A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: Of fairy folk, boaters, corsets & Kevin Kline.
Alleva, Richard
S C R EEN Richard Alleva REWORKING SHAKESPEARE 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' Judged by the film he has made from it, two elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream seem to have fascinated the director...
...When Kline is wooed by Titania, he wonderfully conveys a loser's amazement at suddenly winning...
...But check your local video store or library for the BBC's 1982 Dream, directed by Elijah Moshin-sky and featuring the best Nick Bottom (Brian Glover's) I've ever seen...
...Dare to be awed...
...It is a severe reduction of Shakespeare's multilayered emotionality, but Hoffman's cleverness often prevails...
...He may not be the most glamorous lover Titania's ever had, but he sure is a handy guy to have around...
...I've seen the lovers' spats and the performance of Pyramus and This-be work better in college productions than they do here...
...The men wear boaters and the women corsets...
...The craftsmen trying to put on a play are archetypal in any setting of any era...
...Among the former: the rebellion of Her-mia against a parental authority still powerful and, especially in southern Europe, still backed by the law in 1900...
...Some of Hoffman's inventions fit neither the text nor his updating...
...Oberon and Ti-tania may be less vulgar, yet the fairy Queen, in Michelle Pfeiffer's gracelessly spoken performance, seems middle-class in her shrewishness rather than regally furious, like a Scarsdale matron whose ex-husband has missed his last two alimony payments...
...One mustn't object that Shakespeare must be cut for the screen...
...Shakespeare's Bottom would have received the drenching as a tribute: "Lo, how the commonality lauds me in manner Bacchic...
...But, once the action shifts to the moonlit forest, we begin to discover that Hoffman has something fresh to bring to the play...
...The highest compliment I can pay to the characterization of Nick Bottom as redesigned by Hoffman and actor Kevin Kline is also a backhanded one: Having banished Shakespeare's conception from their production, they have contrived a not unworthy substitute...
...Instead of ancient Athens, Hoffman sets the story in an imaginary Tuscan town called Monte Athena at the turn of the century...
...This local-yokel hambone and would-be Lothario of Kline's is a relative of the overgrown boys in Fellini's I Vitelloni, tugging at the restraints of small-town life and yearning for a future of sensual bliss or artistic renown...
...Up to the moment when the camera enters the forest, this production is a typical example of the cute modernization of Shakespeare...
...As usual with such modernizations, some things in the play fit the director's scheme and some, egregiously, don't...
...But Kline's weaver, to the contrary, feels himself precariously situated in society (a local star but also a clown to be mocked), and has an all-too-fragile ego...
...Its ruler, Theseus, is no warrior hero but a harassed bureaucrat, and his bride-to-be, Hippolyta, is a bluestocking chafed by masculine traditions...
...I began to wonder why the wings hadn't dropped off the fairies long ago...
...But surely a Hollywood producer would never stoop so low...
...And, of course, to eliminate even more glaring incongruities, Hoffman has scissored away at the text and so, many verbal enchantments have disappeared...
...When Bottom finally winds the contraption up and plays "Casta Diva," the nymphs look at him with new respect...
...Initially startling is how unsupernat-ural, even flat-footed, the sprites and dryads and fairies seem...
...But here, with that motive deemphasized, the real cause of the quarrel seems to be a kind of cabin fever...
...Thanks to much of the acting (I also liked David Strathairn's fusspot Theseus and Dominic West's dark, incisive Lysander) and to the director's flashes of invention, this movie is mainly amusing and worth seeing...
...And Roger Rees's Peter Quince—a lovely, subtle piece of work—seems directly inspired by Vitelloni's Leopoldo, the aspiring poet...
...But the pathos of Kline's Nick Bottom is that he achieves what he never imagined would come to him...
...After sixteen hundred years of exile in a very small forest, Oberon and Titania just can't stand the sight of each other...
...Titania may be able to command lightning and rain but she and her nymphs can't work the phonograph filched from the villa of Theseus...
...With the special effects now available to any big-budget movie, Hoffman can convey Titania's wrath at her husband with lightning and thunder, but the insipid kiss and quick fade into the distance with which he stages their reconciliation doesn't distill the essence of "Come, my queen, take hands with me,/And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be...
...Whenever the fairies and Bottom aren't together on screen, the movie trudges...
...Shakespeare's term for working man, "mechanical," here takes on new meaning...
...Commonweal 2 1 June 18,1999...
...In Shakespeare's text, Titania denies her mate the little page boy because of her regard for her friend, the lad's dead mother...
...When Lysander and Hermia camp down for the night, why does Hermia disrobe in the quickly cooling damp forest...
...Hoffman's cinematic shorthand doesn't rock the ground or us...
...These ousted deities, denied the fealty of mortals and confined to a sylvan ghetto, have become clumsy, enervated, aimless, petty, and irritable...
...A few seconds later, he's urinating against a tree...
...Not after Kenneth Branagh's four-hour Hamlet...
...Less convincing is the threat of a death sentence for Hermia's defiance, though the alternate punishment of convent confinement is more plausible...
...When Puck, well played by Stanley Tucci as a lecherous satyr, encounters one of Titania's nymphs, he comes on to her like a spiv trying to pick up a secretary on her lunch hour...
...It's easy to be amused by any moderately well-done production of this play...
...S C R EEN Richard Alleva REWORKING SHAKESPEARE 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' Judged by the film he has made from it, two elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream seem to have fascinated the director Michael Hoffman nearly to the exclusion of everything else in the play: the supernatural sylvan community ruled by Oberon and Titania, and the character of Bottom the weaver...
...the music of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi fills the soundtrack...
...The fellow you encounter in the play—surely Shakespeare's greatest purely comic character, for Falstaff is tragicomic—is a glorious monster of happy fatuity, deaf to all criticism, laving himself in fantasies of theatrical triumph, capable of receiving the amorous caresses of a goddess as but his due...
...When a mischief-maker pours wine on Commonweal 2 0 June 18,1999 the weaver and ruins his best suit, Kline crumbles and goes home to sulk...
...while Oberon takes on the manner of an overripe lounge lizard (but, granted this approach, skillfully done by Rupert Everett...
...Hoffman sees the fairy world simply as a kingdom in exile, driven into the woods by the triumph of Christianity...
...Above all, what this film lacks is a sense of ritual and mystery...
...Since we already accept the convention that these Italians are speaking Elizabethan English, why does Hoffman have villagers in the background chatter in Italian...
...This new characterization, though a reversal of what's in the play, nevertheless works on screen...
...The comedy of Shakespeare's weaver is that he gets exactly what he thinks he deserves...
...bicycles and phonographs are important props...
...This mundanity is a function not of the director's incompetence but of his strategy...
...To add sex to a PG-13 movie, I hear you muttering...
...For instance, being a community of exiles longing for news of home, the fairy folk have smuggled things out of Monte Athena in order to find out what mortals are up to nowadays...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
