Movie Review: Stage Beauty

STAGE BEAUTY:: starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, and Rupert Everett as a straight guy for once....but barely.

i wanted to see this movie b/c once upon a time i saw the play it is based on, and the play is based on actual events from the diary of real-person Samuel Pepys, a social mover and shaker in 1600s England. (remember this play Whit? i know you do and i know why you do...... *evil grin*)
So the premise is this: It's England in the days when women were forbidden to act and all female parts....er, roles, were played by men. (unless you were Gwyneth Paltrow and your Oscar was undeserved. But i digress.) Billy Crudup plays Ned Kenyston, who is famous throughout everywhere for his performances as Ophelia, Juliet, and other lead female roles, including Othello's doomed love, Desdemona. Only this is back when acting was hardly realistic, and playing a woman meant speaking in a high voice and moving your arms weird. When Ned's Desdemona gets smothered by Othello, she simply twirls her wrist like a falling leaf to signify dying. Yeah.
Anyway, he's the shizzle and Claire Danes is his dresser (basically his personal assistant), Mariah. But wait! She's also an outlaw! of sorts- she is illegally playing Desdemona in an underground theater group and getting rave reviews. Truthfully, she is playing Ned playing Desdemona: she's actually not that good of an actress. Ned is secretly sleeping with the theater's benefactor, who is a man, and Mariah is carrying a secret torch for the flaming Ned (HAHA! i'm awesome).
By and by, they all end up at a party thrown by Rupert Everett/King Charles, who has just returned from exile and is bored to death that the theater-going experience is just as lame as when he left it. Charles has a mistress who wants to act, and since Charles is pissed at the appropriate politicos that outlaw females on the stage, he decrees that now women are allowed to act. Ned's pissed- he insists there's no art in women playing women and he refuses to play men for the same reason. Eventually, he insults Charles's mistress, so Charles gets mad and makes another law that only men can play men and only women can play women. This means that Ned's out of a job and Mariah becomes the It Girl. (being The Pioneer makes up for her lack of talent)
She becomes aware of her suckiness and seeks out Ned in his slummy conditions and eventually he comes to help the theater fix their Othello problems. They realize that both of their portrayals of poor Desdemona have been all wrong, so Ned usurps the always-great Tom Wilkinson as Othello for the final scene and plays it realistically- smothering Mariah's Desdemona past the point of stage violence and just short of the the point of actually killing her. Mariah/Desdemona appropriately fights back- no twirling wrist deaths here! In Othello's love and greif for Desdemona, Ned finally finds the bridge between playing a woman and playing a man, and with the scene they usher in a new era of acting. Plus they hook up.

The play was superior, but the movie was better than i thought it would be... and not just because Billy Crudup, when not in Renaissance Drag, is very easy on the eyes. It's an interesting look at gender and sexuality, on who we think we are and who others have told us we are. The acting was good-- the more i see of Claire Danes the more i realize that her acting consists mainly of looking at people and physically responding to what they're saying, and not so much delivering lines herself. This is not to say she's bad, i think she's pretty good, but she's found her money shot and she sticks a little too closely to it. Billy Crudup is very good, especially when trying unsuccessfully to deliver a man's soliloquy; it's a troubling scene to watch. Tom Wilkinson plays a typical Tom Wilkinson role, but unlike Ms. Danes, he seems to make more out of a character than what is written. Rupert Everett does alot with the role he's given, and is hardly recognizable without that great 'i'm Rupert Everett' voice and delivery. i've decided to like him more. HAHA! i just realized that after watching this movie on Saturday, we watched Tootsie on Sunday! Proof that the universe works in circles! Anyway, if anything, this film is a bit of a history lesson and it serves as a reminder of the awesomeness that is Mr. Shakespeare's Othello.
Stage Beauty gets 3.8 out of 5 Smother Pillows. Its playbill predecessor, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, gets 5 out of 5 Unexpected Full Frontals. (ask Whit)