Jul. 08, 2002 - 1:54 am
i think i appreciated this Best Picture much more this time than i did when i saw it originally at the theater. i guess you can appreciate some things more as you get older. ok, if you haven't seen this film before and are planning on doing so, i strongly recommend that you read Romeo and Juliet first. obviously most people that have taken high school English classes have read that, but i'm just telling you to be sure.
the basic jist of this film is that it's a fabrication of Shakespeare's life as he was writing Romeo and Juliet in the 1590s. he falls in love with a lady of court who is in love with him first as a poet/playwright, then later just as a man. she starts out by auditioning as a boy named Thomas Kent to play Romeo. after getting the part she begins her whirlwind romance with Shakespeare. the script does an interesting thing too. it surmises that Shakespeare was getting dialogue and story ideas from his own life. therefore the film greatly mimics many of the plot devices of the very play he's writing - Romeo and Juliet. it also has some other things thrown in from Hamlet, Macbeth, The Twelfth Night and a ton of his other works.
i just realized there are so many great movies that Gwyneth Paltrow is in. i'd say this is really more focused on her than on Joseph Fiennes, but only slightly. she ended up winning the Best Actress award for this one, which she definitely deserved. and yes i know it is difficult, but we must all remember that she is in fact not at all English. she was born in L.A.
two of the best things about this movie are the cinematography and the music. the cinematography was done by Richard Greatrex who also worked on Natalie's Where The Heart Is (2000). he does this really awesome thing to make this such a romantic film. he does lots of sweeping crane motions with the camera, rotating them around characters so that you feel the "whirlwind" feeling of romance visually in multiple ways. with the outstanding editing in certain sequences where we switch back and forth between the play and the bedroom with Shakespeare and Viola, it's just beautiful.
really everything about this movie is extremely well done. all great acting of course. and it was written by Tom Stoppard, who is, as my friend Colin says, probably the best writer of our time. he even did the translation of Anton Chekov's play The Seagull which i saw Natalie Portman, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, John Goodman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marcia Gay Harden, and Christopher Walken in last summer our short trip to NYC. that was an awesome play that we got to see for free and guess what festival it was playing in in Central Park? that's right, Shakespeare in the Park. i love circular trivia.
here are a couple of great trivia notes from the IMDb. although Judy Dench won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role, she only appears onscreen for about 6 minutes in 4 scenes. also interesting are Colin Firth's attempts to kill Joseph Fiennes' character for sleeping with his fiancee. similarly, in The English Patient (1996), Colin Firth's character attempts to kill Ralph Fiennes' character (Joseph's brother) for sleeping with his wife. coincidentally, both films won the Best Picture Oscar.
interesting note concerning Gentleman's Agreement's director Elia Kazan. at the 1999 ceremony where Shakespeare In Love received its numerous Oscars, he was given an honorary award for his outstanding career and achievements. many people did not applaud or stand up to give recognition to him. he unfortunately was forced to name names during the whole HUAC deal that shocked the industry in the early 1950s. he was able to continue making his great films because of this. he had been nominated for Best Director 5 times and won with On The Waterfront (1954).
i need to find a copy of The Twelfth Night to read. i want to know more about how that story relates to this film.