I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.
When you have something forced upon you, you tend to react negatively to it, even if it is not something that you would typically despise. I think that happened with Shakespeare in Love as it is thought of as the ultimate example of Oscar Bait. This is a pejorative term used to describe films that are made with the express purpose of winning awards. They tend to conform to certain trends as they feature scenery-chewing performances, touch on important social issues in a glib manner, pretend to be controversial while ultimately being safe, and fit into genres that the Academy loves, such as period dramas or war movies. There is a formulaic feeling to a lot of projects that are produced with awards in mind and you resent the fact that you feel like you are watching somebody check off a list of clichés rather than aiming to do something new. This was identified as Oscar Bait because Weinstein was so linked with aggressive, potentially dodgy campaigns for awards in the mid-1990s and he had become infamous for forcing certain pictures down people’s throats.
He had already achieved success with films like Pulp Fiction (1994), The English Patient (1996), and Good Will Hunting (1997) and because of this, everybody was lining up to work with him. Even though people acknowledge the fact that awards are not based on merit, people within the industry are often desperate for validation from their peers and they like the idea of having a shiny trophy in their cabinet. Weinstein could make people like Kristin Scott Thomas into international megastars by building up the momentum she had created with her supporting role in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) but he could also help veterans like Robin Williams to finally pick up a win after years of being a runner up. When he got his hands on a production, he would take on a lot of control and his films felt increasingly contrived and manipulative. Shakespeare in Love was probably conceived with awards in mind as Weinstein was desperate to secure Academy Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis to play the leading role. It also tells the story of one of the world’s most respected playwrights, serves as a period piece that allows for impressive production design and costuming, and features the writing of the highly acclaimed Tom Stoppard. All of the pieces were in place and that gives the production an unfortunate air of stuffiness.
When it was actually released, everything got worse as Weinstein ensured that all awards voters were aware of it. His campaign was so notorious that people working on the campaign for Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), the film’s biggest competition, began to attack Weinstein for shamelessly courting the support of voters, in a cynical manner. Another thing that turned people against it was the way that the film’s star, Gwyneth Paltrow, was forced upon people as the next big thing. She was the child of Emmy winner Blythe Danner and she had grown up in Hollywood circles so people saw her as somebody who had become a star through nepotism and luck rather than paying her dues. She had a few major roles before appearing in this but Weinstein was eager to sell her as a fresh faced ingénue who was cute and beguiling. She was on every magazine cover and she was frequently compared to Audrey Hepburn, one of the most beloved stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Paltrow was almost set up to fail as people had to tolerate too much exposure to her and it was easy to turn against her when she came from such a privileged background.
When the film won Best Picture it was a bit of a surprise, especially when considering the fact that the Academy had brought in Harrison Ford, a frequent collaborator with Spielberg, to present the award. Ford’s expression of shock represented the feeling of surprise that must have been felt by many at the time. It had many nominations and Judi Dench was expected to win Best Supporting Actress but its success in other major categories did surprise those who were expecting Saving Private Ryan to achieve a sweep. Paltrow’s Best Actress win has received an even more chilly reception, as her career following her win was disappointing and she has become better known as a lifestyle guru who accidentally gave women vaginal infections. Her major competitors included Cate Blanchett, who went on to become a two time winner, and Fernanda Montenegro, a legendary Brazilian actress who had spent years building up her resume and achieving fame outside of her native country. People were more sympathetic to Montenegro’s plight as she was an older actress who had earned an unusually juicy role for a woman of her age and she would have been just the second actress, following Sophia Loren, to win for a foreign-language performance. Paltrow was not seen to face the same obstacles and her tearful acceptance speech was widely mocked.
I feel like the narrative surrounding Paltrow has changed as we have learned more about Weinstein and his horrific treatment of the people who worked for him. He destroyed the lives of women who refused to submit to his abuse, as well as raping and harassing others. Brave victims came forward with allegations about his abuse and people started to open up about the harassment and abuse that had once been accepted as an industry-wide practice. He is currently in prison but he irreparably damaged so many people and left them with lifelong psychological trauma. He has become most infamous for preying on young, vulnerable actresses who were desperate to get their foot in the door, in an industry which is famously difficult to break into. The star of this film, Gwyneth Paltrow, is the child of Emmy-winning actress Blythe Danner and grew up in the Hollywood environment so you would think that she wasn’t like those vulnerable unknowns who presumably had to work harder to gain exposure. When Paltrow revealed that she had also been abused by Weinstein, it caused a lot of people to reassess the way that they looked at Weinstein’s behavior. He thought he was untouchable and even people who had some degree of power were robbed of it in his presence. She was asked to give him a ‘massage’ in his hotel room when she was in her early twenties and when she turned him down, he screamed at her and verbally harassed her. She reports that she was afraid of being fired and losing her career altogether. When Brad Pitt stepped in and defended her, Weinstein’s treatment of her slightly improved but he had placed her in an extremely uncomfortable position and didn’t agree to back down when she had told him that she had no interest in ‘massaging’ him.
Paltrow’s reputation was already improving at the end of the 2010s as she had displayed more self awareness and was a key player in the Marvel cinematic universe but people did question the way they thought of her when they started to understand how Weinstein’s treatment had impacted her. People are less willing to criticize her for being sheltered and unaware of the difficulties that normal people face and they even defend some of her more interesting career choices from the late 2000s. Even though people appreciate Paltrow more, they look at Shakespeare in Love with even more disgust as it was a production that allowed Weinstein to continue his reign of terror and continue ruling over the industry even though he had seriously hurt people. The stench of overrated Oscar Bait still clings to this film and people are not willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
I said all of that because I feel as though my view of this film was shaped by the narratives surrounding it and it is impossible not to touch on Weinstein’s involvement in it.
William Shakespeare, Joseph Fiennes, is a successful playwright who lives like a wastrel. He has a love affair with the aristocratic Viola de Lesseps, Gwyneth Paltrow, when she poses as a man so that she can appear in one of his plays. He begins rewriting his play, Romeo and Juliet, so it can represent the emotions that he is feeling as he seriously falls in love for the first time. She is meant to marry Lord Wessex, Colin Firth, and Queen Elizabeth I, Judi Dench, declares that de Lesseps must marry Wessex. The two lovers are separated and Shakespeare becomes moody and despondent but at the Queen’s request he ends up writing a new play called “Twelfth Night”, which is inspired by his relationship with de Lesseps.
I went through that long spiel in order to explain why people are particularly harsh on Shakespeare in Love but I have to admit that I could not find much to appreciate in it. My biggest argument in favor of it is that it is not that bad, which is damning with faint praise. It is handsomely mounted and I did admire the period detail, the costume design and some of the imagery. The final scene, in which Shakespeare imagines de Lesseps as Viola. That scene had a haunting quality and it hit the melancholy note that the rest of the film seems to be chasing. We get the sense that she will always live on in in his heart but he must draw from his grief over losing her to produce some of his greatest tragedies. It doesn’t have the impact that it should have, as you don’t truly care about Shakespeare or de Lesseps but that scene could have been almost magical if it had been placed at the end of a story that had more to say.
Now we get to the elements of Shakespeare in Love that turned me off and made me cringe. The air of smugness that hung over the whole thing was off-putting as I couldn’t help but feel like the actors were resting on their laurels and the script got a little too cutesy for me. When I talk about lazy acting, I am referencing Dench as she relies on her stately presence and cut-glass accent to sail through her brief appearances. For some reason, Americans just love it when icy old British ladies dish out witty bon mots and cruel remarks. They tend to find it very funny, but I usually find the writing of the bon mots that they deliver, very poor and I wish that the actresses had been given more to work with. Dench is not as bad as late career Maggie Smith, who only ever plays crabby, superior churls, but this was one of her least memorable turns and I hate the fact that she received her only Academy Award for this. The cutesiness of the script relates to all of the references to obscure facts about Shakespeare’s personal life that his fans could pick up on. I don’t like it when films wink at the audience and flatter people who are knowledgeable about certain subjects by letting them feel smarter than everybody else when they laugh at jokes that might slip by the layperson. I feel like a twat when I do laugh at that sort of in-joke but I also feel like the screenwriters are playing an unfair trick on audience members when they do this as they give them the pleasurable feeling of being smart and distract from the fact that the script doesn’t have much else to offer.
After getting through all of that, I feel like I need to start talking about the ostensible subject of this column, the romance. This was sold as a wittier, more literate romantic comedy and I find it offensive that so many critics praised it for being an ‘elevated’ example of its genre. People shouldn’t look down their noses at romantic comedies because it is extremely difficult to produce a film that makes people laugh, cry, and swoon in equal measure. You need a director with an exceptionally light touch, a tight script and stars who are perfectly attuned to the roles they are playing and the tonal shifts that occur between scenes. Shakespeare in Love doesn’t have most of these things and it feels leaden and heavy even though it wants to be a delightful confection that is deceptively clever. It feels the need to tell you that it is making a witty comment every time that Stoppard crafted a joke about Shakespeare’s handwriting or his rivalry with Phillip Marlowe and that takes all of the fun out of it. You feel like a bunch of writers sat back and performed a celebratory desk press after typing out some of the lamest lines in this script. That is not fun, and it reminded me of the fact that Nora Ephron deserves more credit for her mastery of the genre during this era.
Shakespeare and de Lesseps are both written as fairly uninteresting figures and we are meant to simply admire the beauty of Paltrow and Fiennes as the supporting players chew the scenery and self consciously ‘steal’ scenes. I can’t fully blame the characters as Shakespeare turns into a mushy pea after appearing to be a rakish bad boy for about ten minutes while de Lesseps is just a dewy little girl. Their romance is not compelling because they are two pretty ornaments who have been thrust towards each other as a result of plot contrivances. I groaned in some of their big scenes and the gratuitous nudity in the sex scene made me particularly mad. The scene tries to strike a difficult note between comedy and sensuality but it falls short. You don’t find yourself laughing as Paltrow loudly moans and the morning after is too sweaty to leave the audience feeling excited.
Shakespeare in the Love is the most recently released film on the list and I can’t help but feel like recency bias played into it getting a nomination. The people who voted on this list were probably the same industry insiders who were awards voters in 1998 and they remembered being wined and dined. This list was voted on in 2002 so the voting took place just 3 years after the 71st Academy Awards took place so I am sure that Weinstein’s campaigning was fresh in their minds. In looking through the 400 nominees for this list, which were gathered by an unspecified group of people, I also realized that there were a disproportionate amount of awards nominees on the list. It feels like somebody ran through a list of Best Picture nominees and picked the occasional film that fit into the romance genre. I am somebody who obsessively follows the Academy Awards but I usually don’t agree with their decisions and I don’t think that you should judge cinema based on whether or not it won awards. This list also ends up being full of generic, mainstream choices because voters weren’t willing to make more adventurous picks and only chose pictures that they heard of rather than expanding their horizons. I also suspect that voters might have been friends with stars like Ben Affleck and Simon Callow. They could have thought “Oh, I remember Simon talking about the fact that he had a lovely time on set” and they could have filled out their rankings with this polarizing hit.
I also question the fact that this was ranked so highly as it was placed above classics like The Apartment (1960), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and Pillow Talk (1959), which have had far more influence. If I have not made it clear already, this would not have made the list for me. I feel like I seem like a sourpuss at this point as I have been highly critical of most of the films that I have seen and I haven’t found it in myself to be more forgiving. I do look forward to discussing some of the entries on the list that I truly love and you’ll get to see my sweeter side then.
