Kevin Kline's 'Bottom' seems to be the linch-pin here (no coincidence that Kline takes top billing) and that's both a plus and a very big minus. Bottom was never intended to be the primary focal point of the play, but here, Bottom (and Kline) top out to become both one of the only reasons to see this laconic meander, but also the reason the film drags out far longer than it should. The completely unnecessary and un-Shakespearean Bottom bits with bottles of wine poured on top of him to humiliate him, an unhappy marriage and a lot of gooey mood lighting in a lonely bedroom designed to show that this particular Bottom once had dreams(npi)of being far more than a weaver, are Hoffman/Kline conceits designed solely to pad Kline's presence.
For the rest, with the exception of a luminous Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, once the film is over, Kline is all you remember. The casting is so bland, (in plucky Calista Flockhart's earnest case, so ill advised) that everyone else retreats into a mildly pleasant melange of faces, costumes and decor.
Obvious characteristics, spelled out clearly in the play, are ignored even as they are spoken: the magic flower is called 'purple' innumerable times, but the flower Puck picks is bright red. Helena is supposed to be the physical opposite of Hermia--tall, and insecure about her height, as opposed to a dainty little doll (in Peter Hall's version: statuesque Diana Rigg versus petite Helen Mirren). But here Helena and Hermia could swap clothes in a nanosecond and if anything, Hermia would have the tight squeeze; so the protracted insult swapping (while mud-wrestling no less) about their vastly different statures is meaningless.
Granted the production is "pretty" but even it's prettiness is belabored and inconsistent. The movie opens with a long shot of a Tuscan villa and its valley, proceeds to the outdoor preparations for a wedding feast and then, when the meat of the play should be set outdoors, it shuts itself up in a very theatrical set with fake foliage, foam monuments, bogus boulders, and paths so fake and unmanageable that the lovers would've been ill advised to take them on foot let alone on rattle trap bicycles. (And whose dopey idea was it to practically dedicate the entire production to the invention of the the very un-Elizabethan bicycle?)
You end up witnessing a very stagey play on an obvious set, and the result--far from the magical, ethereal other-world of fairies, is claustrophobic, heavyhanded, achingly artificial. The scale of everything is out of whack. On stage, you have to have life size human beings portraying fairyfolk, but Hoffman seems to have forgotten that film is a magical medium. Here all are obviously earth-bound humans, ungainly, leaden, in some cases, gross. You're better off renting 'A Fairy Tale' for a portrait of believable fairies.
Even the excellent Stanley Tucci is obviously a male actor in his forties pretending to be a sprite. And Rupert Everett, who does deliver a decent Oberon, has been so 'out ' in his public life and most of his prior roles, that having him demand Titania's little boy added a nuance Shakespeare never intended. It doesn't work.
Hoffman never gives you the sense that Oberon, Titania and Company are anything but homosapiens (do fairies pee?) in glitter and gauze, then poof, when Bottom finally wakes, his golden asses' crown barely fits on his thumb and we're asked to believe his bower with Titania was a tiny birdnest.
Better that this version had been called 'Michael Hoffman's and Kevin Kline's Midsummer Night's Dream' than Shakespeare's. There are far too many contemporary liberties taken, clunky additions and omissions made here, and every one of them would've made Will wince.
For the rest, with the exception of a luminous Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, once the film is over, Kline is all you remember. The casting is so bland, (in plucky Calista Flockhart's earnest case, so ill advised) that everyone else retreats into a mildly pleasant melange of faces, costumes and decor.
Obvious characteristics, spelled out clearly in the play, are ignored even as they are spoken: the magic flower is called 'purple' innumerable times, but the flower Puck picks is bright red. Helena is supposed to be the physical opposite of Hermia--tall, and insecure about her height, as opposed to a dainty little doll (in Peter Hall's version: statuesque Diana Rigg versus petite Helen Mirren). But here Helena and Hermia could swap clothes in a nanosecond and if anything, Hermia would have the tight squeeze; so the protracted insult swapping (while mud-wrestling no less) about their vastly different statures is meaningless.
Granted the production is "pretty" but even it's prettiness is belabored and inconsistent. The movie opens with a long shot of a Tuscan villa and its valley, proceeds to the outdoor preparations for a wedding feast and then, when the meat of the play should be set outdoors, it shuts itself up in a very theatrical set with fake foliage, foam monuments, bogus boulders, and paths so fake and unmanageable that the lovers would've been ill advised to take them on foot let alone on rattle trap bicycles. (And whose dopey idea was it to practically dedicate the entire production to the invention of the the very un-Elizabethan bicycle?)
You end up witnessing a very stagey play on an obvious set, and the result--far from the magical, ethereal other-world of fairies, is claustrophobic, heavyhanded, achingly artificial. The scale of everything is out of whack. On stage, you have to have life size human beings portraying fairyfolk, but Hoffman seems to have forgotten that film is a magical medium. Here all are obviously earth-bound humans, ungainly, leaden, in some cases, gross. You're better off renting 'A Fairy Tale' for a portrait of believable fairies.
Even the excellent Stanley Tucci is obviously a male actor in his forties pretending to be a sprite. And Rupert Everett, who does deliver a decent Oberon, has been so 'out ' in his public life and most of his prior roles, that having him demand Titania's little boy added a nuance Shakespeare never intended. It doesn't work.
Hoffman never gives you the sense that Oberon, Titania and Company are anything but homosapiens (do fairies pee?) in glitter and gauze, then poof, when Bottom finally wakes, his golden asses' crown barely fits on his thumb and we're asked to believe his bower with Titania was a tiny birdnest.
Better that this version had been called 'Michael Hoffman's and Kevin Kline's Midsummer Night's Dream' than Shakespeare's. There are far too many contemporary liberties taken, clunky additions and omissions made here, and every one of them would've made Will wince.