I Ne'er Saw True Beauty 'Til This Movie

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Did my heart love 'til now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty 'til this night.

Romeo in "Romeo and Juliet"

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Have you ever been watching the Academy Awards and you find yourself wondering, "What were they thinking?"

Of course, you have. We all have at one time or another.

When the Oscars were presented for 1998, I was certain that "Saving Private Ryan" would win Best Picture. I was so certain that I could have bet money on it — and I am not a betting man.

I could have lost my shirt, too.

Because "Shakespeare in Love," the movie that was released on this day in 1998, took home the Oscar. And I definitely wondered, "What were they thinking?" on that occasion.

Now, understand me. I like Gwyneth Paltrow (who won Best Actress) very much. I always enjoy her movies. I enjoyed "Shakespeare in Love," for that matter. But I didn't think it was a better movie than "Saving Private Ryan." No way.

But, in hindsight, I have to admit there was, in Shakespeare's words, "true beauty" in the story.

1998 was an unusual year for the Oscars in many ways.

Mainly, the Oscars went against the conventional wisdom that the director of the Best Picture wins Best Director. In 1998 Steven Spielberg won Best Director for "Saving Private Ryan," not John Madden (director of "Shakespeare in Love").

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Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow): You have never spoken so well of him before.

William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes): He was not dead before.

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It was an intriguing idea for a fantasy love story — William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), struggling to make it as a writer but plagued by that old writer's bugaboo, writer's block, seeks inspiration from his muse whom he discovers in the person of Viola De Lesseps (Paltrow).

De Lesseps wants to act, but women are prohibited from appearing on the stage in the late 16th century so she disguises herself as a man.

Shakespeare learns who she really is, and the two embark on an affair that Shakespeare uses as the inspiration to transform his current play, "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter," into the classic tragedy, "Romeo and Juliet."

En route to this transformation, you see, Viola is cast as Romeo.

Well, if you haven't seen the movie, you should. As much as I thought "Saving Private Ryan" deserved the Best Picture Oscar, that doesn't change the fact that "Shakespeare in Love" was an entertaining and imaginative tale.

I guess it was the kind of story that the viewer could take anything from. As a writer, it should come as no surprise that the enduring message for me was the reminder that a great story is about people. The best writers take realistic, human problems — often problems they themselves have faced — and make their characters resolve them.

Joseph Fiennes was a persuasively human Shakespeare — not the stiff Shakespeare whose life story you may have had to research or whose plays you may have had to read when you were in high school but a living, breathing Shakespeare with problems very much like the ones we have today.

Personally, I find a Shakespeare who has struggled to achieve success as a writer more appealing than a Shakespeare who never knows hard times. The former is more qualified to comment on the human condition than the latter.

Near the end, I thought the movie grew a bit predictable. As the relationship between Shakespeare and Viola hurtled toward its apparently inevitable conclusion, so did the evolution of the original Romeo and the pirates play into "Romeo and Juliet." You could see it coming.

Of course, it helped to have the benefit of 400 years' worth of hindsight.

The Short, Unhappy Life of Sylvia Plath

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I was speaking with a friend about the movie "Sylvia," which made its debut on this day in 2003. My friend said he thought it was a good movie but depressing.

Well, of course, it was depressing. It was about Sylvia Plath, a writer of poems and short stories who suffered from depression and reportedly attempted to kill herself a few times before she finally succeeded in 1963.

The movie account could not help but be depressing. To tell the story of her life without being depressing would be like trying to tell the story of Richard Nixon without mentioning Watergate.

It was a knowledgeable and reverent movie. It just wasn't much fun, and it didn't have any wisdom to share about Plath's death.

Like many creative types, Plath was a disturbed person. In the movie about Plath's life, Gwyneth Paltrow, in the title role, spoke of how her life changed radically when, long before she turned 10, she lost her father.

While it is tragic for a young girl to lose a parent, it couldn't have been too much of a surprise. Otto Plath was in his 50s (and suffering from undiagnosed diabetes), a fact that wasn't mentioned in the movie.

Anyway, whether she did actually try to kill herself before she finally did in February 1963, it is pretty clear that she was unstable throughout her adult life.

All of which made for a challenging part for Paltrow to play. She never really had the chance to show any warmth — or, for that matter, humor. Nothing that would have made her seem more human.

Nevertheless, I felt Paltrow rose to the occasion, giving a suitably haunting performance. She even resembled Plath — well, sorta.

There were similarities in their lives as well as their faces. Paltrow lost her own father around the time she was making "Sylvia." She was much older than Plath when she lost her father, but she was the same age when she made the film that Plath was when she killed herself.

Like Plath, Paltrow has two children. And her mother, Blythe Danner, played her mother in the movie. That was a nice touch.

Daniel Craig probably would not have been my first choice to play Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. But his performance did manage to restore credibility to Plath's charges when they were running low on the empathy meter.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story, Hughes' role in Plath's death remains murky at best. It is known that he was unfaithful in the year leading up to Plath's suicide, and the couple had separated months before Plath succeeded in killing herself. To my knowledge, it has never been established how much of a part those events played.

Feminists who survived Plath tended to believe Hughes was involved in or contributed to her death in some way. There were even attempts to alter Plath's grave marker by eliminating the Hughes surname.

(For his part, Hughes was said to be devastated by Plath's death. Reportedly, he wrote to a friend that Plath's death meant the end of his own life — yet he outlived her by more than 35 years.)

Most women who must confront infidelity in their marriage manage to survive it; some even thrive. With Plath's history, though, it is not inconceivable that her husband's affair would be the thing to push her over the edge.

I thought Paltrow was effective with what she was given — which was a character who was always unhappy.

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Now, back to the resemblance of Paltrow to Plath.

As I have mentioned here before, I am a big fan of historical movies, but I am kind of picky. If I know what the subject of the movie looked like in life, I expect the actor or actress portraying that person to be close to matching my mental image.

I have long thought that Paltrow was one of the most beautiful actresses of her generation; earlier this year, PEOPLE magazine apparently agreed with me when it named her the most beautiful woman of 2013.

Plath was, by no means, an ugly woman, but I don't think she was quite the beauty that Paltrow is.

The pictures I've seen of Plath are not unpleasant. I simply find her a bit plain, especially when compared to Paltrow.

(Reminds me of conversations I used to have with a co–worker. She told me that she had been told by others that she looked like Julia Roberts. I always smiled and said nothing when she said that to me. I never saw the resemblance.)

Yet Paltrow managed to look quite a bit like Plath (whose actual picture you can see to the left). Some folks have said there was a strong resemblance to begin with, and maybe there was, but I never really saw it, at least until I saw the movie. Then I did.

I don't know what Plath sounded like when she spoke, though. When I saw Oliver Stone's "Nixon," I was a bit put off at first by the fact that Anthony Hopkins neither looked nor sounded like Richard Nixon. I was young when Nixon was president, but I do have a vivid memory of how he looked and sounded.

Even so Hopkins managed to capture Nixon's personality, and I think that may be what Paltrow did with Plath. She may have looked a bit like Plath, she may even have sounded like her, too, although Plath, like many writers, seems to have shunned the spotlight, preferring to let her writing speak for itself.

The Eye of the Beholder

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Hal: Does she take the cake or what?

Mauricio: She takes the whole bakery, Hal.

Shallow Hal (2001)

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One of the truly rewarding experiences that comes from being more than merely a casual movie watcher is the sensation of seeing a story that has something genuine to say — and doesn't have to hit its audience over the head to say it.

I felt that was the case with "Shallow Hal," which premiered on this day 10 years ago — except that, initially at least, I may have been a bit shallow myself.

When I saw the trailers for the movie, I lumped it with a sub–genre of comedy that specializes in cheap jokes at the expense of certain segments of the population — in this case, obese people. And I decided that I would not contribute, in any way, to the exploitation of people who have probably struggled with weight issues all their lives.

I was wrong to prejudge it that way.

A few years later, I was talking to a co–worker who told me he had purchased the DVD of that movie. "What did you think of it?" he asked. I confessed that I had never seen it. He said he would bring it for me to borrow if I would promise to watch it. I promised — and darned if he didn't bring it to me the next day!

"It's better than you think it is," he told me.

So I watched it that night — and he was right. "Shallow Hal" was, in reviewer Roger Ebert's words, "surprisingly moving at times."

My friend was right. It was much better than I thought.

Now, I have always thought that Gwyneth Paltrow is an exceptionally attractive woman, and I figured that any movie that would require me to look at her for nearly two hours wasn't a complete waste of time.

I approached the assignment of watching the movie with a certain amount of resignation.

I had been true to my original position. I had not contributed to the exploitation of obese people. I didn't buy a ticket, and I didn't buy the DVD.

I figured that, if I had to watch the movie, I had avoided contributing to its financial success (and it has earned a handsome profit). I had lived up to my end of the bargain. And my reward was to watch Gwyneth Paltrow — who was quite a bankable star in those years right after she won the Oscar for "Shakespeare in Love."

As I say, I have always thought she was attractive. And I had been gaining respect for her acting ability with her other recent performances in movies like "Great Expectations" and "Sliding Doors."

But it took considerable talent for her to play both the svelte Rosemary that Jack Black (playing a womanizer who had been hypnotized and could see only a woman's internal beauty) saw and the massive Rosemary that everyone else saw — and she deserved to be commended for wearing a 25–pound "fatsuit" and facial makeup that not only gave her the appearance of an obese person but also the sensation of being an obese person.

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That is an important distinction, I think.

As I understand it, there are really two different kinds of fatsuits.

One kind re–creates the appearance of additional weight but is, essentially, weightless. An actor who is wearing such a padded suit under his/her clothes will appear to be obese but will not experience what life is like when one must carry around additional pounds — how an obese person must ease into a chair or a booth or walk through narrow doorways at an angle.

The other kind of fatsuit is the kind that is weighted. It is designed to give the wearer the sensation of obesity, not merely the appearance. And that is the kind that Paltrow wore.

It was bound to influence the way she played the part.

I guess I was put off by the reputation of the Farrelly Brothers, the movie's writers/directors/producers. They were known for making movies that relied heavily on a lot of slapstick and off–color humor. I'm not necessarily opposed to that kind of humor except when it is used to poke fun at those who are weak and vulnerable.

It's like kicking a guy when he's down.

But when I saw "Shallow Hal," it was clear to me that the Farrellys had gone to unusual lengths to build audience empathy for obese people and send some serious messages about modern society and its treatment of those with severe weight issues.

I applaud Paltrow for wearing a weighted fatsuit, but if I was going to criticize that, I would say that the extra weight was not in proportion to the size of the character she played. An additional 25 pounds on someone of Paltrow's build would be noticeable but far from morbidly obese.

And it would take someone who was morbidly obese to buckle the steel legs of a chair merely by sitting in it.

Poor Rosemary, I thought when I watched "Shallow Hal" the first time. How difficult and painful her life must be.

But Rosemary was honest about herself and her emotions — and she had some lessons to teach people who judge others too harshly.

The judgmental ones were the ones to be pitied.