SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (56)

Directed by: John Madden

Starring: Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush, Judi Dench

The Pitch: The young William Shakespeare struggles against writer's block, money-minded producers, narrow-minded censors, and a work-in-progress called "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter".

Theo Sez: The 'luvvie' comedy - best, or at least better, experienced in Kenneth Branagh's A MIDWINTER'S TALE, a.k.a. IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER - reinforced with slapstick, satire, sentimentality, general high spirits and a bushelful of cheerful anachronisms (from a Stratford-on- Avon souvenir mug to a pretentious Elizabethan restaurant serving "marinated pig's-foot on a buckwheat pancake"). It's a genre best appreciated by those who subscribe to the magic of the Theatah, who buy into the image of theatre-people as mendicant free-spirits with a collective heart of gold, who love the atmosphere of perpetual crisis and the way everything somehow comes out right on the night ("It's a mystery"), who swoon to see all the various strands coalesce in a triumphant performance. Those of us who prefer this kind of thing done without the self-congratulation and high-culture rhubarb, as FOOTLIGHT PARADE and 42ND STREET or even DAY FOR NIGHT, may point out that the strands don't in fact coalesce in a particularly memorable or imaginative way - that it just plods along rhythm-wise, that the twists aren't especially ingenious, that the ending is achieved through a rather shabby deus ex machina, that the score is unrelenting in its determination to jolly things along, that the lines really aren't all that witty, unless you find the combination of bawdy jokes and Elizabethan diction hilarious in itself. Best of it are the subtle references, Will's Banquo-like appearance when presumed dead or a cod-Shakespeare line like "I'm unmanned, unmade and unmended" in the (largely blank-verse) dialogue ; worst of it are the unsubtle references, as when everything stops dead so a boy can explain that he's (playwright- to-be) John Webster. Fun, but a good way short of enchantment ; unless, of course, you allow yourself to be enchanted.