HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Kerr and Rothstein

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Don't Believe the Hype

By Sarah Kerr
Posted Monday, March 8, 1999, at 6:07 PM ET

Dear Ed,

RSS

Alas, I see I failed to interest you in the fate of the 100 murdered Mexican girls. Allow me then to step outside our dialogue for a moment, invoke my soapbox privileges, and address Slate readers and the world at large. (I encourage you to do the same on any issue that moves you.) HELLO OUT THERE. HAS ANYONE HEARD WHAT HAPPENED TO THESE GIRLS, AND WHAT'S BEING DONE ABOUT IT?

All right now, back to our chat. Does contemporary American culture really have such a hard time dealing with artistic greatness? On the contrary, I think we've become obsessed with hierarchies of greatness. Every week a new list authoratively informs us that the peach is greater than the honeydew melon, but not quite as great as the king of them all: his highness, the lingonberry. Except in the rare case of Michael Jordan, who is truly light years beyond us all, it's hard to tell what constitutes greatness in 1999. Some mysterious combination of mentions in the media, iconic aura, gross profits, and ability to reflect well on the listmakers, I guess. It's exactly this finger-to-the-wind, late-capitalist sense of greatness that Shakespeare in Love has tapped into. This week's New York magazine reports that Miramax spent $5 million on the film's Oscar campaign (compared with $2 million for the usual big-budget release and $250,000 for the usual indie). The result is an amazing 13 nominations. Now, if this film were a person, I'd hire a hit man; if it were a dog, I'd put it to sleep. Not that it's such a bad movie. It isn't, not at all. But it is deeply, deeply middling--clever and entertaining in some places, clunky and inert in others. You're right that the Fiennes character needn't have been charismatic; Preston Sturges built brilliant comedies around average heroes. But Fiennes as Shakespeare doesn't admit to being a zero; instead he flashes sweaty pecs and brooding (though too closely set) eyes. Aside from a few well-written and well-acted supporting roles (for Geoffrey Rush and Rupert Everett and Ben Affleck), there's a fair amount of vanity going on here, and not a whole lot of wit.

What's weird is that the acclaim for the movie seems out of all proportion to the actual joy many people are deriving from it. I saw SiL over Christmas with six other people in a big theater in suburban Chicago. I liked it least of anyone in the group, but even those who claimed to like it said things like "pleasant enough way to spend the afternoon," or "better than the usual swill." Leaving the theater, too, I overheard others in the audience saying things like "At first it dragged, but then it got better." These are not 13-nomination-caliber recommendations. You're the first, or maybe the second, person to speak of it to me with actual love. Would you go back to see it again, and a third time, with pleasure?

All the best,

Soapbox Sarah