''Shakespeare in Love'' is rated R (Under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian). She contributes extravagantly to this film's visual allure and did the same for ''Velvet Goldmine.'' Gear-switching that extreme is no mean feat. The designer Sandy Powell has previous credits including ''Orlando'' and ''The Wings of the Dove,'' and she deserves to be remembered for her wonderfully inventive work this year. Judi Dench's shrewd, daunting Elizabeth is one of the film's utmost treats. (Cast as Mercutio, he is also hoodwinked by Will into thinking that ''Mercutio'' is the play's name.) Also most amusing is Tom Wilkinson as a financier who grows stage-struck, Jim Carter as the actor who looks silliest in a dress, Simon Callow as the Queen's censor and Imelda Staunton as Viola's nurse. Rush's opportunistic producer is very funny, as is Ben Affleck's version of a big-egoed actor, Elizabethan style. Fiennes, do notably better work here.) Colin Firth plays Viola's fiance as a perfect Mr. Fiennes enmeshed in frequent half-nude, hotblooded clinches in her boudoir.įar richer and more deft than the other Elizabethan film in town (''Elizabeth''), this boasts a splendid, hearty cast of supporting players. The film is as bold in its romantic interludes as it is in historical second-guessing, leaving Ms. In one transporting montage, the lovers embrace passionately while rehearsing dialogue that spills over into stage scenes, and the bond between tempestuous love and artistic creation is illustrated beautifully. (Part of the film's great fun is its way of working such Shakespearean gambits into its own plot.) On her way to winning the role of Romeo, Viola finds herself suddenly enmeshed with the handsome playwright himself, and the film gives way to a heady brew of literature and ardor. ''Shakespeare in Love'' itself seems as smitten with her as the poet is, and as alight with the same love of language and beauty.Įnter Viola, who is so eager to work in the theater that she disguises herself as a boy, since women are forbidden to act. In a film steamy enough to start a sonnet craze, her Viola de Lesseps really does seem to warrant the most timeless love poems, and to speak Shakespeare's own elegant language with astonishing ease. Gwyneth Paltrow, in her first great, fully realized starring performance, makes a heroine so breathtaking that she seems utterly plausible as the playwright's guiding light. Ingenious as the film's many inventions happen to be (from boatmen who behave like cabbies to its equivalent of Shakespearean outtakes - ''One Gentleman of Verona'' in the writing process), it could never have had so much energy without the right real-life Juliet to dazzle Will. Shame about the poetry.'' And there is the inevitable moment when someone asks who Shakespeare is, only to be told by a comically obtuse producer (Geoffrey Rush): ''Nobody - that's the author.'' Tom Stoppard's mark on the jubilant screenplay, which originated as the brainstorm of Marc Norman, harks back to the behind-the-scenes delights of his ''Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.'' This is a world in which a therapist times his patient with an hourglass and a souvenir mug is inscribed ''A Present From Stratford-Upon-Avon.'' Says the dashing young Shakespeare, played tempestuously well by Joseph Fiennes, about the more successful Christopher Marlowe (Rupert Everett): ''Lovely waistcoat. No less marvelous are its imaginings of an Elizabethan theater fraught with the same backbiting and conniving we enjoy today. (So what if characters talk about Virginia tobacco plantations before there was a Virginia?) Galvanized by the near-total absence of biographical data, it soars freely into the realm of invention, wittily weaving Shakespearean language and emotion into an intoxicatingly glamorous romance. Shakespeare meets Sherlock, and makes for pure enchantment in the inspired conjecture behind ''Shakespeare in Love.'' This film's exhilarating cleverness springs from its speculation about where the playwright might have found the beginnings of ''Romeo and Juliet,'' but it is not constrained by worries about literary or historical accuracy.
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