Shakespeare for dummies

That is about the most disparaging and misleading title I could possibly write for this post, when I've just finished watching one of the best films I've ever seen.

That may slightly overstate my feelings about Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter (1968). It's too soon to get a fixed idea on how great I think it is. 

But I can tell you that I luxuriated in every single last beautifully written, beautifully acted second of it.

It's the story of Henry II of England and the question of his succession to one of his three surviving sons by an estranged queen, Eleanor, who are Richard, Geoffrey and John, listed in order by birth. If you want to know how shaky my grasp of British history is, I thought this might have taken place as late as 1400. It was actually 1183. Christmas of 1183, in fact. And I don't want to look up to see if if is remotely based in history, or just an imagined gathering of six key characters -- the sixth being Henry's mistress, Alais (pronounced "Alice") -- in the mind of screenwriter James Goldman, a name I do not know but hope to get better acquainted with soon. (It was adapted from his own play, and won the film one of its three Oscars.) I know for sure that significant liberties were taken, as the film features a Christmas tree, which was not invented for another 400 years, as well as wrapped presents, which I suspect were invented a lot later than the tree. 

Whether it was "real" or not hardly matters, any more than it matters in Shakespeare, when you get this quality of entertainment. It's basically a drawing-room farce with a gigantic brain that is far smarter than that form ever needs, containing moments of poignancy that that form usually does not have. 

And that's why I'm calling this "Shakespeare for dummies." It's Shakespearean in every way that is important -- from character development to the acerbic sharpness of the wit, to say nothing of the densely complicated plotting -- but you don't have to be a Shakespearean scholar to get every little bit of it.

Yes, Goldman writes like Shakespeare would write if the playwright had been time-warped to, let's say, 1963, so by the time this movie was released, he'd have had five years to adapt his brain to slightly more modern phraseology and thinking, while still retaining every bit of his clever wordplay, delightful reversals, and penchant for expressing an emotion of spiralling complexity in just about seven words. 

When it comes to Shakespeare, I'm no dummy. I studied the Bard in high school and college, the latter of which involving two major term papers on two of his tragedies -- though I only remember that one of them was about Othello. I have tried to see almost every major film based on a play of Shakespeare's, and even many minor ones. I have twice selected a #1 film of the year that was based on the writing of Shakespeare, either a documentary about it (Looking for Richard) or a direct modern-day adaptation of it (Michael Almereyda's Hamlet). I've also seen most of the movies that were just loose adaptations of Shakespeare, using only the story. Just about the only Shakespeare thing I haven't done since college is sit down and read a play. (Though I do still have the giant tome from college that contains, I think, all of his plays, so I could do that anytime, and maybe I should.)

I'm telling you all this not to air out my bona fides in a clueless act of peacocking. No, I'm telling you this to tell you that I, a person who loves Shakespeare, often feels like a dummy in his presence. 

So I love a movie like The Lion in Winter, which is essentially Shakespeare, just a little easier. 

I seriously am having a hard time figuring out why I didn't come to this sooner, why the movie gods did not see it fit to sprinkle down a recommendation on me at some point, so good is this film. Certainly I knew the title, which is why I added it to my Kanopy watchlist, and finally got to watch it on a sick Saturday afternoon. (My compromised state also made me grateful for the Shakespeare Lite rather than full Shakespeare language.) But no one had said "Dude you gotta see this!"

The thing I wish I had done as I was watching was start writing down my favorite lines of dialogue, but I didn't know I would react so strongly to the movie, and only got an idea I'd write this post near the end. But Goldman just is constantly selecting le mot juste, spinning a previous line of dialogue into an exciting reversal, and demonstrating a scientific formula for finding just the most withering combination of words to put one of these characters in their place. They all need to be put in their place, as they are all just awful people -- and also all capable of some measure of grace, which makes the film extraordinarily hopeful even as it spends most of its time spewing antagonism. 

But I didn't write down the lines of dialogue. Maybe on a second viewing. Which, if how I'm feeling right now lingers, is bound to be sooner rather than later. 

No, instead I will just tell you about two scenes that I hope will give you some sense of what this movie does and how it does it. And both illustrate the extraordinarily complex relationship between these six people.

One is a scene where they all come to a seventh, not yet mentioned, who is Philip II, king of France. First two of the brothers come to plead a collaboration to Philip, but then must hide when they hear a knock at the door. Then the third brother comes, also to collaborate with Philip, but does not know his brothers are in hiding. So Philip starts playing the scene for both the person he's talking to and the people who are hearing him talk. Then another knock, and the third brother hides elsewhere. (I could name the brothers, I just find it easier this way.) It's Richard, their father, who also does not know that his sons are hiding in two distinct groups around the room, one of which also does not know about the other. So he also proceeds to conspire with Philip, who now must be conscious of what three different unrelated parties are hearing him say in return, and calculating all the various consequences. Yet Philip plays it without breaking a sweat.

Before I go on to the second, I should pause here to tell you who is playing each role:

Richard - Peter O'Toole
Eleanor - Katharine Hepburn
Richard - Anthony Hopkins
Geoffrey - John Castle
John - Nigel Terry
Alais - Jane Merrow
Philip - Timothy Dalton

Not bad, eh? A future Bond and a future Hannibal Lecter thrown in for good measure. Hepburn also won the third of an eventual four Oscars for this role, and I'm sure the scene I'm about to tell you about had something to do with that.

The second scene is between Eleanor and Alais, who, in addition to being rivals for Richard, have a bit of a mother-daughter relationship since the former has known the latter since she was just a child, and participated in some amount of nurturing her. Now, their relationship is absolutely poisonous, just like every other in this film. They are having their only one-on-one scene -- this film is a succession of absolutely marvelous two- or three-person scenes, with the occasional six- or seven-person thrown in -- and it is typical vituperative. Each lashes out in ways they imagine might hurt the other most, scarcely moving a muscle as the tete-a-tetes in this film are all intellectual. After you think they've cut each other deeply enough that one might pull out a real knife to stab the other, Alais collapses crying in the arms of Eleanor, who soothes her like the world's most beloved wet nurse. I was simply floored by this choice.

I have not given you any examples of how funny this movie is. Suffice it to say they are many and numerous. I laughed out loud maybe ten times, which I would not have expected to do. (Actually, I did not even know one of this film's genres would be comedy.) Much of that is in the writing and an equal amount in the delivery of those lines. I think I didn't mention that John is a bit of a simpleton, a great choice, and Terry plays him with gusto without going too big.

My knowledge of these events comes from other movies. The one I was thinking about was the Disney Robin Hood, in which Richard and John were characters. (So I guess I don't know the date of Robin Hood either.) I remember knowing that John was the usurper sitting on that throne while Richard, the good one, was in prison, and I was waiting for this movie to start telegraphing Richard as unambiguously good while John would start showing how unambiguously bad he was. But what's a movie without ambiguity? Both of them can be characters of great courage and both can be little shits. Life is usually complicated like that. 

I think I told you I'm sick, so I can't go on any further about Lion in Winter, much as I would like to.

Instead, I recommend you see The Lion in Winter. Especially if you think you're sometimes a bit of a Shakespeare dummy.

Hey, we all are, sometimes.