STAGE BEAUTY (2004)
Director: Richard Eyre
Cast: Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Rupert Everett, Tom Wilkinson, Zoe Tapper, Ben Chaplin, Richard Griffiths, Edward Fox, Hugh Bonneville
Screenplay: Jeffrey Hatcher; from his own play Compleat Female Stage Beauty
Ben Chaplin, Billy Crudup, Stage Beauty
Despite touches from A Star Is Born; All About Eve; Farewell, My Concubine; and the many versions of Viktor und Viktoria, Stage Beauty's raison d'être is the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. "Shakespeare in Confusion," it might have been called.
Like its predecessor, this romantic comedy about gender impersonations in the old days of British theater may even succeed in becoming a critical and box-office hit in spite of itself. For Stage Beauty, directed by Richard Eyre and adapted for the screen by Jeffrey Hatcher (from his own play), is as much of a calculated crowd-pleaser as John Madden's 1998 Oscar-winning film — minus the magical moments. This important detail, however, may go unnoticed by those eager to be fed fantasy romance, superficial gender-bending humor, juvenile sexual situations, and cheap jokes at the expense of the French and the clergy. "Shakespeare in American Pie," perhaps?
The actual premise of the film, which happens to be based on real-life characters, is quite interesting: Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup), an actor admired for playing female roles, has a love-hate relationship with Margaret Hughes, an actress (Claire Danes) who usurps both his stage roles and his fame. Add to that a dose of sexual fluidity and a touch of sexual confusion, and we could have an intelligent, transgendered Restoration romantic comedy — surely the first of its kind. But despite some modernistic (and jarring) handheld camera shots and an oh-so-hip score that sounds more techno than baroque, Stage Beauty is in fact a woefully conventional effort.
Instead of offering real insights into both gender and sexual roles, the filmmakers have instead focused their efforts on the creation of an old-movie romance between two actors who, their off-screen relationship notwithstanding, have as much on-screen chemistry as oil and water. When the film dares to broach the concept of gender constraints, it is used as mere foreplay for potential sexual encounters.
In the end, I was left even more confused than the befuddled Kynaston. Is he simply bisexual? Is he a gay man trying to pass for straight? Or is he at heart a heterosexual man who happens to be attracted to other men because of all the female roles he has played? Could it possibly be that he is a woman trapped in a man's body, only able to act like the woman he really is when onstage? If so, is Kynaston's attraction to Margaret a form of lesbianism? No wonder Billy Crudup looks so stressed out throughout much of the film.
Claire Danes, Billy Crudup, Stage Beauty
Even so, apart from Richard Griffiths' appropriately slimy patron of the arts and Edward Fox's excellent bit as Sir Edward Hyde (Fox is so snottily good that he almost makes the cheap shot against the French funny), Billy Crudup is by far the best element in Stage Beauty. Unlike the intelligent-looking Claire Danes, who is stuck with a role that alternates between outrage and dewy-eyed sadness, Crudup — as "the prettiest woman in the whole house" — is given a more complex, multifaceted character. Even though he is too old for the part and at times looks and acts like a 21st-century actor, he has excellent moments of lightness as the flirtatious off-stage Desdemona, and a brilliant moment of despair, when he unsuccessfully tries to play a male role for the first time.
Although it is not a total failure, Stage Beauty is weighed down by its own pretensions. If Hatcher and Eyre had something new and unique to say, they should have said it. Else, they might as well have stuck to conventional, gender-bending romances à la Shakespeare in Love. Happy ending and all.