SITCOM SHAKESPEARE

There’s love so lustful that it looks like an animal in heat, as the love-potioned Titania, high queen of all the fairies, flatters and paws Bottom, the lower-class weaver who’s been changed into an ass.

There’s love so stately that it looks like international policy, as Theseus, warrior duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, ruler of the Amazons, tread their self-important way toward marriage.

There’s love so operatic that it shakes the heavens, as Oberon and his fairy queen storm in marital battle through the raging night.

There’s love so romantic that what it mostly loves is the sheer idea of being in love, as the rose-lipped girls Hermia and Helena, and the lightfoot boys Lysander and Demetrius, flee the stern parental law of Athens for one confused, enchanted, love-charged night in the lawless woods before they pair off with their proper mates for marriage.

And always there’s love so comically coiled around itself that we cannot come to the end of it: For aught that I could ever read, / Could ever hear by tale or history, / The course of true love never did run smooth.

Or maybe A Midsummer Night’s Dream is just about its poetry. Like Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest, the play is one of the few that Shakespeare made up from scratch, without any clearly identifiable source (though the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe — the play-within-the-play butchered by Bottom and his fellow “mechanicals” — is lifted from Ovid). And though hardly any viewer has ever been able to keep straight the seven or eight different plots roiling through it, what everyone remembers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the language.

This is the play in which Helena mourns that women cannot fight for love, as men may do, / We should be woo’d and were not made to woo; the play in which Hermia’s angry schoolmate explains, Though she be but little, she is fierce; the play in which the scornful Theseus declares, The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact. When in the opening lines Hippolyta describes The moon, like to a silver bow / New-bent in heaven — or Lysander adds,
 
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

— Shakespeare has passed beyond all questions of sense and nonsense. He’s floating so far above language, you cannot touch him.

It may even be that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about nothing except theater and theatrical convention, for scarcely an action occurs without someone observing it — the audience outside the play continually viewing an audience inside the play. The attempt of the “hempen home-spuns,” the “rude mechanicals,” to perform Pyramus and This-be comes complete with gibing asides by the watching duke. Titania’s asinine frolics are overseen by her wondering fairy attendants. Theseus and Hippolyta invariably carry themselves as formal actors parading before their royal court. The four sex-pixilated adolescents wandering through the woods are so self-dramatized, they hardly need an audience, but the invisible Oberon looks out for them and the “mad spirit” Puck looks in on them: Those things do best please me / That befall preposterously. And was there ever any other comedy with so many characters watching other characters sleep?

But whatever A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about, it’s about something — which is one feature that the director Michael Hoffman left out of his new film version of the comedy.

Hoffman has been one of mainstream Hollywood’s few real finds in recent years. His 1991 Soapdish was an inspired and far-underrated comedy about the lives of soap-opera stars. His 1995 Restoration remains an interesting stab at costume drama. And in 1996, he directed Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney in One Fine Day, an attempt to recreate sweet, traditional romantic comedy. If One Fine Day, wasn’t quite as classic as it pretended to be — back in the late 1930s, the movie studios were turning out a dozen of its equivalents every year — it was nonetheless a rarity for modern cinema.

But Shakespeare remains impenetrable, though Hoffman has obviously filled his production with directorial choices: Every scene, every costume, every setting, every cast member, every really neat idea the director had seems to shout, “Look at me!” But somehow, at the same time, Hoffman never manages to make the final choice of what he wants the entire play to say.

All productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream start with a problem of incoherence. What are English folk fairies like “Pease-Blossom” and “Robin Goodfellow” doing in ancient Greece? And why are Oberon and Titania arguing outside Athens about a changeling Hindu boy they stole from India? And exactly how do Elizabethan workmen with English names like Snout and Starveling come to perform rustic Italian Renaissance dances for pre-classical Greek heroes like Theseus? Samuel Pepys described it in 1662 as “the most insipid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life,” and it was rarely performed until the fame of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music, composed to accompany a German translation, brought the play back into favor in the nineteenth century.

But this new production’s many show-off decisions mostly serve to add to the incoherence. Instead of setting the play in ancient Athens, Hoffman relocates to nineteenth-century Italy — apparently so he can have his actors race around on bicycles. If a director has a coherent vision for Shakespeare, this kind of modern setting can help expound it: In 1996, Baz Luhrmann placed his surprisingly successful filming of Romeo and Juliet in a modern Miami Beach; in 1995, Richard Loncraine used 1930s London for a movie version of Richard III that was at least a clear reading of the play, even if a wrong one. But Hoffman seems to have reset his Midsummer Night’s Dream just for the sake of resetting it. Aside from putting opera in the score and having a stray poster written in Italian, he makes no use of his new locale.

The ostentatious directorial whims show most of all in the casting: The balding, thirty-nine-year-old straightman Stanley Tucci plays the mischievous Puck; Calista Flockhart of television’s Ally McBeal takes on the neglected Helena; the demure French actress Sophie Marceau appears as the regal Hippolyta; and the brittle-voiced character actor David Strathairn is the manly Theseus.

Instead of forcing the roles to form the actors, Hoffman lets the actors form the roles. Kevin Kline is interesting as Bottom — usually mistaken in his over-the-top renditions, but interesting. But then, Kline is the one cast member without a single, well-defined screen persona. The others merely play themselves. In the case of Flockhart, it actually works: She acts the put-upon, love-sick Helena as the doe-eyed, neurotic Ally McBeal, and you can in fact picture Ally crinkling her nose and spitting, Oh spite! But mostly it flops like a pat of butter falling flat on the floor. Even Starveling (his constant snuff-taking translated to chain-smoking) is played by Max Wright with all of the mannerisms of his Willie Tanner from the late 1980s television series ALF. There are few rules in film, but surely one of them is “Thou shalt not mix ALF with Shakespeare.”

To the playwright’s busiest play, the director has strapped even more theatrical business and spectacle. The film introduces Puck in an overwrought fairy tavern, complete with drunken goblins. At the height of the four lovers’ confusions, Hoffman tumbles the girls into a muddy pond, stripped to their underwear — forgetting that American actors have enough trouble speaking Shakespeare without having to talk through mud.

At other times, Hoffman expects the audience to miss the play’s jokes: When Bottom flubs his Pyramus line and declares that a lion vile hath here deflower’d my dear, the camera shifts to Peter Quince mouthing devour’d, just in case we didn’t get it. And what exactly possessed the director to make the mechanicals’ play end on a note of deep-felt drama? You haven’t lived till you’ve heard Sam Rockwell (playing Flute, the bellows-mender who performs as Thisbe) try to read His eyes were green as leeks as a serious line. To add a glimmer of Hollywood-happy ending, the film concludes with Bottom’s being granted one last look at the glowing fairies — who flit prettily across the screen to Mendelssohn and step all over Puck’s final monologue.

With such beautiful people as Flockhart’s Helena, Dominic West’s Lysander, Rupert Everett’s Oberon, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Titania, Hoffman could have made his Midsummer Night’s Dream about sex, for Shakespeare knows better than anyone else that sexual desire is a funny thing — funny comic and funny strange: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

With Kline’s Bottom and the fine British character actor Roger Rees’s Peter Quince, he could have made his film about Shakespeare’s language: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.

With the multiple perspectives the camera allows, the director could even have made it a comedy about theatrical comedies: What! a play toward, says Puck as he comes upon the mechanicals’ rehearsal in the woods. I’ll be an auditor; / An actor too perhaps, if I see cause.

But mostly what Hoffman needed was to make his Midsummer Night’s Dream be about something. And all the odd little choices that he made along the way seem to have kept him from ever deciding what that was.