HILARY AND JACKIE SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE: The creative impluse at work from sibling rivalry to romantic love
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva LOVE'S LABOR 'Hilary & Jackie' & 'Shakespeare in Love' Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the...
...But then she is able to use her art (together with her good looks and irrepressible sexiness) to attract the renowned pianist, Daniel Barenboim...
...Both are musical prodigies but Hilary, the elder, seems more disciplined and determined...
...When Jackie complains at being excluded from performing at one of Hilary's concerts, it isn't out of envy but simply because she can't stand being excluded from any of her sibling's activities...
...Nevertheless, much of Shakespeare scintillates...
...This self-torturing fabrication is Jackie's way of wondering, "What will be left of me once my art has vanished...
...Or would he have concluded that such longings were in vain and that the road he had taken was the only one possible because that road was inside him...
...Barenboim wants to give her this, but she rejects him because he is part of that musical world that is now, in her illness, abandoning her...
...For, just as Jacqueline begins her traveling career, Hilary, abashed by the very nature of large-scale public performance, retreats (or ascends) into a happy marriage with Kiffer, an ex-conductor, and a crofter's country existence...
...But let us imagine that language had abandoned Frost one-third of the way down the road, that whenever he reached for the mot juste, it failed to be there...
...Life provides the coffee beans of poetry and imagination grinds them into stories and verse...
...Would he have regretted the other, more-traveled-by road, the road of more chicken farming, more school teaching, and (perhaps) a rather happier family life than Frost was ever to know...
...If you didn't have that cello...
...But Jackie reassures her that everything will be O.K...
...Jackie does start to get better and, startlingly soon, outstrips her sister...
...Second, the director John Madden ably places his story amidst the bustle and squalor of Elizabethan London...
...Rachel Griffiths as Hilary is just as good as Emily Watson as Jackie...
...The unfairness of life, one of the subjects of this movie, has seeped into the critical reception of the lead performances...
...But where the story is mysterious, Tucker's camera stands still to wonder at moments that verge on the hallucinogenic: Hilary shrinking from an audience's applause to cower in an auditorium's boiler room...
...But when Jacqueline contracts M.S., the disease not only dooms her artistry but brings into question her very identity...
...Love, of course...
...Never mind that the poem doesn't really say that one road is better than the other...
...And what sparks imagination...
...Once he falls for Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow, anemic in skirts but an absolute knockout in Elizabethan boy-player drag), he has only to listen to himself make love to her and—bingo!—there's the dialogue for his new hit play, Romeo and Ethel...well, maybe the title needs work...
...No, Jackie cannot retreat to her childhood but Hilary brings the old love forward into the present and, with Barenboim, mitigates as much of the horror of a truly terrible death as she can...
...Griffiths is a valuable artist, but Watson is—or soon will be—a star...
...But Griffiths, playing a self-effacing woman, works with small, swift strokes—glances, pauses, half-suppressed winces—while Watson is properly flamboyant and her baby-faced beauty becomes, by turns, piquant, gloating, vicious, radiant...
...Again we hear Jackie say, "Well, you're not special...
...But, like everything else in this movie, the answer solves one mystery only to suggest a hundred more...
...Nothing, she fears, so she tries to regain what she had before she was an artist: a nest from which she can never be ejected...
...By the way, at the movie's conclusion, we learn who that woman on the beach was and what she said to Jackie...
...But, instead of Hilary's actual, mild reply, we now hear a retort that Jackie has imagined and inserted into her sister's mouth: "If you think it's easy to be ordinary, you're wrong...
...Distraught and emotionally voracious, the visitor insinuates herself not only into the home but (with her sister's anguished consent) into Kiffer's reluctant embrace...
...Whenever Robert Frost, reciting "The Road Not Taken" to packed houses, came to those concluding lines, he would raise his arms in victory like a heavyweight boxer who had just scored a knockout...
...Now we backtrack to the beginning of the cellist's career and see that since the rootless life of a virtuoso cuts her off from her family (and, most grievously, from her sister), Jackie has begun to hate her own talent...
...Now the film skips several years, and we see Hilary, happy as wife and mother, being startled by the sudden appearance of her now famous sister...
...Mystery: Can artistic talent be catalyzed by the need to preserve a sisterly bond...
...The jokes sometimes pall but, when they do, just shift your eyes to the edges of the screen where a multitude of ministories are taking place among merchants, aristocrats, thieves, and beggars in a London that isn't so much a metropolis as a village on steroids...
...Frolicking on a beach, the little sisters are startled by a spectral, female figure...
...17...
...What then...
...Has Jacqueline become that by-now-familiar figure, the artist-asvampire...
...Love cannot extinguish this anguish but it lets the sufferer know that pain does not rule the universe unchallenged...
...No problem...
...End of argument, but only for the time being...
...She mentally reconstructs the bit16 ter exchange with her sister before Hilary's marriage...
...The remainder of the film provides a brief, exquisitely painful account of Jackie's final physical deterioration and a purely natural miracle of earthly love...
...This immediately leads to another mystery: Can artistic talent, and the lifestyle flowing from it, fray the very bond that nurtured it...
...It is Jackie who immediately senses the hurt of the separation to come, and it makes her furious...
...Mystery is broached in the very first scene...
...Madden was obviously trying to convey the passion of young lovers and artists in an England of crescent greatness, but parts of his movie are keyed up to the point of hysteria...
...Why did she say that...
...So there's this young hotshot Will Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes con brio) who's gonna hit the big time if he can only get his act (or acts, all five of them) together...
...Jackie's beautiful cello creaking and moaning inside a dank hotel room while its owner broods on her lonely existence—what is warping, the instrument's wood or the musician's psyche...
...When the events in Boyce's script are clear and self-explanatory—the advent of Jackie's celebrity, the courtship of Hilary and Kiffer, the physical onslaught of M.S.—Anand Tucker's direction is swift and lucid, and the cinematic shorthand of montage is well used to march the chronicle ahead (the repeated "no" of a prim flute teacher tells you all you need to know about Hilary's disillusionment with musical academia...
...Jackie runs to her and the stranger imparts something we can't hear...
...Their marriage is happy and her art flourishes...
...The good-natured, deliberately naive joke at the heart of Shakespeare in Love is that there is no mystery whatsoever to artistic creation...
...This movie, written by Frank Boyce and directed by Anand Tucker from Hilary's memoir, A Genius in the Family, is a happy paradox: Though charting the turning points in the sisters' lives with lucidity, it begins and ends in mystery...
...And any movie which features beefy, gravel-voiced, wonderful Jim Carter as Juliet's nurse, and makes you understand how such a dray horse of a guy could be both funny and moving in the role, deserves...nay, demands your patronage...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva LOVE'S LABOR 'Hilary & Jackie' & 'Shakespeare in Love' Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference...
...When Hilary claims that Kiffer's devotion makes her feel special, Jackie bluntly tells her she's not...
...These questions are brought to mind by the new British film, Hilary and Jackie, which deals with the lives of the great cellist Jacqueline Du Pre, who took the public path of musical celebrity, and her sister Hilary, a gifted flutist who chose domesticity and private contentment...
...This set-up, though propped up by a romantic intrigue (Viola's trapped in an arranged betrothal) and pretty good anachronistic jokes (the local apothecary is also a psychiatrist with fifty minutes of sand running through the hourglass), wouldn't be enough for a two-hour comedy except that the filmmakers have pulled off two coups...
...It is not an expose but an evocation of two existences that we can never quite understand...
...When Kiffer and the marriage show signs of buckling, Hilary shows Jackie the door and Jackie bitterly departs...
...Their mother scolds, "If you want to be together, you have to be as good as each other...
...You got a problem with that...
...When the child repeats the statement in her sister's ear, Hilary is taken aback, almost appalled...
...And so she descends upon her sister's farm to seduce, to nest, to take the road more traveled by, to do what simply cannot be done: the rearrangement of the past...
...Having triumphed publicly, must she now displace, even obliterate, her sister domestically...
...Clever though he is with the background, Madden may foment too much commotion in the foreground: too many people running in and out with messages, the actors delivering practically all their lines at the same breathless clip, no shot held longer than a few seconds, and the action billowing along on the waves of Stephen Warbeck's constantly swelling but not particularly distinguished score...
...Delivery and gesture made the poem what the octogenarian, belaureled old man now wanted it to mean: He had chosen the hard, lonely path of poetry and had achieved ultimate vindication...
...First, the scriptwriters Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman provide a modernization of Elizabethan language sleek enough to speed the action along but also "period" enough for the several excerpts from Romeo not to seem too archaic by contrast...
Vol. 126 • February 1999 • No. 3
