Beyond Brilliant

Rating: 10/10 (31 December 1998)

I gave this movie 10 out of 10, and I can supply to you only one justification for that action: there were no higher scores available.
It is a hypothetical recreation of what might have been happening in Shakespeare's life at the time he created Romeo and Juliet. It is passionate, touching, contains both high humor and low. It is filled with both loving in-jokes and clear mass appeal. Co-author Tom Stoppard is a Shakespeare scholar, perhaps I should say a Shakespeare lover, who represented the period as accurately as possible without interrupting the accessibility of his story. The authors even threw in a couple of jokey anachronisms that would have pleased Shakespeare himself. (He's drinking from a coffee cup that says "Souvenir of Stratford upon Avon", and the ferrymen on the Thames are eerily identical to today's cab drivers)
If Shakespeare himself had access to modern technology, he could not write a much better movie script than this. How good is it? The screenwriters' words are juxtaposed to Shakespeare's own for two hours, and stand up well. I'm not saying they are as good as Shakespeare, but anyone who can stand next to Shakespeare and not be embarrassed by the comparison is one seriously good writer.
If Stoppard and his partner don't win best screenplay for this movie, then even-handed justice exists not in humankind.