10 Things I Hate About You [1999]

I'm watching 50-some odd Shakespeare adaptations this year and then writing about them for My Year of Shakespeare.

This week we're going back to the place where the caliber of goofy drama that The Taming of the Shrew evokes is appropriate: High School. No longer are we focusing on breaking someone's resolve, we instead come to compromise through listening and understanding. What a concept.

Summary

For most of this post series, I'm going to try to surmise the plot based solely on the adaptation; I don't have a deep bench with Shakespeare with the possible exception of Romeo & Juliet. As a structuring principle, I'm borrowing the Just King Things five-sentence summary approach.

[1] Kat Stratford (Stiles) is an iconoclast of Padua High with a tempestuous disposition that earns her the ire of most any classmate or faculty unlucky enough to interact with her; Her younger sister, Bianca, is the object of affection for all the assorted milhouses of the school, including the clever Michael (Krumholtz), the showboat Joey (Keegan), and the newly-transferred Cameron (Gordon-Levitt in the Lucentio role). [2] Bianca is unable to date until Kat does, per their father's rules, so the assorted milhouses enter a conspiracy with local burnout Patrick Verona (Ledger, in the Petruchio role) to have him date Kat, so that they can court Bianca. [3] Patrick, seemingly the only one with pure intentions despite his entry to the plot via the conspiracy, goes out of his way to actually listen to and connect with Kat. [4] The milhouses squabble among themselves to date Bianca, with Cameron emerging as the one she is interested in. [5] At prom, the conspiracy is revealed and while Kat is hurt, Patrick makes good with her, buying her a Stratocaster with the money from the conspiracy, thereby demonstrating that his interest wasn't in the money but in her.

My Thoughts

This film is a joy. In stark contrast to Kiss Me Kate, it demonstrates an empathy towards its female players by having its male players need to observe, grow, and change. It's smartly written and punched up — quippy, even — without being grating and both in its quoting of the text and deviation from it, clever; neither modality goes out of its way to call attention to itself.

Ledger turns in an all-timer performance; from stabbing a dissected frog with a butterfly knife to his sardonic flirting to his deeply sincere displays of vulnerability during his dates, he does an excellent job showing how one can peel back layers of themselves to people they're interested in.

Stiles, likewise, does a fantastic job at portraying someone who is working through an emotionally turbulent time (coming to terms with her mother's abandonment) via wrecking shop on everyone she has to interact with.

The costuming is so dead-on accurate to late 90s garb that it serves as an excellent time capsule that period pieces set in the late 90s would do well to emulate.

Stray Highlights

The miniature side-character beats — Allison Janney, Daryl Morgan, Larry Miller and the assorted doofuses of Padua high: Andrew Keegan, David Krumholtz, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — are a delight. Even the cliques, painted with an absurdly broad brush to make them cowboys, "coffee guys" and so on, work both for their audacity and because audacious stereotypes isn't that far off from how highschoolers see themselves, a feature that would be used a couple years later in another Joseph Gordon-Levitt picture, Brick.

Miller's asides, J Walter Weatherman-esque stories, feel like someone in the writers room getting away with putting in some absolute shitposts into the script. "Up to my elbows in placenta" will stick with me in a way that I shouldn't be giggling about but am.

Former bandmate and fellow eponymous-website-owner Alice Evans has her big screen debut here as the girl whose posters keep getting ripped down by Julia Stiles.

It's fascinating to look back on the 90s and reckon with the idea that they were just figuring out how to do "high school AU" versions of classics, that the sort of setting transposition maneuver was fresh and new and not yet hackneyed or played out; I'll get more into this next month as I suspect I'll have much more to say about it for the West Side Story essays.

The music from this was an unexpected highlight. Except Air's "Sexy Boy"; I'm not sure that one fits.

Next Week

I'm watching Deliver Us From Eva [2003]. We're halfway done with the Taming of the Shrew.

Next Month

We're watching Romeo and Juliet adaptations - the schedule is as follows:

• Feb 7: Romeo and Juliet (1968)
• Feb 14: Romeo + Juliet (1996)
• Feb 21: West Side Story (1961) and West Side Story (2021)
• Feb 28: China Girl (1987)

Thank you for reading My Year of Shakespeare. If you have any thoughts, responses, etc, please feel free to write me an email (my email address will show up on the banner if you are signed in).

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