On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen REALMS OF FANTASY By Raphael Shargel Anyone looking for evidence that film is in essence a visual medium need only consult recent cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare'splays. Baz...
...Few of the new characters make much of an impression...
...My fear was that the movie would cater to the lowest common denominator and embrace the worst elements of The Return of the Jedi, the last installment, which came off as an unintentional parody of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back...
...After a series of adventures, she and the Jedi return home and propose to challenge the federation through an alliance with the Gungans, who live underwater and loathe the Naboo...
...Hoffman's earthbound, tone-deaf production, by contrast, touches no distinct idea...
...While it retains most of its source's plot, this vastly cut version is thrift store Shakespeare, lacking coherence...
...Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett (who plays Oberon, the fairy king) and the others frequently slip on the meter...
...When they fail, newly enthroned Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman), a 14year-old monarch who seems somehow to have been elected to her position, flees her planet in order to appeal to the Senate...
...Fortunately for them, Calista Flockhart, as Helena, is on hand to make them all look like brilliant Thespians by comparison...
...Helena's role is one of the richest in the play...
...In most action films, groups of villains attack the hero one at a time, but Lucas is a skilled enough director to show assailants rushing his heroes...
...Unfortunately, Shakespeare's language gets the better of most of them...
...Fans of the series know that Anakin, Qui-Gon's protégé, will grow up to become Darth Vader, the trilogy's satanic villain...
...Because it lasts less than two hours, is fairly easy on the eye and provides a few cheap laughs, it may appeal to some viewers...
...He dresses his characters in flattering 19th-century costumes, allows them to chase one another on bicycles, and, in one scene, has them engage in a mud fight...
...Most science fiction filmmakers would be satisfied to create a single credible world...
...An enormously powerful trade federation has defied the interplanetary Senate, flaunting its might by spreading an embargo around the small planet Naboo...
...But unlike such recent derivations as The Matrix and The Mummy, whose relish for Armageddon is as repugnant as their digital effects are derivative and obvious...
...Hoffman interprets Puck's mercurial abilities as license to dispense with continuity...
...The camera work is extraordinary...
...Kline and Tucci read well, but their blustering, scene-thieving performances set an already shapeless picture further off balance...
...He thus gives credence to the opening sequence of Star Wars, where Princess Leia, captured by the forces of the Empire, telegraphs across the galaxy to bring old Kenobi out of his retirement...
...Nevertheless, patience with those flaws does produce rewards...
...Hermia strips down to sultry underwear and pulls her naked lover toward her, only to cover herself and deliver an inexplicable moment later Shakespeare's speech about modesty and virtue...
...Jedi lugubriously recycled the endings of its predecessors...
...The director takes his time visiting a number of planets, exploring their landscapes and people...
...The Phantom Menace curiously sports a central prophet whose predictions will prove untrue...
...And yet The Phantom Menace, the first of three projected installments set several decades before the original trilogy, generated expectations even taller than the ones Hoffman confronted...
...when a presumably benign figure is elected Chancellor, it becomes clear that dictatorship is just around the corner...
...Lucas' ambitions are far greater: In this series, he is successfully populating a universe...
...It brings unexpected and welcome ingenuity to the series...
...both seem equally green and fantastic...
...The sprite is involved in all sorts of mischief —including enchanting the fairy queen Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer) into falling in love with donkey head-wearing Bottom (Kevin Kline)—but his laughter sounds more hollow thanboisterous...
...For the first time since Jurassic Park, it is impossible to spot where live action photography ends and the digital and animation effects kick in...
...The intricate plot has disappointed some viewers, but it does make sense...
...Portman is wooden, as is McGregor, who unsuccessfully mimics Guinness' distinctive speech patterns...
...Lucas seems to have abandoned his original plan of unfolding the series through the eyes of C-3PO and R2D2, the comic android heroes of the first films...
...Moreover, the text's marked distinction between the rule-bound world of the city and the magic realm of the woods is lost here...
...When the two flee the city and the dictates of her father, who has insisted that she marry Lysander's rival Demetrius (Christian Bale), they find a secret resting place in a nearby forest...
...The Phantom Menace is a surprisingly effective and intelligent entertainment...
...The acting, camera work and production design, however, conspire to confuse their meaning...
...Shakespeare set A Midsummer Night's Dream in a mystical Athens that combines elements of antiquity and medievalism, but Hoffman has transposed the action to Tuscany at the turn of this century...
...Baz Luhrmann's music video version of Romeo and Juliet, Kenneth Branagh's vanity production of Hamlet and Michael Hoffman's current movie, misleadingly titled William Shakespeare's ? Midsummer Night's Dream, all draw on the playwright's texts...
...Qui-Gon Jinn is fascinating, a fanatic whom Neeson wisely plays with restraint...
...The appallingly cute Ewoks, a race of scrappy teddy bears who set its tone, seemed to represent the wave of the future...
...In this context it is hard to take seriously...
...The actors, made up of familiar faces from film, stage and television, are interesting to look at...
...Kline makes his entrance in a spectacularly fitting white suit, though, and is seen retiring to bourgeois living quarters where he keeps a wife and child...
...The Phantom Menace does spend too much time with the Gungans, humansized beings with little intelligence who speak with Caribbean accents and look like a cross between a frog and a rabbit...
...A passionate woman despised by her lover, she constantly strikes back at a world she feels has rejected her...
...The Republic, already fallen in the completed trilogy, continues to thrive despite bureaucratic infighting...
...hell...
...In early scenes, Hoffman constantly depicts the virginal Hermia (Anna Friel) embracing her forbidden lover Lysander (Dominic West...
...He makes us believe the Jedi are capable of defending against multiple offensives, even of defeating a whole army...
...He justifies his decisions in an opening statement that suggests he is representing the decline of Victorian rigidities, yet nothing in the film indicates times are changing...
...Like almost everyone else, he doesn't appear to be having much fun...
...From beginning to end, the actress seems capable of registering nothing more than irritation...
...His performance anchors the film as Alec Guinness' old Kenobi did Star Wars...
...Instead of rising momentum, The Phantom Menace maintains an even pace...
...The movie as roller coaster ride has thrilled many summer audiences, but is a numbing, exhausting experience...
...The artisans, played by such wonderful performers as Bill Irwin and Max Wright, come off best, in part because they speak only prose and doggerel verse...
...Almost everything Lucas produced after the trilogy catered to a similarly sunny stupidity...
...The fairies do turn into little tinkerbells at will and, like 1990s high school girls, they coat their faces and necks in glitter, but little else distinguishes them from the human characters...
...I can't say there is deep meaning to any of the series' four completed movies...
...Hoffman has come to her aid by slashing her lines, reducing her stunningly equivocal soliloquy at the end of the first scene to a few fragmentary declarations and a petulant cry of "Oh spite...
...It ignored the expansive and provocative lore of the earlier episodes, the politics and intrigues that set them apart from their derivations...
...Lucas has instilled a good deal of messianism into the science fiction genre...
...There are also some neat surprises, including a final twist that explains the meaning of its title...
...The picture begins before the evil Empire of Darth Vader and his accomplices dominated the galaxy...
...In response, the Jedi Council, protectors of peace in the galaxy, send two emissaries, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and a young Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) to persuade the federation to stand down...
...Creator George Lucas, who has not directed a film in 22 years, is facing fans who in countless imitations have seen his plots recycled, his special effects surpassed, and his tendency to build climax upon climax trumped...
...Yet despite these concessions to the juvenile set, Lucas maintains his fidelity to a fascinating and still developing mythology...
...Class distinctions, a very prominent factor in the play (as well as in Hoffman's last effort, the earnest and diverting Restoration), are severely muted...
...It also casts clean-cut Jake Lloyd, who appears to have stepped from an audition for a television sitcom, as Anakin Skywalker, a nine-year-old slave, pilot and mechanical genius...
...Flockhart's tongue, alas, stiffens underthe verse...
...They, along with old favorites like the ancient sage Yoda and the wicked entrepreneur Jabba the Hut, appear only briefly...
...The politics of the Republic are modeled on those of ancient Rome and Weimar Germany...
...Downplaying the scenes of space flight and battles that he perfected long ago, Lucas focuses on travel and combat on land, under sea and between individuals...
...Sadly, Neeson is not surrounded by memorably colorful figures...
...Its philosophical moments, where the Jedi murmur reverently about the Force that binds us and the Christ-like "One" who will set it in balance, are tedious and silly...
...But it is principally for those who are ignorant of Shakespeare's text or who prefer simple, banal images to dramatic ambiguity and linguistic genius...
...Bottom is a weaver, one of the "rude mechanicals" who are ignorantly rehearsing a tragedy to celebrate the nuptials of Duke Theseus (David Strathaim) and his bride Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau...
...The light saber duels are breathtaking, as are the struggles between the Jedi and their robotic assailants...
...A Midsummer Night's Dream has been read as a play about the callous manipulations of the gods, the mad illogic of love, the vast varieties of human justice, mercy and sexuality...
...Puck, impersonated by full-grown, hairy chested Stanley Tucci, bears no resemblance to the diminutive, nimble fairy the play seems to describe...
...Even more interestingly, he refuses to adopt the structure he himself popularized, where the action continually tops itself with increasingly fiery sequences...
...Although the Star Wars movies are also elaborate fantasies, it clearly would be unfair to compare them to Shakespearean drama...
Vol. 82 • July 1999 • No. 8
