Director: Gil Junger
Writers: Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith
Stars: Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Julia Stiles
Synopsis: A pretty, popular teenager can’t go out on a date until her ill-tempered older sister does.
Shakespeare may have been an amazing playwright, but in the last 10 years, it seems that fewer and fewer people are passionate about his plays. While literature scholars will praise his name, mainstream audiences have fallen out of love with his stories. I say this as someone who hasn’t been a fan of him for much of my life. As a teenager, he seemed like a one-note author who came off as trope-ish. Works like Romeo & Juliet bored me due to the stupidity, and both Macbeth and Hamlet were hard to follow due to the outdated language used in the plays. The coolest parts of these plays were the simply outrageous insults, such as the infamous “What, you egg?!”, which could hardly be described as a story. Despite my years of public school that tried to teach me Shakespeare was cool, I was turned off due to the style, and the age, of his works. And this made the realization that the 1999 romantic comedy The 10 Things I Hate About You was based on Shakespeares’ The Taming of the Shrew a shocking surprise to me.
You see, unlike the cold, distant, and frankly, confusing writing found in most of Shakespeares’ plays, Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You was modern, warm-hearted, and deeply moving. I found it charming and funny, and not in an obscure way. I saw real people experiencing the highs and lows of teenage love. Its effective translation of Shakespeares’ work, by modernizing the setting and language, unlocked a passion for these stories I hadn’t felt before. And it did so by keeping a hold on the emotional journey of the characters and making it understandable to us through the visual medium of film.
The 10 Things I Hate About You, directed by Gil Junger, is a romantic comedy that has withstood the test of time effortlessly. Written by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, it follows Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Patrick (Heath Ledger), two unlikely friends who team up to date sisters Kat (Julia Stiles) and Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) Stratford. It was released in 1999 to a positive critical reception that praised the young talent that occupied the core roles. In many ways, the longevity of The 10 Things I Hate About You comes from the craftsmanship on display in the filmmaking.
While romantic comedies seem to have faded out of popularity in recent years, there have been a few that have stuck out in the waves of franchise-based filmmaking. Films like Long Shot (2019) and The Big Sick (2017) come to mind, having strong writing that managed to leave an impression on mainstream audiences. But where modern romantic comedies largely rely on the star power of known actors and writing to stick with audiences, The 10 Things I Hate About You merely starts there and builds on those elements to make an experience few films compare to.
This is largely a product of the ’90s. While The 10 Things I Hate About You was helmed by largely unknown actors, most of the competition was operating on the star power of known individuals. Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler played off each other in multiple films, and Oscar favorite Tom Hanks was a love interest in You’ve Got Mail (1998). So when Gil Junger, Gail Goldberg, Donna Morong, and Marcia Ross cast the fresh-faced Joseph Gorden-Levitt, Heath Ledger, and Julia Stiles, it was truly groundbreaking. These individuals would grow to dominate the 2000’s, but in 1999, it was still the beginning of their blossoming careers. Australian star Heath Ledger was a small actor in America, Julia Styles had only been given one leading role prior, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a teenage heartthrob from TV. Larisa Oleynik, who plays Bianca, was arguably the largest name attached to the project, due to her expansive work in Television.
And yet, these small-known actors deliver astonishing performances, with teenage wonder being at the forefront of it all.
Each actor gives performances that capture the youth of a high school kid. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a starstruck new kid perfectly, adding comedic levity to each scene due to the awkward nature of sophomore dating. Heath Ledger and Julia Styles play off each other perfectly as Patrick and Kat, being quick-witted in their pointy exterior, but soft and caring on the inside. And Larisa Oleynik plays the part of the popular girl exceedingly well.
And while the main cast clearly is in the headlights for most of the film, the supporting work from David Krumholtz, Allison Janney, Larry Miller, Daryl Mitchell, and Andrew Keegan are unforgettable. Each may play a stereotypical role, but they capture the high school atmosphere perfectly. Add to this the different student cliques, with the popular kids, the performatively woke, the self-centered, and the smarties, and you have a believable high school environment. It’s both a fantasy of the past and familiar in ways most films fail to be.
Those charismatic elements can be attributed to the writing and the performances, and while they provide the content and context for the film to live in, it’s not where the greatness ends. Gil Junger fills each sequence with youthful energy, thanks to the kinetic cinematography and expert blocking. Where most modern films can’t shoot a post-credit funeral sequence without multiple camera angles and constant cross-cutting, The 10 Things I Hate About You stands out in its elegant long takes that often move from one location to another without breaking the sequence. There is always something occurring in the background just beyond the action of our lead cast, and it creates an environment that is reminiscent of high school. Each sequence is built to allow the camera to move, framing new moments and injecting energy into each reveal. Like a play, characters are consistently entering and exiting single takes, and it adds to the atmosphere of a high school love story. And like a skilled surgeon, when cuts are used, they are used to their maximum potential, heightening the emotion of a scene and pulling us into the headspace of our protagonists. And that editing isn’t just for the visual, but the audio mix as well. There are memorable needle drops present in the film that immediately roots us in the headspace of the individuals on screen.
This is the magic behind The 10 Things I Hate About You. It dives deep into the emotion that was lost in translation for many in Shakespeares’ writing and using every cinematic tool at its disposal to pull you deeper into that emotion. By pushing past the desire to make something simple, choosing instead to inject the film with their mastery of the cinematic language, they made a classic worth watching again and again.
