Jerusalem Post

Shakespears in Love - ****
- Directed by John Madden.
Screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard.
Hebrew title: Shakespeare Me'uhav.
123 minutes.
English dialogue, Hebrew subtitles. Not recommended for children.

With Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Judy Dench, Colin Firth and Ben Affleck.

A highly literate crowd-pleaser, Shakespeare in Love is not so much a biographical picture as it is a charming fiction, set in 1593, with a main character named William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) who happens to wear a little goatee and work as a struggling playwright. More than that: the film's take on the vocation of its hero marks a refreshing departure from the standard Hollywood practice of unpacking an artist's private life at the expense of his creations. (In Love and War, to take just one recent, unfortunate example, reduced the writing of Ernest Hemingway to a bitter form of occupational therapy made necessary by the author's failed affair with a pretty nurse.)

While Shakespeare also provides its inky-fingered protagonist with a radiant love interest - a stagestruck heiress named Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who dresses up as a boy in order to audition for the theater and soon becomes the writer's mistress, muse, and leading man - the film keeps its priorities straight (so to speak: there's actually a good deal of whimsical gender-bending at work here). The play's the thing, and the introduction of the imaginary Viola character is used as a mischievous means of exploring the give-and-take relationship between art and life, literary convention and spontaneous emotion, fact and fantasy.

Although screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard fashion their nimble script from dozens of lines and situations taken straight from Shakespeare, they're toying with us and with these familiar scenes: the lovers who meet while dancing at a ball, proceed to a nighttime balcony tryst and are hovered over by a trusted nurse, etc. In this context, the fast-and-furious parade of witty quotations and allusions - seeming correspondences between the events depicted onstage and those unfolding behind the scenes - aren't meant to be taken too literally. Obviously Romeo and Juliet isn't the actual transcription of events that happened to the author.

Rather, the movie floats the more sophisticated notion that the passions depicted in a Shakespeare tragedy, and presumably in all the writer' s plays, were based on the extraordinary psychological and literary sensitivities of a very real human being. Whether or not actual biographical experience provided fodder for Shakespeare's plots is secondary - and in truth unlikely, given the fact, unmentioned in this film, that Shakespeare based many of his storylines directly on works by other writers. (Never mind, for instance, that Arthur Brook's 1562 Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet was probably the historical source of the famous play: the movie makes a running joke of young, blocked Will Shakespeare's stalled attempts to write a shipwreck comedy called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.) In one climactic scene, Queen Elizabeth herself (Judi Dench, looking like an officious pincushion in her outrageously bejeweled and puffed-up outfits) oversees with a wise sneer a wager based on the question: can a play show the "very truth and nature of love"?

Given our contemporary romantic understanding of how art relates to feeling, the answer is, of course, a resounding "yes." (Harold Bloom has even put forth in a recent book the typically nervy but rather preposterous idea that Shakespeare invented personality as we know it.) But to be fair and keep things in perspective, Shakespeare in Love is not, thank goodness, an academic treatise; nor is it especially concerned with helping us to understand the Elizabethans any better. Director John Madden and his screenwriters have instead chosen to treat Shakespeare and his period as a mirror held up to our own - and a fanciful excuse to stage a bubbly romance in some very swanky costumes.

Though the filmmakers mix high and low as freely as Shakespeare did and borrow from the bard's now-classic stock of plot twists, characters, word plays and themes, the crisp, catty nature of the movie feels completely modern. Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde and even Joseph Mankiewicz have just as much to do with the film's rapid comic pitter-patter as does William Shakespeare, and the characters' approach to sex (if not to marriage) seems strictly 1990s. The dozens of wise-guyish asides and tongue-in-cheek anachronisms that pepper Stoppard's script (and it is in the end definitely A Stoppard, whatever work Marc Norman may have contributed early on) keep the film lively and bouncing along, though they do sometimes also give the proceedings a slightly brittle veneer.

Stoppard uses his mastery of Shakespeare's devices as a way of proving how clever he is - and indeed, he is very clever, sometimes too clever for the film's own good. Now and then we may wonder if all the winky quipping isn't coming at the expense of a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's character: here Will, as he's called, is depicted humorously as an almost bumbling Joe Blow, an ordinary guy who writes plays for a living the way another might, say, fix shoes. Could it really be?

All things considered, though, Shakespeare is remarkably lithe, verbal and bittersweet for a contemporary romantic comedy. The movie manages to be smart and accessible at the same time, and to casually address complicated intellectual questions without belaboring them. Paltrow is lovely and wistful as always; the actress has a wonderful knack for conveying mixed emotions - exuberance and melancholy, excitement and concern, and here she's been given a role that allows her to explore the full range of her abilities. (The scenes where she dresses as a boy, with a wispy little mustache, beard and suddenly grave look, have a particular poignancy and charge.) And though Fiennes looks every bit the sulky matinee pin-up, he manages the steep verbal and emotional demands of his part with surprising ease. It's hard to play such an iconic figure without seeming phony or presumptuous, but he manages to make the character sympathetic.

Dench, meanwhile, playing her second Queen for Madden (she was Victoria in his quietly intelligent Mrs. Brown) opts for an over-the-top camp turn - much more in the direction of bald Bette Davis than that of lusty Cate Blanchett. And the supporting cast is filled with talented clowns who play in the boisterous style of Bottom and the mechanicals: Geoffrey Rush, Tom Wilkinson, Martin Clunes, Simon Callow, Jim Carter, Imelda Staunton and Daniel Brocklebank all bring a stagey, scrappy rambunctiousness to the film, and embroider the corners of the action with all sorts of funny curlicues.

In another interesting, modernizing twist, the filmmakers draw a comparison between the energetic populism of the 1590s London theater world and that of the movies today. Both Shakespeare's plays and contemporary film, they suggest, aim to move a wide audience by means of catharsis; both are driven by a mixture of artistic and commercial concerns; and both are shaped, for better and worse, by the quirks of their creators' egos. (Ben Affleck appears in Shakespeare as the actor Ned Alleyn, an actual historical figure who's given a modern comic spin here and is presented as a sort of fame-and-billing-obsessed movie star.)

One could probably argue at length for the differences between the settings, too, and wonder if the filmmakers aren't perhaps flattering themselves a little - as the very best of today's Hollywood pictures rarely rank in the league of even Shakespeare's thinnest works. But if you confine the comparison to the realm of audience response, the reaction of a crowd at a recent Jerusalem screening of Shakespeare makes the equation seem quite apt: the audiences both onscreen and off sat and stared, apparently enraptured, as the colorful spectacle unfurled before them.