[In the following review, Welsh compares Michael Hoffman's 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the 1935 Max Reinhardt-William Dieterle film production. The critic contends that the more recent version of the play is generally less compelling, despite the success of Calista Flockhart's Helena.]

Does Hollywood love Shakespeare, as some have suggested, or does Hollywood simply love Shakespeare in Love? John Madden's film was a surprise success, both at the box office and at the Academy Awards. Shakespeare in Love was made on a budget of $38 million and took in over $68 million in domestic revenues. Hollywood “loves” Shakespeare because Hollywood loves money, and Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar jackpot. Hence the current “Bard Boom” has little to do with the real Shakespeare and a whole lot to do with speculative greed.

In 1998 the much admired Shakespeare in Love put an appealing human face on the Droeshout engraving of the balding Bard, indulging in a biographical fantasy that made the Bard a sexy and energetic young lover who knew how to thrill with his quill. Call it the reinvention of Shakespeare, done with nimble dialogue and astonishing theatrical flourishes sufficient to dazzle the Motion Picture Academy. Newsweek credited the film with starting the so-called “Bard Boom,” even though the current Shakespeare revival has been going on for at least a decade, starting with Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989.

One commentator rightly described Shakespeare in Love as a Shakespeare-highlight film, and so it is—a mishmash of the best bits of Romeo and Juliet squeezed into a faux-biographical framework, mostly invented, mostly fanciful. Kit Marlowe shows Will the way to shape his tragedy of star-crossed lovers, for example, according to Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, who turn the boy Bard into slick Willy, a lovesick puppy pining androgenously for blonde bombshell Viola DeLesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), a poetry groupie who earns her hour on the stage before being sent to Virginia Beach and an arranged marriage in the Brave New World. The script is certainly clever. Shakespeare in Love interfaces amusingly with Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night to provide in-your-face entertainment, distorting the facts in a determined effort to popularize the Bard.

Can the recent adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream compete with this slick confection? That's part of the challenge. Another challenge for Hoffman is to match the enchantment of earlier screen adaptations of the play, especially the Max Reinhardt-William Dieterle production put together by MGM in 1935, embellished with Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music, a Russian ballet troupe, and a cast that included the leading comic character actors of the day. Small wonder, then, that Hoffman's film, though often charming and amusing in its way, comes up short.

Hoffman moves the action forward in time and sets it in late 19th-Century Tuscany, but does the Italianate setting make sense? The MGM version was given a God-knows-where setting that was vaguely and humorously “Athenian,” though this Athens seemed to border a mad German Black Forest setting of gnomes, trolls, fairies, and unicorns. Once the boundaries were firmly set, the film carefully made clear visual and musical transitions between the kingdoms of Theseus and Oberon. In this film the forest was a magical place, something other than a bicycle park on a quaint Italian holiday.

In Hoffman's film the roles of both Theseus and Oberon are strangely reduced. Shakespeare's Duke Theseus is a powerful warrior who has defeated the Amazon Queen Hippolyta in battle and is then determined to marry her and make merry. Hoffman's Theseus (David Strathairn) lacks the grandeur and the comic pomposity of Shakespeare's Theseus, and his lines are so abridged in keeping with the new setting that he appears to be merely the maitre d' of a swanky Italian resort, not a ruler truly in charge, but a stiff, wooden mannequin oddly detached from the festivities of his own nuptials. Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau) is likewise translated into a genteel, aristocratic lady, rather too frail to be imagined wearing Amazon battle-garb.

Rupert Everett's Oberon is perhaps nearer the mark, but more naked than lordly, and not nearly so sinister as Victor Jory's Oberon in the MGM version, attended by bat-winged spirits in contrast to the airy spirits of Titania, his Fairy Queen. Michelle Pfeiffer's Titania is overly made-up as she sweeps her monsterous lover—Kevin Kline with funny ears and a hairy face—into the privacy of her bower, where she discovers her ass-eared lover's other endowments (perhaps suggesting Jan Kott's lusty and bestial reading of the play). The long and the short of it is that Kline is obviously up for the role and makes a fine Bottom, but his Bottom is topped by Jimmy Cagney's performance in 1935, and one suspects Kline knows it, since he seems at times to be imitating Cagney. Though Roger Rees is not bad as Peter Quince, the “rude mechanicals” are altogether eclipsed by the comic talents of the 1935 film, with memorable turns by Hugh Herbert and Joe E. Brown, camping it up as Thisby. As Puck, Stanley Tucci looks like Mr. Spock with horns, oversized, rather than sprightly. Tucci gives a thoroughly professional and carefully modulated performance, but this Vulcanized Puck is no Mickey Rooney, whose performance was outrageously overdone and over the top, campy but fun.

Midsummer Night's Dream should be more fun than the current adaptation is. The only advantage it may have over the 1935 version is the casting of the confused and enchanted lovers. Calista Flockhart is outstanding as Helena. Christian Bale and Dominic West manage to personalize the look-alike beaux Demetrius and Lysander, and Anna Friel pouts mightily as the much-abused Hermia. In the final forest frenzy they muck about in a way that amusingly recalls Peter Hall's 1968 Royal Shakespeare adaptation.

But, again, I stress, the “Bard Boom” did not start last year after Hollywood had tired of exploiting Jane Austen, as witnessed by Branagh's realistic Henry V and his ambitious (if somewhat bloated and extravagant) Hamlet, Oliver Parker's Othello (with Branagh as Iago), and Trevor Nunn's miraculous Twelfth Night, which set a standard for both Shakespeare in Love and A Midsummer Night's Dream to live up to. The fallout of Shakespeare in Love will involve several more pictures. Opening almost concurrently with A Midsummer Night's Dream, was 10 Things I Hate About You, which attempted to translate The Taming of the Shrew into a teenpix set at “Padua High,” Shakespeare rendered Clueless, in other words.

Forthcoming titles promised by USA Today (29 January 1999) may be of more academic interest. Anthony Hopkins will undertake Titus Andronicus (described, not too promisingly, by Julie Taymor as “the Pulp Fiction of its day”) and Ethan Hawke will presume to play Hamlet (a courageous move, given the definitive treatment of Kenneth Branagh, but this one is said to be “transplanted to Manhattan.” One vividly recalls the freaky “transplantation” of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and hopes for the best.) Meanwhile, Branagh apparently intends to transform Love's Labor's Lost into a 1930's styled musical, with Alicia Silverstone and the music of Irving Berlin. How long will it be before the Shakespeare boom goes bust?