Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream 1999

[poliphilo]

According to this essay I've been reading (by Jay Halio) Kevin Kline was originally slated to play Oberon- but then the director had a brainwave and moved him sideways into the role of Bottom.  The director's brainwave was that the story should be rejigged so it's Bottom who's doing the dreaming. Well, some of this comes across on screen, but it's only half-realised- because if this is Bottom's dream what are Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius doing in it? There are interpolated- wordless- scenes that establish Bottom as a melancholy, small town poseur with a nagging wife- but the production is too mainstream to attempt the radical editing of the text that would have been necessary to make the concept stick. Kline's Bottom seems sensitive and intelligent and the clowning the script demands of him out of character.   To muddle and confuse things further the action has been explicitly moved to early 20th century Italy- which allows for grand opera on the soundtrack and some happy business with bicycles and gramophone records but means- again- that certain things Shakespeare wrote just don't fit. Did Italian cities in this era have local laws on the books that condemned daughters to death for disobeying their fathers? I don't think so. And why are we crossing our selves and saying a Hail Mary at one moment and invoking Diana the next?

The fairies are fun; they're modelled after the fairies in the paintings of English Victorian artists like Dadd and Noel Stratton. The lovers are all very pretty- Callista Flockhart plays Helena, Christian Bale is Demetrius- but maybe they'd have been funnier if they hadn't been such icons of physical perfection.  Rupert Everett is menacing as Oberon, Michelle Pfeiffer oddly underwhelming as Titania. Roger Rees as Quince projects the decency and dignity of a workingclass autodidact.  Stanley Tucci's Puck-  part Pan, part Mephistopheles--  two little horns and a quizzical air- is the the best thing in the movie.  

Comments

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Much as I'm generally a fan of Michelle Pfeiffer, she really didn't impress in that film. I got the feeling that she was trying for ethereal without realising that there could still be steel underneath. She's certainly capable of it; her role as Catwoman springs to mind, as does the role she played in Dangerous Minds.

[sovay]

The director's brainwave was that the story should be rejigged so it's Bottom who's doing the dreaming.

A few months ago, I watched the end of the 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream on TCM: I came in at the scene where Bottom wakes up from his enchantment and tried to put his dream into words, at which even synesthesia fails him. I can't speak for the rest of the cast, but James Cagney was wonderful. He laughs in amazement at the improbability of his own dreaming until his voice stutters abruptly into a donkey's hee-haw; in a panic he flings himself down in front of the nearest stream and slaps at the water until his own reflection appears, tousled, stubbled, absolutely human, whereupon he rolls to his feet and dusts himself off and strides off through the forest, not lost, recounting to himself all the ways that he will never be able to explain what happened to him, but he'll still perform the hell out of it when he's gotten Peter Quince to write it up. He's indestructible by magic, but not insensible to it; he will not suffer from them, but he will have strange dreams for the rest of his life. It made me wish he'd done more Shakespeare, at least on film. He was astonishing.