The film's opening, a scene of bustling preparations for the upcoming wedding feast of Theseus {David Strathairn} and Hippolyta {Sophie Marceau}, looks very much like an hommage to Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing. {It is fitting, after all, to remember that we owe much of the recent resurgence in filmed Shakespeare to Branagh.) But thereafter Hoffman goes his own way, and finds his own voice in a fetching synergy of ancient and modern, Christian and pagan, Shakespearean and operatic.

The setting is a turn-of-the-century Tuscan village called "Monte Athena" standing in place of Shakespeare's "Athens". Just outside the prosperous little village lies a numinous forest world ruled by those warring faerie-deities Oberon {Rupert Everett} and Titania {Michelle Pfeiffer}, whose classically over-the-top jealousies and carryings-on sew first disorder--"the course of true love never did run smooth"--then ultimately an Edenic harmony in the love lives of a foolish pair of mortal duos, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius.

The Production

"Operatic" is the word that jumps to mind when watching this film, produced by Michael Hoffman and Leslie Urdang, with production design by Lucianna Arrighi, costumes by Gabriella Pescucci, and cinematogrphy by Oliver Stapleton, who did such notable work on Hoffman's Restoration. But this is, after all, supposed to be turn-of-the-century Tuscany, and the film is anchored by Simon Boswell's lovely score which thieves shamelessly from Italian opera. The music, along with Stapleton's lush, warm photography, sweeps the audience into an appropriately light-hearted and romantic mood, and induced this viewer, at least, to indulge, as soon as the film was over, in a fantasy pilgrimage to bella Italia...if only the familial finances allowed!

Despite the over-the-top production values, Hoffman, who besides directing a Midsummer while a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, was one of the founders of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, stays true to the Bard's marvelous language. He has directed his actors to emphasize clarity in their speech, which slows the pace a little for those familiar with the play, but makes listening a good deal more pleasurable, I dare say, for audience members not as familiar with Elizabethan language.

The Players

The cast is excellent, with special kudos going to the Garbo-esque Michelle Pfeiffer and the scene-stealing Kevin Kline, one of the finest comic {and Shakespearean} actors in the States. After the foresty faery-doings, the final scene's antic comedy might well have come off woefully anti-climactic. Instead, Kline as the ridiculous but sweet Nick Bottom-the-Weaver conquers his audience, on screen and off, with what amounts to a spot-on-target parody of a every high school English student's worst nightmare of a hanky-waving, sword-wielding Bad-Shakespearean-Actor.