It is no Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, that’s for sure.
I assume that 1998 is too recent for there to be a critical reappraisal of Shakespeare in Love. Last that I checked, we were up to nostalgia through the mid-90s (Clueless, Independence Day: Resurgence, Fuller House, 90210, etc.). I guess we have a couple more years before American Beauty (lol) and Shakespeare in Love have their turn in front of the rose-colored glasses.
I’m looking at this movie across a 23-year gap… it wasn’t a good movie, right? I had a good time at the theater because I was on a date, and the movie was kind of cute and fun and I like romantic comedies, but surely it isn’t as good as its box office (almost $300 million) and awards season buzz (Oscar wins including Best Picture) would suggest. No one I know has even mentioned the movie in living memory. I only settled on it because it fit the theme for the week. Consider the image in the header: I had no memory whatsoever of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character disguised as a man for an audition, but Wikipedia confirms that this is in the movie.
Wikipedia also states that frickin’ Tom Stoppard did a script rewrite on Shakespeare in Love! Maybe I should rewatch it.
1998 is a turning point for me as the year that I had a driver’s license, and my parent bought me my first car, a sweet, sweet periwinkle blue 1987 Chrysler LeBaron with plush, upholstered seats and digital displays. I miss that car, and took it for granted at the time. It looked like this (I cannot remember if it was a sedan or coupe, though):
I’ve never been into the car lifestyle idolized by previous generations. I appreciate aesthetics and speed and comfort, but ultimately for me, a car is a lawnmower is a blender is an electric toothbrush. My approach was utilitarian back then too, so I was unprepared and disinterested in the amounts of maintenance necessary to upkeep a high-mileage car with multiple engine problems. (If memory serves, I was one of the mush-brained kids who thought the Dodge Neon and the rebooted VW Beetle were the coolest cars in the world.). The LeBaron went kaput some time between 1998 and 2000, replaced by a white Chevy Blazer (totaled by being t-boned in a collision), which was replaced by another white Chevy Blazer (functionally totaled in a separate t-bone collision but left to limp on for another year), and then I didn’t have a car for a while.
But having any car, in the country, was not just a ritualistic rite of passage, but it also represented a chance to find out who I was and what I enjoyed. I think that this aspect of freedom in the late teens can be overlooked by parents. A kid’s soft brain is always changing as they experience new things, and the sensory jump to driving one’s self, followed by the sensory jump to attending college, are tectonic shifts in who they are and who they will be as an adult person.
Who were your friends growing up? They likely lived within walking distance of your house (I’m not including the suburban life experience here, as no one walks in the suburbs. I’m sure that baby Maddysyn and Kaysin and Jaxxon all have friends from lacrosse practice or whatever who live 45 minutes away). As you got a little older and moved up to a school with larger population, you may have moved on to new friends who shared more than just proximity. Once you had greater personal freedom (from you or a friend getting a driver’s license), that likely changed once again as you could get even more specialized (friend X plays cards, friend Y is the mallrat, friend Z goes to concerts). Dating also worked like that, right? Proximity was the biggest attractor initially, but as the pool of potential partners increased, it became possible to find someone with whom you actually get along (whether that happened is one of the cruelties of chance). And then this all got reset and scrambled again when it was time to attend college and you had the new mix of proximity and variety.
A recurring frustration from the ages of ~16 to 25 was relatives suggesting that one became brainwashed by liberal professors (or general education or MTV or whatever boogeyman they chose to employ). Being old enough to have perspective, I find that sentiment disgusting, myopic, and frustrating, but it is hard to counter at that age.
There’s no brainwashing. What happens is that the child you raised for 16 years, who had almost no agency in where they spent time, who they befriended, the media they consumed, or the hobbies that they pursued, that child got a license and got to explore what they liked. They got to eat at new restaurants, they went to events that sounded fun to them, they found books and hobbies on their own. They found a career path that they were good at or at least tolerated. They hopefully found a partner with whom they gelled. Your child didn’t get brainwashed, they grew up into a human being with their own life experiences and values. That those values and experiences did not entirely overlap your own is not a failure in upbringing, nor is it the result of some deep-state indoctrination… they just fucking grew up and had the agency to pursue their own interests. That’s how life works.
So the LeBaron was an early volley in the war to find my own identity. And Shakespeare in Love was a milestone in various ways too. It was a date in far-off Morgantown, it was a movie that I wanted to see and one that I could not have seen without the driver’s license. I was there with someone from the far end of the county, who I would never have met without branching into new friend circles.
There is a small irony to this, in that I hate cars more with each passing year and long for proximal shops and friends. I’ve heard variations of “we should all buy a farm together” from countless peers, and I wonder how that would have sounded to 16-year-old me, because the 39-year vintage thinks that nothing sounds better than never needing a car again.
Other 1998 candidates: Saving Private Ryan; Rushmore; The Truman Show; There’s Something About Mary; The Big Lebowski; Pleasantville; Sphere; Dark City; Wild Things; Sliding Doors; Henry Fool; Snake Eyes; Ronin; John Carpenter’s Vampires
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.