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Director John Madden’s deft guidance credibly evokes a love, a passion, that could inspire a masterpiece. This isn’t some cheapy, easy riff of Elizabethan pop culture references. Where Ryan gets bogged down in war theory debates, pat philosophizing, strained personal anecdotes, banal platitudes, and burdened self-import, Shakespeare In Love is a nimble, absorbing farce in the mold of Shakespeare – with veiled identities, comedy of manners, and a lyrical star-crossed romance – that matures and expands into a variation of his tragedies, especially as events become influences for the play that he’s writing, Romeo & Juliet. The right director won the Oscar, if only for the landmark Normandy invasion alone (including the kinetic drop-frame approach that remains the standard for a combat aesthetic), but the reason Shakespeare In Love is better is because of the screenplay, which is superior to Robert Rodat’s for Ryan – and by a considerable margin. It’s smart, witty, and as substantial as the legend it fictionalizes, with a fervent love story to match.
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Shakespeare In Love is downright rapturous. Now, twenty years removed from that awards season noise, a revisit (my first in over at least a decade) of the 7-time Academy Award winner confirmed what I always believed: Academy members loved and respected Shakespeare from start to finish because it is a better film from start to finish.Īs a result, on March 21, 1999, despite Saving Private Ryan being so pre-ordained that the Academy tapped Spielberg’s iconic collaborator Harrison Ford to present Best Picture, Shakespeare In Love’s surprise victory elicited the biggest gasp this side of the Moonlight / La La Land debacle.īut that was then. By contrast, Shakespeare In Love boasted a conceptual brilliance and literate sophistication that, with its superb ensemble and skillful direction, soared with a highbrow-yet-accessible follow-through. People may have perceived it as a smear, and tactically perhaps it was, but aside from the caveat that Ryan’s climactic battle is the near-equal of the Normandy sequence, the whisper also had the benefit of being the truth.įor many Academy voters, Weinstein was confirming (and thus validating) what many of them likely felt but were too afraid to say (whether out of reverence for Ryan, its legendary director, or a newfound appreciation for The Greatest Generation). Harvey didn’t need to plant the idea he simply seized on it. It wasn’t a new thought it’s one that people had – hell, I had it – if mostly in secret. The ambivalence about Saving Private Ryan post-Normandy was already in the air. Weinstein did not concoct that view out of whole cloth. The fact that he did this is indisputable, but the idea that Harvey invented that opinion isn’t. For Harvey, the whisper campaign was this: once you get past the stunning D-Day opener, there wasn't much there to Saving Private Ryan. Various accounts, from books to oral histories, attribute it to the birth of the “whisper campaign,” where a slander is strategically spread through gossipy buzz along the awards circuit, or in off-the-record press convos. Most contend it was through a dirty trick. Instead, it was to assure them that it was okay to vote for Shakespeare – the film they actually loved – and that doing so wouldn’t make them bad, unpatriotic Americans. His job, then, wasn’t to convince Oscar voters that Shakespeare was better than Ryan. When initial December premieres and Academy screenings for Shakespeare were met with unexpected raves of exultant bliss, Weinstein realized he had a legitimate contender. This, no doubt, was crucial and perhaps even necessary to slay an Oscar-lock goliath like Saving Private Ryan, but Shakespeare didn’t win because Weinstein was some Hollywood Svengali whose spellbinding powers of deep-pocketed marketing persuasion somehow hypnotized weak-minded Academy members to vote against their wishes. With a rumored $15 million, the notorious-now-disgraced mogul-bully staged an unprecedented Oscar race blitz. Shakespeare in Love is a better film than Saving Private Ryan.Ĭonsidering how that’s a minority opinion (which I’ll defend in a bit), many people believe that Shakespeare producer and Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein essentially bought the 1998 Academy Award for Best Picture. Here's the dirty little secret: it should have. This year's Best Picture winner should hold Shakespeare's ale, because in 1999 an artsy piece of erudite fan fiction about the Bard's young career took down none other than Steven Spielberg himself.
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And you thought Green Book was a surprise.