Directed by Michael Hoffman; written by Mr. Hoffman,
Based on the play by William Shakespeare
Running time: 115 minutes.
Rated PG-13.
Year: 1999
Kevin Kline (Nick Bottom), Michelle Pfeiffer (Titania), Rupert Everett (Oberon), Stanley Tucci (Puck), Calista Flockhart (Helena), Anna Friel (Hermia), Christian Bale (Demetrius), Dominic West (Lysander), David Strathairn (Theseus), Sophie Marceau (Hippolyta), Roger Rees (Peter Quince), Max Wright (Robin Starveling), Gregory Jbara (Snug), Bill Irwin (Tom Snout), Sam Rockwell (Francis Flute) and Bernard Hill (Egeus).
So says Bottom in "William Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream," and he could be describing the play he occupies. It is an enchanted folly suggesting that romance is a matter of chance, since love is blind; at the right moment we are likely to fall in love with the first person our eyes light upon. Much of the play's fun comes during a long night in the forest, where the mischiefmaker anoints the eyes of sleeping lovers with magic potions that cause them to adore the first person they see upon awakening.
This causes all sorts of confusions, not least when Titania, the Fairy Queen herself, falls in love with a weaver who has grown donkey's ears. The weaver is Bottom (Kevin Kline), and he and the mischievous Puck (Stanley Tucci) are the most important characters in the play, although it also involves dukes, kings, queens and high-born lovers. Bottom has a good heart and bumbles through, and Puck (also called Robin Goodfellow) spreads misunderstanding wherever he goes. The young lovers are pawns in a magic show: When they can't see the one they love, they love the one they see.
Michael Hoffman's new film of "William Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream" (who else's?) is updated to the 19th century, set in Italy and furnished with bicycles and operatic interludes. But it is founded on Shakespeare's language and is faithful, by and large, to the original play. Harold Bloom complains in his wise best seller, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that the play's romantic capers have been twisted by modern adaptations into "the notion that sexual violence and bestiality are at the center of this humane and wise drama." He might approve of this version, which is gentle and lighthearted, and portrays Bottom not as a lustful animal but as a nice enough fellow who has had the misfortune to wake up with donkey's ears--"amiably innocent, and not very bawdy," as Bloom describes him.
Kevin Kline is, of course, the embodiment of amiability, as he bashfully parries the passionate advances of Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer). Her eyes have been anointed with magical ointment at the behest of her husband, Oberon (Rupert Everett), who hopes to steal away the young boy they both dote on. When she opens them to regard Bottom, she is besotted with love and inspired to some of Shakespeare's most lyrical poetry: I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee; And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep, And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep. Meanwhile, more magical potions, distributed carelessly by Puck, have hopelessly confused the relationships among four young people who were introduced at the beginning of the play. They are Helena (Calista Flockhart), Hermia (Anna Friel), Demetrius (Christian Bale) and Lysander (Dominic West). Now follow this closely: Hermia has been promised by her father to Demetrius, but she loves Lysander. Demetrius was Helena's lover, but now claims to prefer Hermia. Hermia is offered three cruel choices by the duke, Theseus (David Strathairn): marry according to her father's wishes, go into a convent or die. Desperate, she flees to a nearby wood with Lysander, her true love. Helena, who loves Demetrius, tips him off to follow them; maybe if he sees his intended in the arms of another man, he will return to Helena's arms.
The woods grow crowded. Also turning up at the same moonlit rendezvous are Bottom and his friends, workmen from the village who plan to rehearse a play to be performed at the wedding of Theseus and his intended, Queen Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau). And flickering about the glen are Oberon, Titania, Puck and assorted fairies. Only the most determined typecasting helps us tell them apart: As many times as I've been through this play in one form or another, I can't always distinguish the four young lovers, who seem interchangeable. They function mostly to be meddled with by Puck's potions.
Hoffman, whose wonderful "Restoration" re-created a time of fire and plague, here conducts with a playful touch. There are small gems of stagecraft for all of the actors, including Snout, the village tinker, who plays a wall in the performance for the duke, and makes a circle with his thumb and finger to represent a chink in it. It's wonderful to behold Pfeiffer's infatuation with the donkey-eared Bottom, who she winds in her arms as "doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle gently twist"; her love is so real, we almost believe it. Kline's Bottom tactfully humors her mad infatuation, good-natured and accepting. And Tucci's Puck suggests sometimes that he has a darker side, but it not so much malicious as
Pot luck Shakespeare is enjoying a special film vogue now, what with the tempting prospect of hearing a ''forsooth'' or ''methinks'' from the least likely sources. The strategy of choice is picking a travel agent's dream setting, casting attractive actors no matter what (e.g., Keanu Reeves in ''Much Ado About Nothing''), giving an outrageous costume party and hoping for the best. But even for the Leo-does-Romeo set these productions need more than visual flash if they hope to work. Take away smooth ensemble acting and a unifying vision, and you're left with the dramatic equivalent of watching Noah load the ark.
Michael Hoffman's fussy production of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' is just such a parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what. Mr. Hoffman has transported the play's humans and fairies to Tuscany, where they switch partners under the influence of trickery from Stanley Tucci's mischievous Puck. But there's no magic potion to banish the film's awkwardness or make it more than a string of intermittent acting highlights. Puck's ''Lord, what fools these mortals be!'' looks like an understatement under the circumstances.
No doubt unwittingly, this ''Midsummer Night's Dream'' shows how high the bar has been raised by ''Shakespeare in Love.'' The allure and cleverness of that film, not to mention its far more Shakespearean spirit, make it a hard act for a hodgepodge to follow. Not even Michelle Pfeiffer's commanding loveliness as the fairy queen Titania, and her ability to speak of such things as ''my bower'' with perfect ease, can offset the decision to have the actors grapple awkwardly with bicycles. Not even the digital butterflies that flutter through the opening credits look as magical as they should.
The hoodwinked characters of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' are meant to be mismatched much of the time. But not like this. The distraught Helena, played as a hand-waving, eye-rolling ditz by Calista Flockhart, hardly fits into the same film with David Strathairn's reserved Duke Theseus, or with Rupert Everett as a slinky Oberon. Mr. Everett, like the inspired Kevin Kline as the ham actor Bottom, is utterly at ease with this material in ways that many other cast members are not. This Oberon makes himself seductive just by speaking, but the film isn't taking any chances. It finds as many ways for Mr. Everett to lounge around bare-chested as the play will allow.
Similar directorial inspiration guides the love-struck adventure of the title, to the point where the film's most nubile actors -- among them Christian Bale as Demetrius, Anna Friel as Hermia and Dominic West as Lysander -- wind up discreetly naked in the woods the morning after. Unfortunately, that's more memorable than just about anything else they do. Though Mr. West and especially Ms. Friel approach their roles with gratifying ease, Mr. Bale is once again given the cheesecake treatment and little occasion to rise above it. This production tarts up the play any way it can.
One ostensible attraction is the vast woodland set built on Fellini's old Cinecitta sound stage, a murky fairy kingdom where much of the film takes place. Though Mr. Hoffman loads it with high-minded clutter that recalls his ''Restoration,'' he can't change the fact that the film is stuck in dark, unappetizing surroundings despite its intermittent Italian scenery. The Tuscan hill town of Montepulciano is largely wasted here.
But it is in the town that Mr. Kline's Bottom saunters into view, looking natty and faintly woebegone in ways that invoke Marcello Mastroianni's courtly presence. Mr. Kline's very appearance here is a relief, since the role of Bottom is so very right for him.
The play's trajectory is never clearer than in chronicling Bottom's actorly affectations, then watching him come to life in the bewitching presence of Ms. Pfeiffer's Titania. Literally transformed into an ass, as the film uses ingenious donkey makeup and Mr. Kline actually brays in witty fashion, this Bottom carries with him all the story's possibilities of tenderhearted redemption rising out of inspired folly.
The theatrical carryings-on of Bottom and company provide the film's best attempts at comedy. Staging a play about Pyramus and Thisbe with a troupe including Bill Irwin, Roger Rees and Sam Rockwell (as the beauteous heroine), Bottom's acting company delights its late-19th-century audience in ways Mr. Hoffman's film can only occasionally manage.
Critics are looking for "magic" in Shakespeare's tale about magic, A Midsummer Night's Dream, re-envisioned for the screen by director Michael Hoffman. Janet Maslin in the New York Times can't find it. "There's no magic potion to banish the film's awkwardness or make it more than a string of intermittent acting highlights," she concludes. Nor can Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Daily News, who writes that the film "suffers from an incoherent vision and a fatal lack of magic." Jay Carr in the Boston Globe agrees: "Hoffman has given us a serviceable Midsummer Night's Dream, but not a magical one when nothing less than magical will do." "Sometimes, magic doesn't happen," is the verdict of Steve Murray in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Philip Wuntch in the Dallas Morning News concludes that the film "is imaginative but not magical." But Jami Bernard's review in the New York Daily News is headed: "Magic's Still There" Likewise Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail commends Hoffman for resisting the temptation to load the film with special effects and to rely instead on the performances of the cast. He particularly praises the performance of Kevin Kline as Bottom in a closing scene. "Suddenly, with virtually no help, our disbelief gets suspended, instantly transporting us into the illusion. We're moved, and the point is beautifully made: Who knows when the theater might work its splendid magic?"
After watching "William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' " Michael Hoffman's adaptation of the romantic comedy, I'm left with more admiration than fairy dust. But it was pleasurable all the same.
I only wish I had loved this film the way I enjoyed an outdoor stage version one delightful summer's eve in the early 1970s in Hyde Park, London.
The performers (were they from the Royal Shakespeare Company?), dressed in Roman period costume, enthralled me and my fellow, knock-kneed schoolboys. The big star was an athletic, sandaled Puck who leapt like a two-footed gazelle between shrubs and bushes.
He seemed more like Tarzan or Hermes than Puck. There was also a romantic delicacy over everything, and a sense we had really penetrated the world of fairies. I felt as if I had been to romantic oblivion and back that night.
Hoffman's movie didn't take me on the same flight, but his direction is imaginative, and there are spirited performances from Kevin Kline as Nick Bottom and Calista Flockhart as Helena, that tenacious pursuer of a man with eyes for another.
In case you haven't taken that class, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a play written by the Man of Stratford-Upon-Avon 400 years ago.
It's about a handful of frustrated lovers whose unrequited, mismatched passions are put right � eventually, that is � by a circle of fairies with too much time and fairy dust on their hands. If you use this synopsis in your next English test, I don't know you.
When her imperious father demands an arranged marriage with the wrong man, Hermia (Anna Friel) and her true love, Lysander (Dominic West), run off to the forest.
The setting, by the way, is 19th-century Tuscany, a beautiful world of cafes and squares, where that newfangled invention known as the bicycle has become the hottest thing. Thus, Hermia and Lysander escape by bike. Demetrius (Christian Bale), the promised groom in Dad's arranged union, chases Hermia, also on bicycle. Helena (Flockhart), who's crazy for Demetrius, gets on her wheels, too, and chases him.
They're all headed for the magical lair of Oberon (Rupert Everett), King of the, uh, Fairies, whose jealousy for his wife Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer in excelsis) knows no bounds, and whose trusted assistant, Puck (Stanley Tucci), is read ily available for mischievous duty.
Employing a potion that causes its recipients to fall in love with the first person they see, Puck starts the craziness that � for one midsummer night's eve � will render everyone romantically bonkers. Titania, for example, will find herself inextricably drawn to Bottom (Kline), an insufferable over-actor in a troupe of simple-minded actors who happen to be rehearsing a play in the forest. To make this attraction even more comical, Oberon's minion renders Bottom into a partial, big-eared ass.
Hoffman introduces a memorable sensuality to the movie. The fairy world has a definite whiff of passion, lust and Bacchanalia about it, while lustrous tresses of hair seem to have a magical sense of decency, falling in all the right, tactful places.
Is it possible that Hoffman � who made the underrated "Restoration," was too bright and busy about things? Is that why Bottom's fellow goofballs � who are supposed to be comic relief � look like the somber cast of "The Iceman Cometh"?
The magic, alas, isn't as potent as it could have been. It seems merely a means to a dramatic end, rather than a rhapsodic, enchanting end unto itself. And if there had been more of it, Hoffman could have sprinkled it over Bale, Everett and Sophie Marceau (as Hippolyta), who honor their duties rather than rise above their roles. They are passing cameos, but not radiant parts of a great whole.
Hoffman's more successful with the bigger names. There's an amusing piece of business, for instance, when Tucci's Puck tries to make sense of this strange contraption called a bicycle. And he has a comical array of, uh, puckish facial expressions. Pfeiffer is visually radiant, although this probably has more to do with cinematography and her genetics than performance.
Kline and Flockhart do most of the pedaling. When Kline gets goofy � as he did in "A Fish Called Wanda" and "In & Out," he's an irresistible, madcap Errol Flynn, twisting his good looks into hilarious contortions. And Flockhart exudes a wonderful vulnerability and sense of comic timing, as she pursues Demetrius, suffering all manner of indignity and incredulity along the way. Unfortunately, her character is scripted to wax poetic about Bale, who hardly deserves such a charismatic soul. Passing inequities like this turned this movie into a pleasing reverie, say, rather than a lifelong dream.
When filmmakers scratch a Shakespearean itch, they tend to do the dramas.
Those are perceived as a testing of the mettle, especially to actors with enough name to get a project green-lighted, an urge to stretch or prove themselves, and to display their altruism.
The dramas make for strong film scenes. The Richards have the battles. The Othellos still speak, in filmmaker logic, to today from the 17th century.
But if you really want to test the mettle, try Shakespeare's comedies. No armor-rattling or Greatest Hits monologues to fall back upon. Just you and the language, baby, and a '90s show-me audience out there.
Although it is overproduced, and not a little affectedly clever, A Midsummer Night's Dream passes the mettle test. There are no failures among the actors.
And while we're talking mettle: Director Michael Hoffman has the chutzpah to give himself a screenplay credit, as well. If there is sacrilege afoot, I'm not enough of a scholar to spot it.
This is the "What fools these mortals be" play. I should like to point out, as a mortal, that the same fairy who makes that judgment slipped the story's mortals the Elizabethan-age equivalent of LSD before he came to the conclusion.
Hoffman, with excellent result, changes the setting from ancient Greece to bucolic Italy at the end of the 19th century. Love is everywhere, but it is woefully misaligned.
The father of Hermia (Anna Friel) wants her to marry Demetrius (Christian Bale). She wants to marry Lysander (Dominic West), whom she really loves.
The duke, Theseus (David Strathairn), rules that Hermia may either marry Demetrius or forswear love forever.
She and Lysander flee -- on bicycles, which is cute -- into the forest in hopes of finding a place where they can marry.
Pursuing them is Helena (Calista Flockhart), who chases the definitely uninterested Demetrius like a spaniel (and berates herself for being so besotted).
Also in the forest: A troupe of amateur actors, among them the weaver Bottom (Kevin Kline), rehearsing a play for the duke's pleasure, and perhaps a bit of a stipend for being the best of an evening's entertainment.
The forest is home to the fairies, whose king, Oberon (Rupert Everett), is in the midst of a spat with his wife, Queen Titania (Michelle Pfeiffer). Oberon dispatches the behorned Puck (Stanley Tucci) with a flower love potion.
After its administration, lovers awake to find themselves deeply in love with inconvenient partners. Titania, for example, is in love with an ass -- Bottom, whom the potion has turned into a donkey.
The potion will wear off with the dawn, and all will end well, especially for the amateur actors. Just about everything that could go wrong at their performance for the duke and his audience goes wrong. The duke is amused, though, and you will be, too. This is easily the best and funniest sequence of Hoffman's film.
Credit Kline for most of this. He does the physical comedy wonderfully; Shakespeare comes from his mouth as easily as "Lemme have a Snickers and two Paydays" comes from ours. Tucci is memorable as a laid-back Puck.
The film follows the new international co-production standard for Shakespeare: Each actor is allowed his accent of national origin.
Hoffman's choice of place and period allows handsome costuming and gorgeous music: Italian arias and Mendelssohn.
One would like to raid the wardrobe at night and reduce the glitter available to production designer Luciana Arrighi. And move the forest scenes a little back from the precipice of camp.