A weak comedy

Rating: 1/10 (12 December 1998)

This is definitely not a film for all tastes. "Shakespeare in Love" is a one joke comedy clearly aimed at self satisfied intellectuals of a literary bent. In my opinion, it is neither terribly romantic nor terribly funny suffering as it does from sitcom style performances from its two leads; Joseph Finnes (looking very much like a Japanese animation character) and Gwyneth Paltrow (one of the most uninteresting actresses in Hollywood).
The one joke (a sophmoric conceit from Tom Stoppard) is to apply all the modern theater's cliche's (greedy theater producers, conceited actors, etc.) to Shakespeare's time. The "romance" (Shakespeare finds his "muse" and the love of his life as he struggles to complete "Romeo and Juliet") is on a par with most paperback romance novels and consists mostly of Finnes and Paltrow gazing idiotically at one another. The most satisfying moments are from the short excerpts from "Romeo and Juliet" but Finnes and Paltrow play them so badly (and they are so poorly directed) that any real emotion is lost. One would be foolish to expect any accuracy in the recreation of Shakespeare's life and times (the authors of this triviality are far too self interested for that) but it is distressing to see Shakespeare reduced to a sitcom character in a second rate television show. Pseudointellectual and neither charming nor funny, "Shakespeare in Love" was a total waste of my time.