MovieChat Forums > Shakespeare in Love (1999) Discussion > come on, gwyneth paltrow pretending to b...

come on, gwyneth paltrow pretending to be a boy is silly.

posted 11 years ago by cooler56
8 replies | jump to latest

Seriously, Shakespeare believing that Thomas Kent was a boy must purely be for comedy. He sees Viola like 10 minutes after Kent, how does he not see they are the same person? Did he think they were brother and sister or something? Gwyneth Paltrow hardly put any effort into passing as a male. A wig and a husky voice would not be enough to fool Elizabethan people. I am surprised she won an oscar for this travesty.

[–] Randy-144 10 years ago

I remember a scene she did in SiL where, if memory serves me correctly, she was lying on a bench barechested in a room with other naked women, and I thought she wouldn't have that much difficulty passing as a male.

[–] Suzume-san 10 years ago

she was lying on a bench barechested in a room with other naked women

I don't think memory does serve you correctly; if that happened, I must have missed it every viewing!

[–] Randy-144 10 years ago

I am slightly embarrassed to say I am wrong. Perhaps I am thinking of Amy Irving. She and Paltrow are built alike.

[–] k.m.bunting 10 years ago

Well, of course it is purely for comedy - but a cross-dressing woman not being found out is a staple ingredient of Renaissance drama and fiction. Men's and women's clothes were so totally different from one another in those days, I suppose you could argue that people didn't normally need to be so observant in telling the sexes apart as we have to be in these days of unisex fashions.

[–] syntinen 10 years ago

I suppose you could argue that people didn't normally need to be so observant in telling the sexes apart as we have to be in these days of unisex fashions.

That's absolutely true. In an culture where dress is highly differentiated, and you expect it to tell you not only someone's sex but their social status, nationality and often their occupation and marital status, you generally don't look past the packaging. You see the clothes, you assume that the person inside them matches. In fact, people who are used to clothing giving clear gender signals often find it quite difficult to identify gender without those signals. In the early years of the hippie era, I remember (yes, I am that old) a lot of harrumphing as people cried 'These hippies, you can't tell the boys from the girls!' And it wasn't a joke; they really couldn't. Being used to the equations 'short hair + trousers + plain colours + no ornaments or surface decoration + flat practical shoes = male' and 'long, probably curled/waved/put up hair + make-up + bright colours + skirts + possibly frills, patterns, jewellery + high heels = female', when faced with young people wearing sandals, beads, flowers in long un-dressed hair, etc they were honestly at a loss. But after a couple of years, everyone got their eye in and it was no longer difficult.

There's a great story of the 18th-century French explorer Bougainville's expedition to Tahiti in 1766-69. Unbeknown to anybody, the servant of one of the expedition scientists was a girl, Jeanne Baret. She dressed as a boy and behaved as a boy, and nobody guessed a thing till they landed in Tahiti - where the Tahitians, to whom the conventions of her dress and behaviour conveyed no clues, simply asked 'Why only one woman among so many men?'.

(BTW, it may be just me but I found Paltrow far more convincing - and rather more attractive - as 'Thomas Kent' than as 'the beautiful Viola de Lesseps'!)

[–] Prismark10 10 years ago

A girl pretending to be a boy was not that unusual at the time!

Its that man again!!

[–] randommovies2002 10 years ago

It's a comedy. In fact, it's a Shakespearean comedy (that aspect parallels the main conceit in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night). The audience doesn't have to actually believe Viola is a man, they just have to accept that within the world of the play (or in this case, the film), the other characters are 100% fooled by her disguise.

It's not supposed to be realistic. Whatever made you think it was?

[–] mark-1589 10 years ago

To OP: not to pile on or anything, but do you even know anything about the plays of Shakespeare? Did you imagine it was just a silly plot device that some hack Hollywood hack came up with? In fact, the screenplay was written by Tom Stoppard, one of the top playwrights of his generation, and he clearly knows a thing or two about Shakespeare as he uses so many elements and devices from Shakespeare's opus, cleverly weaving them into the tapestry of this plot.