BEFORE: Now that the Super Bowl is out of the way, we can talk seriously about romance, right? Wait, what? Winter Olympics? Ah jeez, it's never a good time, is it? You and your sports... Well, I watched "Miracle" and "The Cutting Edge" last year, so I feel like I'm covered here. Go on, enjoy the games, it's only relationship matters that will be discussed here. Linking from "The Merchant of Venice", an actor named John Sessions carries over - must be some kind of Shakespeare specialist.
THE PLOT: Shakespeare's intertwined love polygons begin to get complicated as lovers' lives are complicated by city law and feuding faerie royalty.
AFTER: And Shakespeare also inspired the great J. Geils Band song "Love Stinks", with the lyrics "You love her, and she loves him. He loves somebody else, you just can't win." That's the case here as Helena pursues Demetrius, but Demetrius loves only Hermia, and Hermia only has eyes for Lysander. Which might be fine if the duke of Athens wasn't expecting Demetrius and Hermia to get married.
But the king of the fairies, Oberon, has his servant, Puck, secure the liquid of a flower that works as a love potion - which screws up his wife, causing her to fall in love with a human actor, but this potion also fixes the love rectangle of the other humans, just causing Demetrius to do an about-face (fortunately Helena is the first person he sees when he wakes up) and then everything sort of works out for the two couples.
The background for this is the Duke's wedding (I think the Duke was Hermia's father, but I'm not sure) and the whole thing wraps up with a play-within-a-play performed at the wedding, which is the classic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, two star-crossed lovers themselves.
As with last night's film, I found this very hard to follow, possibly because they insisted on maintaining the Shakespearean dialogue, and not changing it for modern-day ears. What I found most helpful, besides having read this play in junior high, was calling up the plot summary on Wikipedia and sort of following along. But this is another play that's often quoted, since it's the source of lines like, "The course of true love never did run smooth." and "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
There was an attempt to modernize the story by moving it from the 16th to the 19th Century, but they still all say "Greece" and "Athens", when the scenery looks nothing like Greece, it looks like Italy or Victorian England. That was a little weird. Also, everybody seems to ride bicycles, even into the forest, which doesn't seem like a good idea.
Last night's film featured cross-dressing, as Portia impersonated a male lawyer. And tonight we've got a male actor in the play-within-a-play who's forced to play a female role. Knowing that all lady parts during Shakespeare's time were played by men, this means there was a lot of transvestitism going around. It makes me wonder what the Bard would be writing about today, if he were still alive and had the opportunity to throw same-sex relationships into the mix? Would he shy away from the topic, or see it as a new vista of comic misunderstanding?
Also starring Kevin Kline (last seen in "The Big Chill"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "New Year's Eve"), Calista Flockhart, Christian Bale (last heard in "Pocahontas"), Rupert Everett (last seen in "Stage Beauty"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Jack the Giant Slayer"), David Strathairn, Dominic West (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Anna Friel, Sophie Marceau, Sam Rockwell (last seen in "Cowboys & Aliens"), Roger Rees (last seen in "The New World"), Bill Irwin (last seen in "Rachel Getting Married"), Max Wright, Bernard Hill.
RATING: 4 out of 10 wine jugs
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