Great job

Rating: 9/10 (28 May 2000)

Okay, I admit it. I loved this movie. I loved it even more than the classic play on which it is based.
Remaking, and especially modernizing, a classic is a delicate business. It's terribly easy, when bringing old truths into modern idiom, to fall so far into the pool of popular culture as to lose depth, or to work so hard at making an old story accessible to a young audience that the result is pure tedium for all ages.
In 1999, She's All That, a very loose and unacknowledged update of Pygmalion, gave us a perfect example of this kind of failure. Thankfully, however, the same year brought us this movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, an update/remake of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew - and a great example of how to do it right.
Doing it right, you see, is not about putting the thing into modern dress and language or adding gimmicks you think will appeal to people who might otherwise expect themselves to be bored. Doing it right is about deconstructing something old until you get right down to the barest timeless truth of the thing, the reason why the author wrote the original, the reason why you are drawn to retelling the story in the first place, and then - and only then - reconstructing the story around that truth in the spirit of the original author, but dressing it according to your own zeitgeist.
Ever since my parents took me to see The Taming of the Shrew when I was eight years old, I've had kind of a love/hate thing going on with it. I've loved the humor, the cleverness, and the fact that everybody who deserves happiness and love gets it in the end. The parts I've hated are, first, the part where Kate is privately humiliated, and then the part where she has to appear subservient to her husband, even though she does it for love. Without spoiling it for you, I can tell you this is not quite what happens in 10 Things I Hate About You.
Strip away all the business and temporal context of Shakespeare's Shrew and this is the message you are left with: Love, trust, and respect must be earned. They are not simply consequences of being young and cute. Having a good relationship, loving well and being well loved, require trust and respect. These are earned in a relationship when two people are kind, generous, and honest with each other, and bound up in all that, a little humble and a little nakedly needful and desirous of each other.
And guess what? When you strip away all the business and temporal context, this is also the message of 10 Things I Hate About You! Of course, it's been put into modern context, young language and dress. And I love the fact that this version has also been thoroughly adapted to the modern consciousness that a young woman can learn this stuff herself, just by being smart and true to herself, and without being forced there by a bunch of men. I also love the way that the boys in this version of the story have to go through the same painful process and learn the same lessons. But all the best elements of the original - the timeless truth, the humor, the cleverness, and the just deserts - remain intact.
The really cool thing about this version, though, is something I don't remember from the original. In 10 Things, we really get to watch all the main characters grow up. We get to watch them make choices, right and wrong, hurt each other, heal each other, and learn. We get to watch them all become more human.
And that's the kind of transformation that makes a classic.