[In the following review of Michael Hoffman's 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rothwell praises the film as a visual masterpiece and lauds Kevin Kline's ability to turn the cartoonish character of Bottom into “a living, breathing, and very vulnerable, human being.”]

The opening credits of Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream (“Based on the play by William Shakespeare”) situate the action around the year 1900 in Monte Athena in Tuscany, Italy, one of those fabulous Italian hilltop towns but not exactly the Athens of Shakespeare's play. Then again his film is “based” on Shakespeare's play, not the thing itself, a salient point that Shakespeare on film critics sometimes egregiously overlook. In spectacular color on crystalline DVD, wherein it is divided into twenty-five ‘chapters’ for random access, Hoffman's movie is stunningly designed, costumed, and photographed. In a lush, opulent setting, quivering with bright fruits and great wines, servants set up for an alfresco wedding feast on the open porch and steps of the Duke Theseus's (David Strathairn) Villa Athena. The heroic strains of Felix Mendelssohn's “Incidental Music,” which Max Reinhardt in his many expressionistic European productions virtually grafted onto Shakespeare's play, fill the soundtrack. When the scene shifts, however, to the piazza of Athena, Mendelssohn yields to stirring chorales from Traviata to echo the lightheartedness of the citizens as they stroll during the exhibitionistic hour of the promenade. It becomes hard to tell if Hoffman is more interested in Italian opera or in Shakespeare. Is all this anachronistic? Yes. But anyone reading Shakespeare's play will detect a similar indifference to literal mindedness about place and time.

Visually the film is a masterpiece, so exquisitely conceived by Hoffman and designer Luciana Arrighi that it goes far beyond the Masterpiece Theatre English Heritage look. Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer) wears gowns inspired by the pre-Raphaelites, while Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau), a woman of ineffable dignity, with her parasol and flowing dress, and Hermia (Anna Friel) with her epic millinery could both pose for John Singer Sargent portraits. Feistier is Calista Flockhart as the forlorn Helena who appears astride a bicycle in a sign of the growing independence in the Victorian era of the fair sex. In contrast, during the prologue a gnarled little boy and a dwarfish woman (who looks like Kathy Burke but who is not listed in the credits) cart off a purloined gramophone and a set of Victor Red Seal records of Italian operas from the duke's bustling kitchen. They surface again later in the bizarre fairy world, where, in an ironic postmodernist twist, the gramophone records seem as magical to the fairies as the magic of fairies is to human beings. Hoffman's fairy world, inspired by Etruscan tombs and caves, dancing and feasting, filmed indoors at Rome's Cinecitta, with its satyrs, griffins, Janus figures, and dwarves, is the antithesis to Max Reinhardt's gauzy and fuzzy forests. The bower of Titania looks disturbingly like a House of Ill Repute, while her fairy king, Rupert Everett, manages to look both raffish and heroic simultaneously.

In the ‘real’ world of Athens, Hoffman dutifully squeezes in politically correct allusions to Hippolyta's incipient feminism, telegraphed by her obvious resentment of Duke Theseus's complicity in the old-boy network. Vital to the fairy realm is the voyeuristic Puck (Stanley Tucci), the antithesis of Mickey Rooney's cuddly Puck of years ago, whose great sound bite (“What fools these mortals be!”) is validated by the love-game antics of the four beautiful young lovers roaming the forest, Demetrius (Christian Bale), Lysander (Dominic West), Hermia, and Helena, and the efforts of the rude mechanicals,” to put on the play of Pyramus and Thisby at the Duke's wedding feast.

Ultimately, though, this film turns Shakespeare's play into Nick Bottom's play. It seems that Hoffman drained all the menace out of the carnivalesque fairy world and instead made Bottom's psyche the site of Lenten melancholy. Kevin Kline turns this cartoon figure into a living, breathing, and very vulnerable, human being. He is a ridiculous dandy flirting in the market place, a would-be actor whose beautiful (and only) white suit is doused in red wine by twelve-year-old hoodlums, and the butt of jokes for being henpecked by a nagging Xanthippe of a wife (who of course doesn't exist in Shakespeare's play). At the end of the film, though, Bottom transcends his own follies and his detractors. Alone, gazing at the fairy lights and contemplating the dream of a life he never had, he evolves into the type of a ‘holy fool,’ an unlikely saint who is foolish in the eyes of men but wise in the eyes of God. Kline's Nick Bottom, and his “bottomless dreams” are Hoffman's foray into the kind of ‘character criticism’ that offends purists but delights most of us.