Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
Lit-Flicks
By Robert Gottlieb
Becoming Jane
a film directed by Julian Jarrold
Molière
a film directed by Laurent Tirard
Shakespeare in Love
a film directed by John Madden
We're not talking about movies that recapitulate a highly dramatic event in the writer's life: the Dreyfus affair in The Life of Emile Zola; Oscar Wilde's trial in a scattering of Wilde movies. Or a special case like the film of The Hours, Michael Cunningham's highfalutin novel that glossed the life of Virginia Woolf and provided Nicole Kidman with an Oscar-winning nose. We're talking about movies that think they can convey something about 'the creative process' by dishing up conventional plots for their heroes against lots of period decor: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, we get Hamlet.
Review, 3067 words
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