Just like their first kiss (or other romantic benchmarks), everyone remembers their "first Shakespeare." Mine was A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was High School English, circa 1979, and I was hopelessly in love with the pretty girl who sat at the front of the class. Shakespeare and hormones collided at the intersection of my puberty.
Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream for class, I swooned over Shakespeare's poetry as much as I did that pretty, front-row girl. Since then, Midsummer has always had a very tender place in my heart.
So, when I sat down to watch Michael Hoffman's feature film version, I was pre-disposed for an ethereal, romantic romp. Two hours later....well, let's just say, I'm not swooning, but I haven't lost my love for the play either. It's a fine film, but it labors under some miscasting and, I'm forced to admit, a few problems with the original 1596 script.
For those who sat at the back of the class or who never had the dreamy pleasure of reading Midsummer, here's the lowdown:
Hermia loves Lysander. Demetrius loves Hermia. Helena loves Demetrius. If this is starting to sound like "As the Shakespeare Turns," hold on. It gets better.
The two couples end up in an enchanted forest filled with moonglow and sprites, all ruled by the Fairy Queen Titania and King Oberon. The fairy couple is also having a romantic spat of their own—Oberon is jealous of the attention his fair Titania is paying to a young boy. The hot-tempered King tells his servant Puck to fetch the juice from a magic flower which, when squeezed into the eyes of sleepers, will cause them to fall in love with the next person they see. When Oberon sees the squabbling Demetrius and Hermia, he hits on the perfect solution--squeeze some magic-flower in their eyes and voila! the soap opera is straightened out. Puck, unfortunately, gets things a little mixed-up.
Then there's Titania. She also gets a dose of the potion. The next person she sees when she wakes from her sleep is the blue-collar worker, Bottom. He's been in the forest rehearsing a play with a group of community theater actors. Bottom is, without a doubt, one of the more uproariously funny characters in all of Shakespeare and his pomposity alone is worth the price of admission.
With plenty of mistaken identities and screwball antics between the gods and the mortal lovers, Midsummer soon turns into a complicated tangle, all of it glossed over with some of Shakespeare's best poetry.
Elizabethan language doesn't always translate well to the modern cinema, however. As anyone who’s spent hours poring over Shakespeare’s plays knows, his words are dense and beautifully compacted. Perhaps the best way to savor their full joy is on the page. Which is not to say Shakespeare shouldn't be performed. Heck, the Bard wrote for the stage and that will always be his first home. You just need a few extra ounces of patience when you sit down with your bowl of popcorn and the VCR remote.
In the 1999 big-budget Midsummer, Hoffman makes it a delight for the eyes—setting it in turn-of-the-century Italy and filling the misty woods with fairies that dance like fireflies courtesy of the special effects wizards. With so much going for it, however, the movie somehow doesn’t sparkle like it should. Maybe it’s the long soliloquies, maybe it’s the turtle-paced editing; the fact remains that Midsummer’s pacing is off-kilter and Hoffman makes some odd, anachronistic choices (the female mud-wrestling scene still makes me scratch my noggin).
Midsummer has an all-star cast which includes Calista Flockhart, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Christian Bale, Stanley Tucci and Kevin Kline. This is typical of the Shakespeare adaptations of recent years where casting directors have a field day trying to draw audiences into what turns out to be (surprise!) two hours of arcane language. Sometimes it works (Billy Crystal in 1996’s Hamlet), sometimes it doesn’t (Jack Lemmon in the same).
Here, it’s a little of both. Some Gen X actors should have stayed away from the iambic pentameter (Flockhart and Bale have difficulty getting the words past the marbles in their mouths); others fare much better (Tucci and Everett roll the prose trippingly off the tongue). But the real delight of this Midsummer is Kline whose Bottom is an adorable egomaniac. His shameless scene-stealing in the play-within-the-play is pitch-perfect. It’s easy to overplay Bottom’s excessive hamminess, but Kline has done something wonderful with the role—he’s made Bottom a poignant loser worthy of our sympathy.
In fact, Kline is so good, he makes us forget that the last act of Midsummer is so out-of-place with the rest of the lovers-in-the-forest story. After all is set right by Oberon and Puck and the two couples pair off satisfactorily, there’s still a good twenty minutes to go. This is the tacked-on ending where Bottom and the inept troupe of players present the mini-play "Pyramus and Thisbe" to the guests assembled at the Duke’s palace. Critics have complained that the fifth act is clunky after the gossamer and moonshine of the previous four acts. Perhaps so, but at least in this film version, Kline and the other players turn it into the giddiest bit of community theater you’ve ever seen. It’s a perfect ending to a not-quite-perfect night.
A stellar cast, headed by Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline, bring Shakespeare s romantic comedy to life. When two pairs of star-crossed lovers, a fen...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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