Word: winslet
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...Laurence Fishburne's Othello and made a film, A Midwinter's Tale, about doing Hamlet in the provinces. This year he directs and stars in Hamlet--every word of Shakespeare's longest play--and has cast it with nearly every tony Brit actor (Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Kate Winslet, Rosemary Harris) but Emma Thompson. There are also some ringers: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Billy Crystal. How do you say shtick in Elizabethan English...
...differences. Branagh's film is small budget, black and white and--some feat--has a happier ending than Thompson's. The two aren't saying what they think of each other's work, but Branagh, now making a real Hamlet, must have liked something. He cast Sensibility's Kate Winslet as Ophelia...
...loss of Norland, the stately digs where she and her all female family have been safe and content; the genteel but palpable anxiety of her mother (Gemma Jones), trying to be brave as poverty and spinsterhood loom for her girls; the hysterically misplaced passion of her sister Marianne (Kate Winslet)--the "Sensibility" of the title--nearly dying when that cad John Willoughby (Greg Wise) leaves her for a woman better endowed financially; the romantic occlusion that prevents Marianne from seeing what everyone else can see, that the good Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), despite a certain stiffness in his emotional joints...
...plot is simple, shocking in the way it unfolds in macabre logic. Fourteen-year-olds Pauline (Melanie Lynsky) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) meet, become friends and grow extremely attached to each other, so attached, in fact, that their parents worry the relationship is "unhealthy" and determine to separate them. In desperation, the girls decide to prevent a separation by any means possible...
Despite Pauline and Juliet's appearing as interchangeable parts in a matched pair, Lynsky as Pauline and Winslet as Juliet are well-differentiated and developed. Juliet comes from the upper class, and Pauline from the very lower-middle, as their respective accents demonstrate. In temperament, Lynsky is a perfectly sullen Pauline, flat-faced and brooding, while Winslet makes a high-strung Juliet, blonde and impulsive. Pauline's ubiquitous heavy awkwardness is less demanding than Juliet's rapid-fire swings from copious tears to maniacal happiness, but both Lynsky and Winslet manage to make their characters more than caricatures of polar...