Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998)

Colin Firth and Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love

William Shakespeare: Joseph Fiennes
Viola De Lesseps: Gwyneth Paltrow
Philip Henslowe: Geoffrey Rush
Hugh Fennyman: Tom Wilkinson
Lord Wessex: Colin Firth
Tilney: Simon Callow
Queen Elizabeth: Judi Dench
Nurse: Imelda Staunton
Ned Alleyn: Ben Affleck
Richard Burbage: Martin Clunes
Christopher Marlowe: Rupert Everett
Ralph Bashford: Jim Carter
John Webster: Joe Roberts

Director: John Madden
Screenplay: Marc Norman, Tom Stoppard
Cinematography: Richard Greatrex
Production design: Martin Childs
Film editing: David Gamble
Costume design: Sandy Powell
Music: Stephen Warbeck

Posterity is a bitch. Winning a best picture Oscar doesn't necessarily fix a film permanently in the hearts and minds of moviegoers or film historians. Who today, for example, thinks that How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) was a better film than Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles masterpiece that it beat for best picture Oscar? And even more recent Oscar history is littered with dubious choices, most notably Paul Haggis's Crash, which was chosen as best picture of 2005 over Ang Lee's epochal Brokeback Mountain. Almost overnight, the tide began to turn against John Madden's Shakespeare in Love, in large part because it was a surprise winner over the presumed front-runner, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. As time has passed, Gwyneth Paltrow's best actress win for Shakespeare in Love has been questioned, too, partly because Paltrow's subsequent acting career has done nothing to maintain her reputation and her dabbling in fields such as country music, fashion, and off-beat New Age medicine and diet has made her look like a giddy dilettante. Even the fall of Harvey Weinstein cast a dark shadow over Shakespeare in Love, which he helped produce for his company, Miramax, and for which he managed an extensive Oscar campaign. But watching the film last night, I found myself caught up once again in its witty imagining of Shakespeare's life and milieu, the sexiness of its romantic intrigue, and yes, Paltrow's skillful performance of what is essentially four roles: Viola De Lesseps, Thomas Kent, and both Romeo and Juliet. It's a charming tour de force that makes me wonder what brought it out of her and what subsequently made her crash and burn. Much of the success of the film, however, lies not in its uniformly good performances or in John Madden's direction, but in the Oscar-winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. I suspect the latter, who had already demonstrated his intimate knowledge of Shakespeare in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is most responsible for a screenplay that can attract the casual moviegoer and entertain English majors at the same time. Some of its jokes go over a lot of the audience's heads, such as the revelation that the bloodthirsty, sadistic street urchin who hangs around the playhouse is named John Webster. The character is just the right age to grow up to write those hair-raising Jacobean plays The Duchess of Malfi (1612) and The White Devil (1614), but not knowing that doesn't matter much to the success of the film. Shakespeare in Love is never, as its central character would put it, "caviar to the general." Is it a better film than Saving Private Ryan? Or is it just smaller but cleverer and the temporary beneficiary of aggressive promotion? That bitch posterity will be the final judge.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)

Jude Law and Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley: Matt Damon
Marge Sherwood: Gwyneth Paltrow
Dickie Greenleaf: Jude Law
Meredith Logue: Cate Blanchett
Freddie Miles: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Peter Smith-Kingsley: Jack Davenport
Herbert Greenleaf: James Rebhorn
Inspector Roverini: Sergio Rubini
Alvin MacCarron: Philip Baker Hall
Aunt Joan: Celia Weston

Director: Anthony Minghella
Screenplay: Anthony Minghella
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: John Seale
Production design: Roy Walker
Film editing: Walter Murch
Music: Gabriel Yared

This second film version of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley suffers from a miscast lead and an over-detailed screenplay. That it suffers by comparison to the earlier version, René Clément's Purple Noon (1960), is only incidental -- comparisons, as people have been saying since the 15th century or longer, are odious. More to the point is that Matt Damon was, at this point in his career, not up to the role of Highsmith's charming demon, Tom Ripley. Damon has since become a major star and a very good actor, but The Talented Mr. Ripley appeared only two years after his breakthrough role in Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting -- a part tailor-made for the young Damon, and not just because he co-wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay. Still in his twenties when he played Tom Ripley, Damon hadn't quite grown into his face: He seems all teeth and youthful mannerisms, not at all the kind of person to attract the friendship of a Dickie Greenleaf. His transformation from the poor but upwardly mobile Ripley to masquerading as the wealthy, cosmopolitan Greenleaf feels spurred by the urgency of the moment and not by any innate corruption of the soul, which should be the essence of Ripley. Damon's Ripley could never grow into the killer con-artist that carried Highsmith's books into four sequels. But again with the comparisons: Damon is following in the footsteps of Alain Delon, whose spectacularly handsome Ripley in Purple Noon is the embodiment of Shakespeare's dictum that "sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds." It also doesn't help that Damon's Ripley is matched with Jude Law's Dickie. More people than I have wished that Law had been cast as Ripley instead. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, originally sought for the role, might have made a more convincing Ripley than Damon. But the fault also lies in Anthony Minghella's screenplay, which stretches and pads the story into a 139-minute run time, giving us more of Ripley's backstory -- how he met Dickie's father and got the commission to bring Dickie home, and how he first pretended to be Dickie when he met Meredith Logue on the trip to Europe -- than is absolutely necessary. Again, Purple Noon began in medias res, with Ripley out sailing with Greenleaf and Marge, and the backstory only gradually emerges. Minghella has fallen into a common error of American filmmakers: the desire to explain too much to the audience. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a handsome film, and there are some fine performances: Seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman in movies always gives me a pang of loss, and his Freddie Miles is a superbly snotty, wicked creation. It's the one point in the movie when we actually root for Ripley to kill someone. Cate Blanchett's Meredith is a small role, but Blanchett makes us wish there were more of it. And I think I prefer the ending of Minghella's film to that of Purple Noon. Both leave Ripley on the brink of being found out, but Minghella gives us a better tease: His Ripley faces a dilemma he has resolved before, that of disposing of a body.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

Royal Tenenbaum: Gene Hackman
Etheline Tenenbaum: Anjelica Huston
Chas Tenenbaum: Ben Stiller
Margot Tenenbaum: Gwyneth Paltrow
Richie Tenenbaum: Luke Wilson
Eli Cash: Owen Wilson
Raleigh St. Clair: Bill Murray
Henry Sherman: Danny Glover
Dusty: Seymour Cassel
Pagoda: Kumar Pallana
Ari Tenenbaum: Grant Rosenmeyer
Uzi Tenenbaum: Jonah Meyerson
Narrator (voice): Alec Baldwin

Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman
Production design: David Wasco
Film editing: Dylan Tichenor
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh

It's hard to be droll for an hour and a half, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which runs about 20 minutes longer than that, shows the strain. Still, I don't have the feeling with it that I sometimes have with Wes Anderson's  first two films, Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998), of not being completely in on the joke. This time it's the wacky family joke, familiar from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It With You and numerous sitcoms. It works in large part because the cast plays it with such beautifully straight faces. And especially because it's such a magnificent cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson (who co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson), Bill Murray, and Danny Glover. It's also beautifully designed by David Wasco and filmed by Robert D. Yeoman, with Anderson's characteristically meticulous, almost theatrical framing. Hackman, as the paterfamilias in absentia Royal Tenenbaum, is the cast standout, in large part because he gets to play loose while everyone else maintains a morose deadpan, but also because he's an actor who has always been cast as the loose cannon. Even in films in which he's supposed to be reserved and repressed, such as The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), he keeps you waiting for the inevitable moment when he snaps. Here he's loose from the beginning, but he doesn't tire you out with his volatility because he knows how much of it to keep in check at any given moment.