A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2017
Distributed by Passion River Films, 154 Mt. Bethel Rd., Warren, NJ 07059; 732-321-0711
Produced by 5B Productions, Empyrean Pictures, and Dream Movie
Directed by Casey Wilder Mott
DVD, color, 106 min.
High School - General Adult
Drama, Shakespeare, Classics, Theatre
Date Entered: 07/25/2018
Reviewed by Ray Boucher, Lecturer of Theater and Film (SUNY Buffalo State, SUNY Geneseo, GCC, NCCC) and actorCasey Wilder Mott’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream uses modern Los Angeles as a stand in for ancient Athens, with all the modern accoutrements, such as dialogue delivered through texting, sports cars, downtown cafes, and skyscrapers. Digitally filmed, the movie manages to look more like VHS at best and incorporates jarring edits and ephemeral voice overs that render the bard’s words mostly nonsensical. The poor lighting obscures the faces of many of the actors and scenes taken out of sequence from the source material make the film difficult to decipher.
The key performances of Helena (Lily Rabe) and Hermia (Rachel Leigh Cook) stand out and lend great clarity to the dialogue. Unfortunately, the cavalcade of B actors that round out the cast can make little sense of Mott’s convoluted concept. The film incorporates a half dozen lame Shakespeare jokes (yes, there is a room 2B) and sinks to the depths of replacing Bottom’s traditional donkey’s head with (spoiler alert) a gluteus maximus, complete with flatulence. These painful add-ons aside, no one seems to understand that the play is Shakespeare’s most well-known comedy. The farce is completely drained from the piece, rendering what are funny scenes rife with witty dialogue dreary at times, histrionic at others, and, sometimes, oddly menacing. Almost nothing in this adaptation works.