A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2017: Casey Wilder Mott

This is one of those films that straddles the line between being an actual production of the play and a parodic knock-off, and as such it is difficult to categorize. It is not nearly as pretentiously self-regarding as, say, the fatuous recent productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company, though it seems to be constantly trying to establish its genuine Shakespeare street cred by arch allusions — mildly pretentious in its own way, but not self-importantly stuck-up. The best construction to put on it, I guess, is to say that it’s an attempt to mine the play for 140 minutes of moderately good fun, without really being answerable to its source material any longer. If you find it appealing, its appeal is rather broad, turning the nuance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into something more evenly farcical throughout. As an actual production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which ideally ought to evoke (among other things) a sense of wonder, it’s rather tepid tea. Personally, I found it moderately amusing, but hardly brilliant: its deviations from the script are not so much about bringing new perceptions to bear on the play as about forcing some new humorous construct on everything with an arch wink at the viewers, who get to feel smugly in the know if they catch two or three broad allusions. The language is Shakespeare’s, for the most part, but the underlying sensibilities are more those of an adaptation like the ShakespeaRe-Told series, or one of the teen Shakespeare adaptations like She's The Man or 10 Things I Hate About You, which are riffing on their sources, but not presenting them. There’s a place in the world for such things. I even enjoy some of them. Because of the split loyalties to Shakespeare’s language and the referential postmodern aesthetic, this film seems a little less certain about whether it is trying to rehabilitate the play or parodically to deconstruct it. It seems less dedicated to literary vandalism than, say, Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), but there is a kindred impulse, I think.

The whole is set in greater Los Angeles: Griffith Park, Echo Park, and the Malibu beach make their appearances in due course, but Athens Studios are the nexus of the plot. The characters’ concerns and real motivations are all about breaking into film (what else are films set in Hollywood ever about?); the king of the hill is Mr. Theseus, an aging studio executive. He’s superficially jovial but accustomed to being pandered to; he has among his possessions a slinky trophy wife with a foreign accent, though she almost never speaks; and his life goals are apparently to collect new scripts that will make him rich, and objectified ingenues who will make him feel young. At the end of the film, he expresses interest in the Pyramus and Thisbe story (transformed into a deeply discounted Star Wars knockoff, complete with light sabers); he seems particularly taken with one of the actresses in it as well. Whether he wants her for a film or for a more private performance is not entirely clear, and perhaps best left unexplored. Oberon and Titania, on the other hand, are (appropriately) not part of his world: they are apparently Rastafarians, purveying cannabis-fueled stoner visions; with other drugs Titania is induced to fall for the transformed Bottom. Shedding the canonical furry ass’s ears for something more trendy, and punning on the physiological slang, Bottom has had his his head transformed into a...bottom. (It's disturbingly grotesque — as faceless persons usually are.) The rest of the characters orbit Theseus and each other, speaking selected lines of iambic pentameter in a highly edited version of the play. Cell phones are everywhere in evidence, and used (of course) for comic effect. Helena informs Demetrius about Hermia’s flight via CMS.

Bits from other Shakespeare plays are imported for laughs as well. Attempting to banish his dog from a meeting or viewing room, Theseus sends him off with, “Out, damned Spot” (a whiskered joke already; suffice it to say that Lady Macbeth had not a dog in mind); at another point, Bottom briefly quotes Hamlet’s instructions to the players. There’s something a bit self-congratulatory about this kind of humor, but it’s mild enough not to be irritatingly pretentious.

All in all this is pretty inconsequential stuff. If you are of a mind to be blandly diverted, and your sensitivity to crude material is not too high, this has some amusing bits, and I would be lying to say that I didn’t find it cleverly entertaining at least in spots. It’s competently filmed (except for the Pyramus and Thisbe film, which is supposed to be bad), and it does the “let’s map this to a completely different situation” trick a good deal better than some other productions (I’m reminded of Michael Almereyda’s bleakly tedious Cymbeline of 2015). But as with most such things, we are not so much asked to consider Shakespeare’s play as to admire how cleverly the script has subverted the text and made it into something else. That’s a different artistic process altogether. If it’s cheap fabric, at least it’s mostly a harmless exercise, assuming one doesn’t mistake the one for the other. In its limited realm, this one is not too bad. It’s just not Shakespeare’s comedy any more — it’s a different one about Shakespeare’s play. In that regard I can respect it more than some of the pretentious gas other productions have foisted on us in an apparent effort to be edgy and relevant. This is relevant to pretty much nothing — but it isn’t really pretending otherwise.

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