A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)
Director: Michael Hoffman Cast: Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel, Dominic West, Christian Bale Screenplay: Michael Hoffman Producers: Michael Hoffman, Leslie Urdang Runtime: US Distribution: 20th Century Fox Rated PG-13: sensuality, nudity
Copyright 1999 Nathaniel R. Atcheson
I've always been sort of a purist when it comes to Shakespeare. I think it is possible to update his plays and place them in a period of time in which they were not intended to be set. But this is not an easy thing to do. Those who have seen William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet have experienced the ultimate failure in an update of a Shakespeare play. Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream is much better than that other movie, and I was thisclose to giving it a favorable review. And while I have nice things to say about it, the film just doesn't work the way it should. The first reason for this, perhaps, is that it's set at the turn of the 19th century for no reason whatsoever. It's also an artistically confusing film: why do all the sets look so obviously fake? Why do the actors feature an array of non-matching accents? Why do so many of the scenes occur in the exact same spot of woods? These are questions I had when I should have been concentrating on Shakespeare's brilliantly-conceived story.
But I have to give Hoffman credit for following the play so closely. >From what I could tell, no scenes have been removed, and only parts of speeches have been trimmed down. Other than that, Hoffman has done the source material justice with his script. The story is a familiar one: The four lovers, Demetrius (Christian Bale), Lysander (Dominic West), Helena (Calista Flockhart), and Hermia (Anna Friel), are manipulated relentlessly by Puck (Stanley Tucci) and Oberon, the Fairy King (I stand by my belief that Rupert Everett has this role as part of a Hollywood in-joke). Meanwhile, the lovable lout Bottom (Kevin Kline) and his partners in stupidity work to put together a lame stage version of Pyramus and Thisbe. The basic set-up of the film lends itself to a series of entertaining and/or tedious scenes in which lovers run around and shout at each other in a forest near Athens.
The film is a mixed bag of scenes that are notably over-the-top and others that are strangely perfunctory. The best scene in the film is the last one, in which the six lower classmen get to perform their play before the aristocracy. Here, Kevin Kline shows off his well-established comic brilliance. But Hoffman's direction of the scene is really what carries it, as the players make desperate attempts to impersonate walls, moons, and lions. The other high points of the film lie mostly in a few key performances. Calista Flockhart is quite funny as the love-starved and ravished Helena; even though Flockhart doesn't attempt a British accent, she enunciates properly and does a good job with her lines. Everett takes an interesting angle on Oberon, playing him as stone-faced and extremely pensive. And Stanley Tucci makes a perfectly indifferent Puck, roaming around the forest and making people fall in love with each other just because it's amusing.
Many scenes are great, and they add up to a lot, but there are too many failed moments to ignore. Michelle Pfeiffer annoyed me, playing Queen Titania as some sort of breathless, shiny-eyed nymph; I disliked most of her scenes, and particularly the tedious ones in which she falls for Bottom following his transformation into an ass. David Strathairn entirely misses the point of the paradoxical Theseus, and delivers his lines with a cold, inappropriate American accent. Hoffman also missed the boat with Bottom and his crew; they're not nearly silly or stupid enough, and scenes that are hilarious in the text come across as detached and obligatory here. Shakespeare makes explicit their misusage of words and their inability to understand the point of drama, but here Hoffman seems to blow right past all the jokes.
In general, I don't understand why the movie looks so flashy and fake. The forest of Arden looks particularly set-like, and pointless special effects (like a CGI vine wrapping around Bottom's feet) call too much attention to themselves. I realize that live theater does not allow for fancy special effects and sets, but films do, and a film version of a play should not be made to look fake. And then there's the needless time period-change, which bothers me every time a director attempts it: people didn't speak like this at the turn of the 19th century. Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream works on many levels -- nothing could be as bad as that other movie -- but it doesn't go far enough with some themes, and takes others way too far. I think it all boils down to a general lack of consistency -- what was Hoffman's vision? What's with the fake sets and the half-hearted "update?" There are big laughs to be had in this film, but Hoffman's puzzling artistic choices keep it from being the really good update of a Shakespeare play that it might have been.
Psychosis Rating: 6/10
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Nathaniel R. Atcheson
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