Shakespeare in Love (1998) Review

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 is 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.

What the film cannot escape is the result. This is the entry on this page where the film is least at fault and the campaign around it is most documented, and the two have become inseparable.

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 is the film’s genuine subject and it is unusual. Romeo and Juliet becomes a tragedy because the boy playing Juliet’s voice breaks, and the film’s argument is that the canon was produced by people solving scheduling problems.

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, are handed pages that were written that morning, cannot 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 is a mystery, and the line lands differently each time because the circumstances keep getting worse.

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, which is 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 has almost no plot function, arrives, alters the temperature of every scene she is in, and leaves, which is 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 was nominated for that, which means the Academy had been looking for a reason. A short performance that wins an award is very often the second short performance a voting body has been offered by the same actor.

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.

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 is in, and it is 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 genuine 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 does not 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.

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 specific 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 simultaneously. 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 slightly unfair. The campaign is Harvey Weinstein’s and the film is Stoppard’s, Dench’s and a great many crew members’, and the result has been attached to all of them.

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 is not complicated. 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, which is 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 does not 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 is worth stating is that this film did not steal anything. It was a good film in a campaign that was better than everybody else’s, which is a description of an industry instead of an accusation against a picture.

Should you watch Shakespeare in Love?

Yes, and separate the film from the result. A genuinely witty screenplay about theater as a business, a tragedy produced by a boy’s voice breaking, Judi Dench altering the temperature of every room in eight minutes, and the most documented campaign in Academy history attached to all of it permanently.

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