The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations
Recently a friend mentioned how much of a shame it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those backdoor “classic” reimaginings today like the ones we had growing up. And after thinking for a moment, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘90s were treated to an embarrassment of riches when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent films. Nearly every week seemed to offer another modernization of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a wink and a nudge to appeal to teenagers reading much the same texts in high school or university.
But then when looking back at the sweep of 1990s cinema beyond just “teen movies,” it was more than only Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger vehicles that were getting the classical treatment. In fact the ‘90s, and to a large extent the ‘80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literaturewith the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. It was a time when some of the most exciting or ambitious artists working in the industry sought to trade in the bullets and brutality of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more brutal constraints of corsets and top hats.
Shakespeare was arguably bigger business in tinsel town than at any other point during this period, and we saw some of the most faithful and enduring adaptations of Austen or Louisa May Alcott make it to the screen. Why is that and can it happen again? Let’s look back at the golden age of period piece costumed dramas and splashy literary adaptations…
Mozart and Merchant Ivory
Since the beginning of the medium, moviemakers have looked back at well-worn and familiar stories for inspiration and audience familiarity. Not too many years after making his enduring trip to the moon, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short in 1907. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.
Even so, literary adaptations were often constrained, particularly in Hollywood where filmmakers had to contend with the limitations of censorship via the Hays Code and preconceived notions about what an American audience would enjoy. The most popular costumed dramas tended to therefore be vanity projects or something of a more sensational hue—think biblical or swords and sandals epics.
So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year that Miloš Forman’s AmadeusA Room with a View. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.
In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of modern oppression and control from about a decade earlier—was taking the story of Mozart and making it a punk rock tragicomedy. Based on a Peter Shaffer play of the same name, Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it both funnier and darker as Forman strove to pose Mozart as a modern day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling as much Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.
It went on to do relatively big business and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past. Otherwise, most of the recent winners were dramas or dramedies about the modern world: Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter, and Annie Hall. They reflected an audience that wanted to get away from the artificiality of their parents’ cinema, which in the U.S. associated historical costumes with thephoniness of Ben-Huror Oliver!.
Yet perhaps the movie that proved this was the beginning of a popular trend came a few years later via the British masterpiece A Room with a View. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those films were mixed with modern comedies and dramas like rock ’n roll-infused The Guruand Jane Austen in Manhattan. More importantly, all of these films tended to be art house pictures; small chamber pieces intended for a limited audience.
Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U.S.—this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country!”The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.
It also defined what became the “Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in future Oscar and box office darlings like the Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Carter-starring Howard’s End, and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day. These were all distinctly British and understated pictures, with Remains being an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but their relative success with a certain type of moviegoer and Academy voter signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in ‘em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.
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Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama
In 1990, Michael Mann was one of the hottest creatives working in Hollywood. As the executive producer and sometime-director on NBC’s edgypolice drama, Miami Vice, he played a direct hand in proving American television could be “gritty” and artistic. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would clash with the neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic that Mann developed for the series.
As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the ’80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter. Instead he sought to adapt a childhood favorite for the screen, James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Certainly a problematic text in its original form with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian Warwhere Indigenous tribes in what is today upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes, the text proved a jumping off point for Mann to craft a gripping, primal, and prestigious film.
He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is an elevated action movie, and a beautiful drama that did bigger business in the U.S. than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tom Cruise vehicle A Few Good Men in the same year. It also would create a precedent we’d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.
Some of the biggest and most respected filmmakers of the moment, many of them praised under auteur theory, were looking to literary classics for an audience that craved them. After the one-two genre punch of Goodfellasand Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese made one of his most ambitious and underrated films: a stone-cold 1993 masterpiece inspired by an Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence.
It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. Indeed, The Age of Innocence remains the best cinematic representation of the Gilded Age in the U.S., capturing the lush pageantry of the most elite New Yorkers’ lifestyles in their robber baron heyday, as well as how class snobbery metastasized into a ruthless tribalism that doomed the romantic yearnings of one conformist attorneyand this would-be divorcée love of his life.
It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U.S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already the toast of international and independent cinema via movies like The Wedding Banquetand martial arts-adjacent Pushing Hands, but it is when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 that he became a Hollywood favorite who would soon get movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragonand Hulkgreenlit. Sense and Sensibility benefits greatly, too, from a marvelous cast with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman among its ensemble. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.
It set a standard that most of the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured by, be it Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic take on Pride and Prejudice a decade later, various attempts at Emma from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow to this decade with Anya Taylor-Joy, or even Netflix’s recent Dakota Johnson-led Persuasion adaptation.
Columbia / Sony
A Dark Universe of Gods and Monsters
Meanwhile, right before Columbia Pictures greenlit Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightfulinterpretation of Little Women in 1994, the same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star. And it was Dracula.
Considered a folly of hubris at the time by rivals who snickered to Variety it should be renamed “Bonfire of the Vampires”, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola’s lurid and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called “New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. He also correctly predicted there was a box office hit if he could bring all those elements out in an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation.
Love or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel—which is pretty audacious since he put the author’s name in the title—Coppola crafted one of the most sumptuous and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever put onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.
It set a standard for what can in retrospect be considered a pseudo “dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a worse movie that flopped, but it looked spectacular as the only major Frankenstein movie to remember Shelley set the story during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.
Yet while Frankenstein failed, Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would have a lot of success in the same year adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. It was also a grandiose costumed drama where the guy who played Top Gun’s Maverick would sink fangs into young Brad Pitt’s neck in a scene dripping in homoeroticism.
This trend continued throughout the ‘90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionistSleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. For instance, did you remember that Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom appeared in a revisionist take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where she played the not-so-good doctor’s maid? It’s called Mary Reilly, by the by.
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
The Resurgence of Shakespeare
Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Yet curiously it was only in the 1990s that someone really lit on the idea of making a movie directly based on the Bard tailored almost exclusively for that demographic: Baz Luhrmann in 1996, who reconfigured the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into the visual language of MTV. He even stylized the title as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.
That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. Their Verona was a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news, with hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do.
But it was hardly the first box office breakout for Shakespeare in the ‘90s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. To the modern eye, it is hard to remember Gibson was a heartthrob of sorts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s—or generally viewed as a dashing star worthy of heroic leading men roles.
Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamletif you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet, and Zeffirelli mines the medieval melancholy of the story well with production design, costumes, and location shooting at real Norman castles. Plus, Helena Bonham Carter remains the best Ophelia ever put to screen. Hamletwould eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the ‘90s: Kenneth Branagh.
Aye, Branagh might deserve the most credit for the Shakespearean renaissance in this era, beginning with his adaptation of Henry V, which featured the makings of Branagh’s troupe of former RSC favorites turned film actors: Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife, Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing, a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. It also features Denzel Washington as a dashing Renaissance prince, Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.
It would define the style of Branagh’s following ‘90s efforts, whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein, or right back on them in the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. At the play’s full four-hour length, Hamletis indulgent. Yet somehow that befits the material. Branagh would also star as Iago in Oliver Parker’s Othelloopposite Laurence Fishburne and reconfigure the Bard as a musical in his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost.
It paved the way for more outside-the-box Shakespeare movies by the end of the decade like Julie Taymor’s deconstructionist Titusand the A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1999 where Kevin Kline turns into an ass and makes out with Michelle Pfeiffer.
CBS via Getty Images
The Birth of the Teenage Shakespeare RemixAs popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the ‘90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re talking moving past modernizing Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did, or repurposing it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim aimed with West Side Story.
These were straight, unapologetic youth films that also proved clever reworkings of classic storytelling structure. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You, a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. Stiles would, in fact, do this kind of remix a number times in the more serious-faced modernization of Othello, O, which also starred Mekhi Phifer as a tragically distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior, and Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke’s own Hamlet, the third Hamlet movie in 10 years, albeit this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC.
Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale, an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the strange attempt to turn Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 into an erotic thriller for teensvia the lusty Cruel Intentions
However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s CluelessEmma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Foregoing modern fads and simply inventing her own—with the assumption anything she wrote in 1994 would be dated by ’95—Heckerling create a faux yet now authentically iconic language and fashion style via Cher, a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-meaning in her matchmaking mischief that she defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother. It’s a classic!
And the Rest
There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime like the Gillian Armstrong-directed Little Women of 1994 starring Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst; and they can include the wretched like the Demi Moore and Gary Oldman-led The Scarlet Letter. There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and then those that just had some fun with playwrights, as seen in the over-celebrated Shakespeare in LoveBraveheart.
More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, this type of film has by and large gone away. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That beautiful film was a good-sized hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.
Now such projects, like everything else not considered four-quadrant intellectual property by studio bean counters, is mostly relegated to long-form stream series. Which in some cases is fine. Many would argue the best version of Pride & Prejudice was the BBC production… also from the ‘90s, mind. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers, period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.
This seems due to studios increasingly eschewing anything that isn’t reliably based on a brand that middle-aged adults loved. But in that case… it might be worth reminding them that ‘90s kids are getting older and having children of their own. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories; a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These stories are mostly in the public domain too. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don’t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. So perhaps once again, a play’s the thing in which they can catch the conscience of the… consumer? Or something like that.
#1990s #were #golden #age #periodThe 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations
Recently a friend mentioned how much of a shame it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those backdoor “classic” reimaginings today like the ones we had growing up. And after thinking for a moment, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘90s were treated to an embarrassment of riches when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent films. Nearly every week seemed to offer another modernization of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a wink and a nudge to appeal to teenagers reading much the same texts in high school or university.
But then when looking back at the sweep of 1990s cinema beyond just “teen movies,” it was more than only Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger vehicles that were getting the classical treatment. In fact the ‘90s, and to a large extent the ‘80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literaturewith the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. It was a time when some of the most exciting or ambitious artists working in the industry sought to trade in the bullets and brutality of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more brutal constraints of corsets and top hats.
Shakespeare was arguably bigger business in tinsel town than at any other point during this period, and we saw some of the most faithful and enduring adaptations of Austen or Louisa May Alcott make it to the screen. Why is that and can it happen again? Let’s look back at the golden age of period piece costumed dramas and splashy literary adaptations…
Mozart and Merchant Ivory
Since the beginning of the medium, moviemakers have looked back at well-worn and familiar stories for inspiration and audience familiarity. Not too many years after making his enduring trip to the moon, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short in 1907. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.
Even so, literary adaptations were often constrained, particularly in Hollywood where filmmakers had to contend with the limitations of censorship via the Hays Code and preconceived notions about what an American audience would enjoy. The most popular costumed dramas tended to therefore be vanity projects or something of a more sensational hue—think biblical or swords and sandals epics.
So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year that Miloš Forman’s AmadeusA Room with a View. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.
In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of modern oppression and control from about a decade earlier—was taking the story of Mozart and making it a punk rock tragicomedy. Based on a Peter Shaffer play of the same name, Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it both funnier and darker as Forman strove to pose Mozart as a modern day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling as much Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.
It went on to do relatively big business and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past. Otherwise, most of the recent winners were dramas or dramedies about the modern world: Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter, and Annie Hall. They reflected an audience that wanted to get away from the artificiality of their parents’ cinema, which in the U.S. associated historical costumes with thephoniness of Ben-Huror Oliver!.
Yet perhaps the movie that proved this was the beginning of a popular trend came a few years later via the British masterpiece A Room with a View. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those films were mixed with modern comedies and dramas like rock ’n roll-infused The Guruand Jane Austen in Manhattan. More importantly, all of these films tended to be art house pictures; small chamber pieces intended for a limited audience.
Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U.S.—this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country!”The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.
It also defined what became the “Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in future Oscar and box office darlings like the Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Carter-starring Howard’s End, and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day. These were all distinctly British and understated pictures, with Remains being an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but their relative success with a certain type of moviegoer and Academy voter signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in ‘em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.
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Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama
In 1990, Michael Mann was one of the hottest creatives working in Hollywood. As the executive producer and sometime-director on NBC’s edgypolice drama, Miami Vice, he played a direct hand in proving American television could be “gritty” and artistic. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would clash with the neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic that Mann developed for the series.
As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the ’80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter. Instead he sought to adapt a childhood favorite for the screen, James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Certainly a problematic text in its original form with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian Warwhere Indigenous tribes in what is today upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes, the text proved a jumping off point for Mann to craft a gripping, primal, and prestigious film.
He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is an elevated action movie, and a beautiful drama that did bigger business in the U.S. than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tom Cruise vehicle A Few Good Men in the same year. It also would create a precedent we’d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.
Some of the biggest and most respected filmmakers of the moment, many of them praised under auteur theory, were looking to literary classics for an audience that craved them. After the one-two genre punch of Goodfellasand Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese made one of his most ambitious and underrated films: a stone-cold 1993 masterpiece inspired by an Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence.
It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. Indeed, The Age of Innocence remains the best cinematic representation of the Gilded Age in the U.S., capturing the lush pageantry of the most elite New Yorkers’ lifestyles in their robber baron heyday, as well as how class snobbery metastasized into a ruthless tribalism that doomed the romantic yearnings of one conformist attorneyand this would-be divorcée love of his life.
It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U.S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already the toast of international and independent cinema via movies like The Wedding Banquetand martial arts-adjacent Pushing Hands, but it is when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 that he became a Hollywood favorite who would soon get movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragonand Hulkgreenlit. Sense and Sensibility benefits greatly, too, from a marvelous cast with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman among its ensemble. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.
It set a standard that most of the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured by, be it Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic take on Pride and Prejudice a decade later, various attempts at Emma from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow to this decade with Anya Taylor-Joy, or even Netflix’s recent Dakota Johnson-led Persuasion adaptation.
Columbia / Sony
A Dark Universe of Gods and Monsters
Meanwhile, right before Columbia Pictures greenlit Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightfulinterpretation of Little Women in 1994, the same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star. And it was Dracula.
Considered a folly of hubris at the time by rivals who snickered to Variety it should be renamed “Bonfire of the Vampires”, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola’s lurid and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called “New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. He also correctly predicted there was a box office hit if he could bring all those elements out in an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation.
Love or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel—which is pretty audacious since he put the author’s name in the title—Coppola crafted one of the most sumptuous and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever put onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.
It set a standard for what can in retrospect be considered a pseudo “dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a worse movie that flopped, but it looked spectacular as the only major Frankenstein movie to remember Shelley set the story during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.
Yet while Frankenstein failed, Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would have a lot of success in the same year adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. It was also a grandiose costumed drama where the guy who played Top Gun’s Maverick would sink fangs into young Brad Pitt’s neck in a scene dripping in homoeroticism.
This trend continued throughout the ‘90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionistSleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. For instance, did you remember that Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom appeared in a revisionist take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where she played the not-so-good doctor’s maid? It’s called Mary Reilly, by the by.
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
The Resurgence of Shakespeare
Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Yet curiously it was only in the 1990s that someone really lit on the idea of making a movie directly based on the Bard tailored almost exclusively for that demographic: Baz Luhrmann in 1996, who reconfigured the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into the visual language of MTV. He even stylized the title as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.
That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. Their Verona was a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news, with hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do.
But it was hardly the first box office breakout for Shakespeare in the ‘90s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. To the modern eye, it is hard to remember Gibson was a heartthrob of sorts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s—or generally viewed as a dashing star worthy of heroic leading men roles.
Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamletif you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet, and Zeffirelli mines the medieval melancholy of the story well with production design, costumes, and location shooting at real Norman castles. Plus, Helena Bonham Carter remains the best Ophelia ever put to screen. Hamletwould eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the ‘90s: Kenneth Branagh.
Aye, Branagh might deserve the most credit for the Shakespearean renaissance in this era, beginning with his adaptation of Henry V, which featured the makings of Branagh’s troupe of former RSC favorites turned film actors: Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife, Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing, a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. It also features Denzel Washington as a dashing Renaissance prince, Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.
It would define the style of Branagh’s following ‘90s efforts, whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein, or right back on them in the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. At the play’s full four-hour length, Hamletis indulgent. Yet somehow that befits the material. Branagh would also star as Iago in Oliver Parker’s Othelloopposite Laurence Fishburne and reconfigure the Bard as a musical in his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost.
It paved the way for more outside-the-box Shakespeare movies by the end of the decade like Julie Taymor’s deconstructionist Titusand the A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1999 where Kevin Kline turns into an ass and makes out with Michelle Pfeiffer.
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The Birth of the Teenage Shakespeare RemixAs popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the ‘90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re talking moving past modernizing Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did, or repurposing it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim aimed with West Side Story.
These were straight, unapologetic youth films that also proved clever reworkings of classic storytelling structure. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You, a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. Stiles would, in fact, do this kind of remix a number times in the more serious-faced modernization of Othello, O, which also starred Mekhi Phifer as a tragically distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior, and Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke’s own Hamlet, the third Hamlet movie in 10 years, albeit this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC.
Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale, an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the strange attempt to turn Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 into an erotic thriller for teensvia the lusty Cruel Intentions
However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s CluelessEmma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Foregoing modern fads and simply inventing her own—with the assumption anything she wrote in 1994 would be dated by ’95—Heckerling create a faux yet now authentically iconic language and fashion style via Cher, a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-meaning in her matchmaking mischief that she defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother. It’s a classic!
And the Rest
There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime like the Gillian Armstrong-directed Little Women of 1994 starring Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst; and they can include the wretched like the Demi Moore and Gary Oldman-led The Scarlet Letter. There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and then those that just had some fun with playwrights, as seen in the over-celebrated Shakespeare in LoveBraveheart.
More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, this type of film has by and large gone away. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That beautiful film was a good-sized hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.
Now such projects, like everything else not considered four-quadrant intellectual property by studio bean counters, is mostly relegated to long-form stream series. Which in some cases is fine. Many would argue the best version of Pride & Prejudice was the BBC production… also from the ‘90s, mind. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers, period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.
This seems due to studios increasingly eschewing anything that isn’t reliably based on a brand that middle-aged adults loved. But in that case… it might be worth reminding them that ‘90s kids are getting older and having children of their own. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories; a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These stories are mostly in the public domain too. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don’t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. So perhaps once again, a play’s the thing in which they can catch the conscience of the… consumer? Or something like that.
#1990s #were #golden #age #period
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