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Pegasus' Mane

By David Edelstein
Posted Sunday, Dec. 13, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

Shakespeare in Love
 Directed by John Madden
Miramax Films

Little Voice
 Directed by Mark Herman
Miramax Films
 		Movies

Pegasus' Mane
 Two fleas hitch a ride to Mount Olympus.

By David Edelstein
 (posted Saturday, Dec. 12, 1998)
Paltrow and Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love
Paltrow and Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love
Writers tend not to be modest people, but few have ever been presumptuous enough to dramatize the life of William Shakespeare--they'd sooner take a crack at depicting God, whose dialogue is more variable. The writers of Shakespeare in Love (Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard) cheekily evade the matter by naming their protagonist Will Shakespeare but making him a handsome, moodily impetuous hero type (Joseph Fiennes), and then setting him down in a knockabout Elizabethan romantic comedy. Do they take liberties with fact? Unable to finish his new play, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, Will tosses sheet after crumpled sheet at a skull (Yorick?) beside his desk, then stretches out on an analyst's couch to speak in suspiciously phallic metaphors of his writer's block. ("It's ... like trying to pick a lock with a wet herring," etc.) Convinced that he needs a muse, he spies a beauteous, highborn wench (Gwyneth Paltrow) who--luckily--already harbors a mad passion for his poetry. Soon, she's dressing up as a boy to play Romeo, he's sneaking out of her bedchamber disguised as a woman, duels are being fought, theaters are shut down on trumped-up morals charges, and Queen Elizabeth (Judi Dench) must descend from on high to set things right.
Baldly, sometimes hilariously anachronistic, Shakespeare in Love is a gleeful pastiche of the Bard and showbiz parody, and a lot of people think it's the cat's pajamas. It certainly has the trappings and the suits of wit. The director, John Madden, is a master at making Elizabethan hubbub both credible and drolly satiric, and the action is wondrously light on its feet. There's a special effects shot of boats on the Thames that's more transporting than any in Elizabeth, and the cast abounds with boisterous hams, among them Geoffrey Rush as a strapped-for-cash producer ("We haven't the time, Will, talk prose!") and Ben Affleck as a conceited, Bottom-like leading man who only agrees to play Mercutio because he thinks that's the title of the play.
I kept puzzling, as I watched, over why I wasn't being seduced. It might be that, having recently plowed through Harold Bloom's tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human for a Slate "Book Club," I was predisposed to be picky. It might also be that the screenwriters seem to be congratulating themselves a little too merrily, given the absence of a single sustained comic set piece and a level of banter far lower than that of the Rowan Atkinson sitcom Black Adder. The little we know of Shakespeare as a person is that he wasn't handsome, was cautious to the point of colorlessness, and acted small character parts in his own plays when he acted at all. "What a stuffed shirt!" I hear you say. "Forget about the real Shakespeare!" I'd love to--I only wish that the movie had. I wasn't opposed in principle either to Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman turning the Mozart of Amadeus (1984) into a braying ass to add weight to their specious middlebrow musings on the discontinuity of character and artistry. But when they went ahead and dragged in the climax of Don Giovanni and the Requiem--well, even a flea can reach Mount Olympus nestled in Pegasus' mane. Shakespeare in Love interrupts its farcical high jinks to exploit Romeo and Juliet, the sonnets, and Twelfth Night, and we're supposed to stop chuckling and start swooning at the way in which this callow youth has evolved before our eyes into the greatest chronicler of love of all time. Shakespeare, a magpie himself, might approve of the aphrodisiac uses to which his verses have been put, but I doubt he'd think much of the clumsy and ramshackle narrative--like a third-rate musical comedy without the songs.
Paltrow, who grows more effervescent as she grows more confident--and she grows more confident with every picture--does about as well as can be expected given that she's an American actress with little formal Shakespearean training. Instead of holding to the meter and pushing through to the end of the line, she gives weight to each word: We register less what she's saying than her own intoxication with it. Still, the actress has a way of disarming criticism. With her short hair, tights, and pert overbite she makes the most beautiful boy I've ever seen, and she's more breathtaking yet as a woman, her golden ringlets setting off that storybook swan neck.
Horrocks in Little Voice
Horrocks in Little Voice
L.V. (Jane Horrocks), the heroine of Little Voice, wears her hair in a poodle cut that hangs over her eyes, and on the rare occasions that she speaks, she sounds like a duck. Incessantly hectored by a slatternly working-class mum, Mari (Brenda Blethyn), L.V. stays in her room all day, stares at a beatific picture of her dead dad, and plays vinyl records of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, and other noisy vocalists. Ah, but when she sings, it's as if she's channeling the performers she worships--she's uncanny. Her mother's new boyfriend, a luckless promoter called Ray Say (Michael Caine), hears L.V. during a power outage and hocks his possessions to book her an orchestra at a local music hall. This could be his big break--that is, if the queer child will allow her private gift to be hauled before the public.
Jim Cartwright wrote the play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice especially for Horrocks, whom he knew to be a wonderful impressionist. (Americans know her best as the befuddled Bubble on Absolutely Fabulous, although she's even better in 1988's The Dressmaker and Mike Leigh's 1991 Life Is Sweet.) You can see how this material might play onstage, especially when L.V. picks up the microphone and out come the damnedest sounds. In the movie, Horrocks' singing is clearly post-synced: It sounds so artificially enhanced that the studio had to add a title before the closing credits assuring you that it's Horrocks' own voice.
The other elements translate even less well to the screen, and the director, Mark Herman, exacerbates the problem by rubbing your nose in the characters' hideousness. Caine lets you see the desperation behind Ray's seedy opportunism and manages to elicit some sympathy. But Blethyn is a honking horror show. Piper Laurie in Carrie? Demure. Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest? Wanly tasteful. Godzilla? A stripling. You can't look away because she's always there in the center of the screen. You can only close your eyes, plug your ears, and whisper to yourself, "It's only a movie. It's only a movie. It's only a movie."

Links

Find out more about Tom Stoppard, playwright and co-author of Shakespeare in Love's screenplay, here, and read the behind the scenes experience of a woman who was an extra in the film here. For pictures of the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow, check out this fan page or the film's official site. The official Little Voice site has video clips from the movie. For more on Jane Horrocks, this fan page has much funny information, as does this site devoted entirely to Bubble, the character Horrocks played in Absolutely Fabulous. Check out this "Culturebox" entry for Edelstein's review of Star Trek: Insurrection. Finally, click here for more Slate film reviews.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic.

Photographs by Laurie Sparham © 1998 Miramax Films. All rights reserved.
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David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at .
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