by Alexander Walker
Judging by the uncritical hype and exposure it's got in the British media's current Hollywood feeding frenzy, that seems the only thing left to discover. I'd twice been turned away from sold-out public screenings of it in New York. When at last I settled into a seat in a cinema on Third Avenue, my mind-set was like that of many a latecomer: understandably sceptical.
And at first the movie seemed to justify it. Monty Python's Life of the Bard, I reflected, after 15 minutes of corny jokes and anachronistic gags: young Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), stony broke, stumped for fresh ideas and horny into the bargain, taking himself to a Tudor shrink (Antony Sher) to overcome his writer's block. An hourglass measures out his 50 minutes of couch-time. But still the pentameters won't run off his quill pen. Worse, he finds his girlfriend is busy sleeping around. And his theatre manager is getting a literal roasting from the moneymen for not coming through with Will's promised new play, a drama called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.
It's all fast, furious, irreverent - and glib. Even the non-stop hustle and bustle of streetwise Elizabethans hints at the movie-makers' nervousness about losing an audience's attention - or not getting it.
And then, in a flash, things were transformed. Suddenly it all came together. Exactly how is a mystery, though that in itself is a gag that runs through a film about the ageold mystery of showbusiness. No one professes to know quite how it all comes right on the night; but it does.
The moment I sensed that the film was coming right, changing from a sophomoric panto into a dazzling entertainment, occurred precisely with the arrival of Gwyneth Paltrow. She is the muse who fires this film, just as she becomes the new girl who unblocks Will Shakespeare's imagination. She is a wonder. With this role, stardom falls round Paltrow like a coronation cloak.
As Viola de Lesseps, a rich merchant's spirited, romantic-minded daughter, she yearns to be an actress in an age when only boys are permitted to wear frocks on stage. She embraces the chance Will's new play gives her to appear at rehearsals in the changeling disguise of male attire; and Will, in turn, without at first discovering her transvestite deceit, embraces the love he feels at first sight of the mysterious blonde she turns back into once inside her father's Thames-side mansion.
The couplings of Fiennes and Paltrow possess more than screen chemistry. They have an alchemical potency, too. As we watch them, they turn love into art. An affair of the heart becomes creatively invigorating. The passion fusing the pair together at night behind a bedroom door, where Viola's old nurse (Imelda Staunton) stands guard, passes at dawn into glorious lines of poetry for the stage. Will's latent play sheds its piratical overtones - as well as its heroine Ethel - and takes shape on the parchment and then the boards as Romeo and Juliet.
In one and the same breath, the film celebrates passion and playwriting. It's a movie about lovers and authors, and the sheer love of writing. The bedroom ecstasies are intercut with theatrical rehearsals; then, through a series of antic and tragic events, the players in the first performance reclaim their rightful gender roles. In front of a surprisingly liberal and liberated Queen Elizabeth (Judi Dench, with a tongue sharp enough to run a courtier through without need of a sword), an indubitably female Juliet proves that love can change the course of history - theatrical history, anyhow.
Long before then, I was entirely seduced. Shakespeare in Love is such a clever film: literate, sensual, accessible, light-hearted, even giddy-headed. It is a part-work that's all of a piece: a romantic tragedy of star-crossed lovers, a literary conceit, a satire on showbusiness, a post-modern comedy. Whom can I credit with such multiplex inventiveness?
Marc Norman had the original notion of presenting Shakespeare's love life inseminating his play. To Tom Stoppard surely belongs the bold and dazzling literary licence that plays fast and loose with sacred text, historical fact, theatrical traditions and period shibboleths.
It seems safe to say - until proven otherwise - that Norman crafted the principal players' passionate relationship with the uninhibited confidence that belongs to a Hollywood blockbuster; while Stoppard, in turn, conjured up the linguistic conceits, the "in" jokes and Eng Lit gamesmanship with the sly, dry genius he's shown in his own theatrical jeux d'esprit such as his 15-minute version of Hamlet and in the brilliant "outtakes" he constructed from the same play under the title Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
But the secret of Shakespeare in Love's success is simpler. It's the way it laminates together the carnal and the cerebral: it makes words flesh. When all has been said and done, we feel as pleased as punch to have had our emotions given a workout and our intelligence taken out for exercise.
After the Victorian restraint of his last film, Mrs Brown, director John Madden looks as if he's been liberated by the fleet tongues and robust temper of Elizabethan rowdiness. His cast is multitudinous: too many, alas, to name all. Almost every character wears a 16th century reality while reflecting a 20th century sensibility to show how little has changed in 400 years.
Ben Affleck, as the vain thespian Ned Alleyn, is coaxed into playing the supporting role of Mercutio by the promise of a good death scene; Tom Wilkinson's usurer-turned-theatrical angel finances Romeo and Juliet, but wants his name above the title; Rupert Everett's Christopher Marlowe wags his already "mighty line" in our Will's envious face; Geoffrey Rush's playhouse manager copes with the impresario's eternal problem of cash flow; Colin Firth's fortune-hunting nobleman marries Viola for her dowry, but succeeds only in inspiring Shakespeare to write Twelfth Night next; a sadistic urchin called John Webster feeds live mice to an alley cat and foreshadows Jacobean drama; and the entire cast is studded with witty one-liners, almost always impinging on the eternal vanities and insecurities of writers and actors. Everyone wants to be famous: even the Thames boatman has an unproduced play in his locker.
But the heart and soul of the film belong to its two stars: Fiennes's lean and hungry Shakespeare makes you feel the passionate fluids of ink and semen that animated the man before the receding hairline and graveyard mask of history were thrust on him; and Paltrow remains a gloriously love-smitten wench whose frequent lightning changes of wig to make her look like a boy - what she does with her own blonde waterfall remains "a mystery" - don't conceal her irrepressible sexiness and irresistible glamour. I may have gone in to Shakespeare in Love as a sceptic: I don't mind confessing I came out a sycophant.
