the session, Marlowe supplying plot points in a tavern, a running joke about a boy who feeds mice to a cat and turns out to be John Webster.
The rehearsal scenes also get the mechanics right. Actors arrive late, receive pages written that morning, can’t read some of the handwriting, and the company assembles a play out of what physically exists on the day. Geoffrey Rush also gets the film’s most useful running joke as the theater owner. Asked repeatedly how anything will work out, he says it’s a mystery, and the line works differently each time because the circumstances keep getting worse.
Write the commercial pressure and the art becomes interesting. A play that changes because of casting availability is a better story than a play that arrives from inspiration. The reader believes a deadline and a payroll. They don’t believe a muse.
Let a great work arrive through an accident. A voice breaking producing a tragedy is funnier and truer than any account of intention.
Plant a joke that pays off in a name. Webster feeding mice to a cat is a whole future career delivered in four seconds to whoever recognizes it, and costs nothing to everybody else.
Judi Dench, Eight Minutes
She won Supporting Actress for about eight minutes of screen time, which is among the shortest performances ever to win, and the award is entirely defensible.
Elizabeth appears four times, is bored, is amused, is dangerous, and delivers the film’s final judgment in a courtyard while everybody waits.
She also settles a wager in the last scene with a single sentence and no interest in either party. That’s the correct use of a monarch in a comedy. The plot needs an authority and she has no stake in it.
What Dench does in the time is establish a person who has been managing men for forty years and finds the whole business tedious. The line about the theater and the man she knows is a woman, delivered flatly, is the best laugh in the film. The efficiency is the lesson. She’s almost no plot function, arrives, alters the temperature of every scene she’s in, and leaves. That’s what a supporting part is for and is rarely achieved this cleanly. Dench also had about five minutes in Mrs Brown the previous year and the Academy nominated her for that. That means it had been looking for a reason. A short performance that wins an award is very often the second short performance the same actor has offered a voting body.
Fiennes and Paltrow
Joseph Fiennes is the weaker half, and the part is largely a device. Shakespeare is blocked, then unblocked, and the performance is charm without much underneath it. That’s my biggest reservation about the film, because a love story needs a lover I believe in, and I never quite believe him. Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress and this is the award the page argues against. The performance is capable, charming and well judged for the film it’s in, and it’s a light romantic lead against Cate Blanchett’s transformation in Elizabeth.
What she does well is the disguise material. Viola as Thomas Kent has to be convincing enough that the audience accepts it and visible enough that the audience is ahead of the characters, and Paltrow handles both.
The film also gets a real joke out of the layering. A woman playing a man playing a woman, on a stage where that was the convention anyway, and the picture is aware of the joke without explaining it to anybody.
The play-within-the-film is also staged properly, which a lesser version would have skipped. The final performance of Romeo and Juliet runs at real length, with the audience in shot, and the film treats a first night as the event it is.
The Blanchett comparison is the whole argument and it doesn’t require Paltrow to be bad. Two good performances of different difficulty, and the Academy rewarded the easier one in the film with the better campaign.
A charming performance in a light film competing against a difficult performance in a serious one will frequently win, because charm is the thing audiences report enjoying. That’s not a scandal. It’s a fact about what gets noticed and it’ll affect your work the same way. Disguise requires two registers at once. Convincing to the characters and transparent to the reader, and most writers only manage one. A criticism of an award isn’t a criticism of a performance. Keeping those separate is the whole discipline of a page like this.
The Campaign
Miramax’s operation for this film is the most studied awards campaign in the Academy’s history and the reason the record reads as it does. The documented elements include a volume of screeners nobody had attempted before, a large number of events, personal lobbying of members, a reported spend far beyond the norm at the time, and a sustained press effort. The scale of it changed the practice permanently and the Academy has adjusted its rules repeatedly since as a direct result. The rule changes since have covered screener distribution, the timing and conduct of events, and direct contact with members, and the practice that prompted them was largely this one.
Miramax also had Life is Beautiful in the same season, which appears separately on this page, and ran both campaigns at the same time. One distributor took Best Picture and Best Actor that year against Saving Private Ryan and Gods and Monsters.
What that means for this film is specific and unfair. The campaign was Harvey Weinstein’s and the film is Stoppard’s, Dench’s and a great many crew members’, and the result has been hung on all of them. That’s worse than anything in the film itself, because the people who did the work are the ones paying for his tactics.
The further context is now impossible to separate from the record. Weinstein’s conduct became public in 2017, the campaign is discussed differently as a result, and a film that was already a byword for manipulation acquired a second and worse association.
Saving Private Ryan
Best Picture went to this. Spielberg won Best Director, which is the split this page documents repeatedly, and Saving Private Ryan won five awards in technical categories.
The argument isn’t complicated, and I’m firmly on Spielberg’s side of it. One film is a well-made romantic comedy and the other is a landmark in how combat is depicted, whose opening twenty-five minutes changed war filmmaking permanently and are still the reference point.
The other five Saving Private Ryan awards were Director, Cinematography, Editing, Sound and Sound Effects Editing. It’s every craft category that describes how that opening was achieved. The counter-argument exists and is weaker than it sounds. Saving Private Ryan has a frame device that doesn’t work, a squad of recognizable types, and a middle section that sags, and none of that approaches the gap between the two films’ ambitions.
What’s worth stating is that this film didn’t steal anything. It was a good film in a campaign that was better than everybody else’s. That’s a description of an industry instead of an accusation against a picture.
The best-campaigned work wins and campaigning is a separate skill from writing. Knowing that won’t help you and not knowing it’ll hurt. The only thing inside your control is whether the work survives the campaign being forgotten. This one mostly has. A film credited with a result it didn’t engineer keeps it anyway. Reputations attach to titles and not to the people who made the decisions. Judge the object. Stoppard wrote a good screenplay, Dench gave a superb eight-minute performance, and neither of them ran the campaign. Stoppard has also said very little about the result in twenty-seven years. That’s consistent with somebody who wrote a screenplay and had no view about the marketing of it. The crew won too. Costume design, art direction and score all went to this film, and the production design in particular is doing serious work with a London built out of a small number of standing sets.
Should you watch Shakespeare in Love?
Yes, and separate the film from the result.
It’s a 7 because the screenplay is witty and smart about theater as a business, a boy’s cracking voice puts Viola on stage as Juliet, and Judi Dench changes the temperature of every room in eight minutes. It doesn’t go higher because the romance at the middle is thin and Fiennes can’t save it. I’d still take it over most romantic comedies of its decade, campaign and all.
