Better than Shakespeare (possible spoiler)

Rating: 8/10 (22 March 2000)

This is a wonderful, funny, romantic teen comedy that may not be as laugh-out-loud uproarious as AMERICAN PIE, but whose drifts into seriousness and sentimentality are far more plausible and acceptable.
The film is at least the second modernisation of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew, but is much less objectionable than the Bard to its title character. Surely it will soon become a commonplace that Shakespearean makeovers are more successful than actual dramatisations. The advantages for the scriptwriter are legion - characters with a ready-made set of characteristics; forward moving plots etc. But the exercise never feels contrived here - characters may be named Stratford or Verona; one goth-hippy worships Will; the wired Bruno Kirby-a-like may spout the odd Bardic tag - but the rich inevitabliity of the plot allows for many themes to be touched on.
An adherence to this plot allows for some narrative surprise - for instance, Shakespeare, unlike most mainstream films, rarely begins his plays with his heroes, so it's a surprise when nearly ten minutes are spent introducing a character in the conventional Hollywood manner (past history; explanatory friend; introduction to him of other characters etc.), that it comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that he's only a subsidiary character after all.
This non-claustrophobic opening out applies to the film as a whole - although the relationship between Catherine and Patrick is clearly central, there is an even-handed treatment of secondary characters, not just plot enablers, but with problems and plot crises of their own, that makes the film seem so rich and alive.
Shakespeare's big theme is the mask, the roles we are forced to play in life, how we are fixed by how others see us, how this can lead to emptiness and perversion in our own nature. 10 THINGS is a brilliant essay on this, the adolescent battleground of reputation being the perfect place to test it. The theme is stated right from the start with Cameron, whose army-background means that he is starting at a new school for the ninth time. This accumulation of continually inchoate selves, the sense of the itinerary and the unfinished, plants seeds of ambiguity and doubt into a mechanically constructed plot of elegant closure, undermining the outcome not only of Cameron's subplot, but Catherine and Patrick's too (although not the pleasure we derive from such outcomes).
The main issue of reputation centres on Catherine and Patrick. The former is a very hostile, intelligent young woman, exasperated with her jock contemporaries and the fetishisation of shallow values. It may seem misogynistic to suggest that these very valid objections are just a smokescreen for the usual fear of sex, but it's not neccessarily sex per se Catherine rejects, but the egotistical male-gratifying power games that seek to put her in a very inferior place.
This is a marked improvement even on Shakespeare, and the resolution of her plot is not a climb down, but actually enabling, couched in terms of possible creativity and independence, as Patrick gives her a guitar to form a band, something she earlier said would annoy her dad. This is a uniquely open ending - she has already ruptured family ties by accepting a college place on the East Coast - what if she actually does form a band? If she doesn't, will Patrick follow her to Saint Laurence? Will she outgrow him?
Remarkable in a Hollywood movie, the male lead exists mainly to reflect and extract elements of the female lead's character, to push her plot. And yet it is his plot that distills the conflict between what you are taken for, and what you do. We aren't told until near the film's end over the 'truth' of Patrick's life (after all, we only have his word); up until then, we are forced to hold in tension the seeming connection between his actions (going out with a girl to make money) and his negative reputation, and its opposition to his likeable personality and evident desire. This ambiguity casts further doubt on the ending.
The rest of the cast brilliantly mirror this theme, from the staid careers officer who writes erotica, to the hipster teacher who loves Shakespeare. The film's very existence is called into ethical question by the discussions on the exclusionary literary canon.
Because it parallels a second interesting tension in the film, one of class. As in AMERICAN PIE, every character is fantastically rich, with huge houses and their own cars, all except Patrick, whose reputation is rooted in a criminal underclass. There is a tacit contrast between haves and haves not, conspicuous consumption and the disturbingly unknown that is quite surprising in such a good-natured comedy.
And it is scrupulously good-natured and fair. All the secondary characters are given depths and insecurities, even the silliest (Joey), while the blossoming of Bianca from a trivial beauty into a very complex, self-aware young woman is one of the film's great achievements. The fairy-tale school setting adds to the 'unreal' flavour of the plot, as do the snatches of Surrealism (playing golf into an American football sportsground; the scene with the marvellous Stratford dad doing his exercises).
The humour is remarkably clever and verbal, easily co-existing with the expected slapstick fun. The Shakespearean use of ritual spaces (eg Prom Nights) for the playing out of social anxieties is compelling, as is the wonderfully uncontrived gender reversal in the expected fight. The invasion by an army of drunken students of a huge upper-middle-class home has the right degree of terror and exhiliration. A real treat.