Best of the Bard
One of our critics, also a theater director, picks his top ten Shakespeare films.
By Ron Reed | posted 6/01/2004
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As the summer Shakespeare festivals started packing up their tents and putting the swords and codpieces in winter storage, I wasn't yet ready to give up my Elizabethan addiction cold-turkey. So, if you're anything like me, here are some suggestions for a cinematic mini-fest that should temporarily stave off your cravings for iambic pentameter and incomparably profound insights into the mysteries of the human soul.
William Shakespeare
I make no apology for the fact that all but one of my top ten premiered in the last 15 years. Where be your Oliviers, your Burtons, your Orson Welleses? Fact is, I'm a theatre guy, and fanatical about Shakespeare—fanatically devoted to the conviction that these 500-year-old plays are as visceral and immediate today as any work of art that's being created at this very moment, and more deeply True than any created thing outside The Bible itself.(See what I mean about fanatical?)
What a pity that so many people think of Shakespeare as dusty and academic. I'm impatient with anything that puts a barrier between us and these soul-essential stories, and there's no getting away from the fact that 40- and 60-year-old film versions can't help seeming dusty, mannered or precious. At the very least, the out-of-date technologies and anachronistic acting styles put an extra lens between us and the original work.For me, that's one lens too many.
So without further ado, here's much ado about something: My own personal selection—in order of preference—of ten extraordinary journeys into the human heart by one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived.
1. Twelfth Night (1996)
directed by Trevor Nunn
Okay, the problem with Shakespeare's comedies is that they're just not very funny. Actually, that's only one problem: you also can't keep the eight million characters straight, and it's impossible to swallow—let alone follow—all that stuff about everybody being mistaken for everybody else. Twelfth Night changes all that: it's clear, it's laugh-out-loud funny down the home stretch, and these Royal Shakespeare Company actors know how to make the language sing. Helena Bonham Carter perfectly embodies Olivia's untouchable lovelorn beauty, and Ben Kingsley gives the light-hearted tale real ballast as a dark, almost dangerous Feste. But for my money, Imogen Stubbs steals the show: maybe the story is so easy to follow because she's just so darn smart, and every thought and feeling registers unmistakably on her face and in her body language. Wow.
Content: PG for mild thematic elements. Suitable for most all ages.
2. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
directed by Baz Luhrmann
Brash and brilliant Aussie director Baz Luhrmann raised two million eyebrows with his pedal-to-the-metal updating of Romeo + Juliet, but his over-the-top juvenile high-hormone sex-and-violence treatment is ideal for Shakespeare's most over-the-top juvenile high-hormone sex-and-violence play. The perfect match of style and substance, it's closer to West Side Story's urban intensity than Zeffirelli's pretty romantic romp through the Renaissance daisies. If the look and pacing are MTV and video game, the emotions are pure opera—which pretty much sums up adolescence, at least as I experienced it, and is pretty much perfect for Luhrmann, internationally renowned for his innovative staging of classic operas, and other highly theatrical films like Moulin Rouge or Strictly Ballroom. In 1996, Leo DiCaprio was the teen heartthrob, and if he can't exactly fulfill the nuances of the text, he certainly incarnates the essence of all-consuming teen-aged smittenness—as does Claire Danes, who does better with the words. It's endlessly inventive, fast and furious as a street-racer, and I think Bill Himself would be proud of its passion. (For a great Double-Bill, follow this one with Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard's brilliantly entertaining riff on events that maybe led to the writing of R+J.)
Content: PG-13. Stylized but intense gang violence. The sexual elements are underplayed.
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