Film: Of Blood and a Poet. - film reviews of `The Thin Red Line' and `Shakespeare in Love' - Review - movie reviews

National Review, Jan 25, 1999 by John Simon

Most of the acting is solid, nicely backed up by a score made out of Faure's Requiem, Arvo Part, and original music by Hans Zimmer. This will surely be the year of heated debates between partisans of Line and of that other 160-or-so-minute epic, Saving Private Ryan. My vote goes to the more chaste and cohesive Thin Red Line.

n The screenplay of Shakespeare in Love is credited to Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, though the idea came from Norman's son, and the writing from Stoppard. This is a fantasy, which would be fine, save that it flagrantly defies known facts instead of working around and in between them. Still, fun is to be had with the concept of a Lady Viola de Lesseps, who, out of love of poetry and acting, gets the part of Romeo under the assumed identity of one Thomas Kent, women not being allowed on the stage. Unaware that she is right under his nose, Will falls in love with the distant Lady Viola and circuitously works his way into her bed.

For her family's social-climbing reasons, however, the young woman is promised to the nasty and impecunious Lord Wessex in a loveless marriage; he, in this year of 1593, would whisk her off to his estate in Virginia. (Anachronism runs rampant.) Many well-known figures appear: Marlowe (Rupert Everett), the manager Philip Henslowe (the excellent Geoffrey Rush), Richard Burbage, Ned Alleyn (Ben Affleck, strange among the sons of Albion), a bloody-minded young lout called John Webster, and Queen Elizabeth, sovereignly played by Judi Dench.

There are amusing inventions: the moneylender Fennyman (a supremely droll Tom Wilkinson), the ignoble nobleman Wessex (a funny Colin Firth), a stuttering tailor who becomes fluent onstage (Mark Williams), Anthony Sher as an astrologer who uncannily resembles a modern-day ther- apist, and Jim Carter, Imelda Staunton, and Simon Callow in other merry roles. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, whom I have never before liked, is a creditable Viola cum Thomas; only Joseph Fiennes, as Shakespeare, is a wimpy, calf-eyed nonentity. John Madden has directed with bounce and brio, and the picturesque, authentic-looking backgrounds are nicely rendered by Richard Greatrex, who, with a name like that, might as well have been in front of the camera as behind it.

The problem for me is the relentless crosscutting from bedroom to stage, with identical or similar dialogue surfacing both in Will and Viola's dalliance, and in the rehearsals of a play first called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, which gradually evolves into you-know-what. The conceit of life imitating art and vice versa becomes a bit too mechanical; certain other parallels, or bits of leering revisionism, are likewise labored. But when a gag works, it's a corker. So Viola remarks to Will, mourning Marlowe, that she never before heard him as admiring of his rival. Comes the reply, "He wasn't dead."