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Tag Archives: Julia Stiles

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #79: 10 Things I Hate About You [The Taming of the Shrew] (1999)

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Tags

Allison Janney, Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Karen McCullah, Kristen Smith, Larry Miller, Taming of the Shrew Adaptation

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

79. Gil Younger’s 10 Things I Hate About You [The Taming of the Shrew] (1999)

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s only story fixated on teenagers in love, but Karen McCullah and Kristen Smith adapted The Taming of the Shrew to do so.

07 Taming of the Shrew

Shrew is one of Shakespeare’s most outrageous plays. (It’s the comedy equivalent of Tis Andronicus, if you ask me.) That comedy dramatizes the institutional stresses of matrimony in Shakespeare’s time. Women were, from a legal view, property. They required a dowry—a pile of money, property, or other valuables—to protect their socioeconomic security as well as that of their husband at the time of marriage. Occasionally, this would result in a happy marriage, but security, not happiness, was the goal of this business transaction.

If a rare woman rebelled against this order (in which she was a commodity), she was a bitch, or a shrew. If such a bitch had a younger sister, by rights, the younger sister should not marry unless her elder sister did first, so a spinster could bring discord and shame upon her family.

An alcoholic bachelor of some means could bolster his security by marrying that shrew, if he were just drunk and brave enough. Shakespeare had a daring sense of humor.

This is not polite humor, or drama, for that matter.

Because the playwright worked towards a paradoxical reconciliation of these values (a woman could be her own person and yield herself as property to a patriarchal order), some dumb modern viewers become uneasy at the conclusion, as if Shakespeare were confirming that the patriarchy he has been skewering for two hours is mostlyokay, once characters have the wisdom to understand that love is required for the system to work.

Similarly, the conclusion of The Merchant of Venice has viewers wondering if Shakespeare was anti-Semitic since Shylock never does get his vengeance for losing his daughter and property (again reinforcing a woman’s identity as a commodity), and because Shylock is punished for being so inhumanly Jewish (according to the gentiles in the play).

The way comedy worked in Shakespeare time was to pretend that all was mended at the end.

Comedy ends in marriage. Tragedy ends in a pile of corpses.

By ending in such a reassuring way, Shakespeare could complicate the world in fairly tragic ways in the middle of the play. Through clowning, Shakespeare could sneak in a lot of truth about the odd ways we live our lives, even though he had to pretend like he was only kidding.

Which brings me to this question: as a young American actress, how did Julia Stiles come to star in three Shakespeare adaptations? She was in Tim Blake Nelson’s excellent O, and in Michael Almereyda’s diarrheal Hamlet.

10 Things I Hate About You is a loose adaptation that doesn’t use Shakespeare’s language and seldom nods to the wording of the original play, though pedestrian meta-references to Shakespeare abound.

10 Things I Hate About You Poster.jpg

The high school setting for this adaptation is a strength. Today, the parental limits for a daughter’s sovereignty makes more cultural sense than Renaissance norms for marriage. Instead of marriage, the boundaries here are for adolescent dating.

10 Things I Hate About You 2

The title sequence and title make clear that this is supposed to be a teen rom-com. While the predictability of the Shakespearean comedy is often blissfully undercut, the predictability of the teen rom-com genre is, alas and fuck, sometimes grating. Occasionally, 10 Things I Hate About You seems to try too hard to be cool and outré. But the wild romantic scheming of the original is there in this adaptation, along with the surprises that this scheming brings to the schemers.

The cast takes the movie pretty far.

Allison Janney plays Ms. Perky, a dean who can instantly see all of the conniving neuroses of adolescence from a billion miles away, and dispatches their problems as quickly as possible in order to steal more time while on the job to write a lurid romance novel.

10 Things I Hate About You Janney.png

Perky suggests the fate of the spinster, whose love life is imaginary despite being pretty and smart. (This character seems to disappear halfway through the movie. I guess Janney could only get one day off from The West Wing.) This could be Kat’s fate, which doesn’t seem terrible, actually.

10 Things I Hate About You Larry Miller

Comedian Larry Miller plays the concerned dad to two daughters. Miller’s posh monotone deadpan always makes him seem a bit sinister, which makes the hand-wringing of the father character of Shrew much easier to handle. (The character is pathetic at best in the original play.)

Our Petruchio, the drunken shrew-wooer, is played by Heath Ledger, who plays the part with a verve that will remind one as his turn as the Joker later in his career. Instead of a drunk, though, McCullah and Smith make his character a chaotic juvenile delinquent with a reputation that makes him beyond the respectable pale. He is dreamy, yet wrenches out of this part some real sophistication of emotion.

10 Things I Hate About You

Both Stiles and Ledger have exquisitely downturned mouths, which became distracting once I noticed it. Do you notice it?

10 Things I Hate About You 4

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays—who cares?

Julia Styles plays Kat, the shrewish lefty alternative feminist whose contempt for the entire high school system makes her critical of everything, which was more or less me in high school, or college—actually I’m still that way. Stiles does not generally play Kat’s anger with a broad sense of comedy, allowing the situations and dialogue to do the comedic heavy lifting.

What ultimately makes me not quite love this movie is its disappointing conventionality. It’s zany comedy tends to feel forced when Heath Ledger is not there to deliver it, and as the story proceeds, the moral component of the film makes the attitude of Kat more about her own personal experience, her own disappointing psychological and sexual journey, than about her entirely appropriate critique of the world she is living in. Her motivation ultimately becomes a bit paint-by-numbers, and the various plots of the family cohere in ways that border on the sentimental.

One of the few graces of the end of the movie is that the love stories don’t have sentimental closure. The younger sister will give Joseph Gordon-Levitt a chance, and Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona makes a grand gesture that provisionally returns him to Kat’s good graces, even though college makes their future uncertain.

I can’t help but think that if Allison Janney and Larry Miller each had one more scene that the movie could have deepened its edge more.

10 Things I Hate About You is a virtual time capsule for the late 1990s for its style and music, with just a hint of the Renaissance about it. Mostly, though, it’s a teen rom-com that compares poorly with Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew.


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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #37: Hamlet (2000)

28 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Bill Murray, Denmark Corporation, Diane Venora, Elsinore Hotel, Ethan Hawke, Ethan Hawke is an Idiot, Hamlet 2000, Julia Stiles, Liev Schreiber, Michael Almereyda, Ophelia, Postmodernism, Sam Shepard, Shakespeare

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

37. Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000)

When it comes to presenting Shakespeare well on film, sometimes it just isn’t enough to be a pretentious twat.

Baz Luhrman has proven that once, and Michael Almereyda has proven that twice, the first time with Hamlet.

Hamlet 2000 poster.jpg

This Hamlet stars a really goofy knit-cap. Underneath it, unfortunately for this movie, was Ethan Hawke’s facial stubble. Even more unfortunately, Ethan Hawke was underneath all that.

Hamlet and his Stupid Hat

Clearly, this is one of those Hamlets where you’ll have to try to watch around the idiot playing Hamlet.

On paper, I should love this postmodern film, which sets Hamlet in New York City, in 2000, in a corporate context: Denmark is a Corporation, run by Hamlet’s uncle and his mother. The family lives in the Elsinore Hotel. Hamlet is a film student, and there is a meta-cinematic dimension to the way this Hamlet is imagined. There is so much potential in these choices.

The rhetoric of Claudius’s speech to Denmark works perfectly in a PR-saturated corporate world.

And Kyle MacLachlan’s Claudius seems grandiose in addressing Bill Murray’s thoughtful Polonius,

Hamlet Bill Murrayand Liev Schreiber’s lucid, powerful Laertes.

And then the scene moves to Hamlet.

Damn.

Ethan Hawke acts with the intensity of a Fruit Roll Up being peeled from plastic.

Hamlet Yuck

Kyle MacLachlin, who I adore, will by the end of the movie seem bewildered to find himself outside of a David Lynch universe. By the final act, his Claudius mostly seems shell-shocked. I could try to rationalize this as a valid aesthetic choice.  Claudius is in shock that his impulsive plan (to kill his brother, to marry his sister-in-law, who he had secretly been in love with while his brother was alive, and gain the CEO-ship of Denmark) actually worked, but has actually brought him little satisfaction.

But so many of the actors look dulled with shock in this movie, or like they are trying to act their way out of a Quaalude haze. Or like they are trying to act with Ethan Hawke.

Hamlet Sam ShepardSam Shepard, another interesting casting choice, theoretically speaking (a Postmodern playwright acting in Shakespeare), plays the ghost of the father of Hamlet, but not persuasively. But we rely on Hamlet to let us know how frightening the ghost is, and Ethan Hawke forgot to wear his knit cap in that scene. Sam Sheperd as King Hamlet’s ghost is an opportunity squandered.

In time, with their contact with Hawke, almost everyone seems to be on the same soporific downers in this film.

Diane Venora portrays Gertrude as a bored socialite. Fine. Sure.

B0043003-4C

If only the play were called Polonius. Or Laertes. Or Ophelia.

Hamlet Julia Stiles Liev Schreiber

Julia Stiles does well as Ophelia, conveying a sense of vulnerability and sensitivity and … peculiar timing. Her Ophelia is struggling to have an identity. She looks nearly as pristine as a doll.

Hamlet Polonius OpheliaShe is being systematically crushed by the characters of Hamlet. Stiles clearly know what her lines mean, and she has to act with the affectless non-acting and occasional ham-acting of Ethan Hawke.

Hamlet Julie Styles and the Horrible Hawke

Besides Hamlet, Ophelia is the other virtuoso role in the play. Odd how Julia Stiles generally emotes well, yet her character has every cause for the stilted, affectless mode of most of the cast, since she is the recipient of so many gazes in this film, and is viewed at times as an outright art object by Hamlet.

Hamlet GazeThat is how Michael Almereyda seems to view humanity, though: not as a collection of human psyches and spirits, but as art objects for him to film doing Shakespeary things.

This Hamlet loves to watch his film footage from film school and other media, and all of it comes off as self-indulgent rubbish, like Hamlet is casually thinking of the movie he would like to make out of the poetry of his soliloquies. In other words, Almereyda interrupts his bad film of Hamlet to show us even more abysmal, shittier films. Such meta-cinematic play requires brilliance, and this film, alas and fuck, is not brilliant.

But clearly Almereyda and Hawke are convinced that they are.

_______

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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