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Dressing the Girl / Playing the Boy: Twelfth Night Learns Soccer on the Set of She's The Man
She's The Man (2006), Andy Fickman's Shakesploi1 adaptation of Twelfth Night pulses with the Title Nine girl power that found cinematic voice and financial reward in Bead It Like Beckham (2002).2 Creating a pretext for the play's gender swapping by entering the world of high school soccer, She's The Man exploits conventions associated with the teen film genre-social group conformity and anxiety, crisis of identity, divorced parents, and ineffectual authority figures-as it reworks the Shakespearean plot.3 Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroine becomes Viola Hastings played by Amanda Bynes, for whom this film serves as a star vehicle showcasing Bynes's comedic range. Bynes appears to be following the career trajectory of previous teenage-film star Julia Stiles who chased credibility in three Shakespearean adaptations, 10 Things I Hate About You (Junger, 1999), Hamlet (Almereyda, 2000), and O (Nelson, 2001). Despite a critical drubbing, Fickman's "Shakes-soccer" earned box office success comparable to GiI Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You.4 Desson Thomson of The Washington Post describes She's The Man as "another gate-crasher at the let's-do-a-mediocre-update-of-Shakespeare party," adding that "once again, Hollywood makes the mistaken assumption that cribbing Shakespearean plots and dumping the poetry will somehow download the Bard's brilliance." Critics split over the merits of Bynes's performance, with a significant number deriding her transparent and unconvincing impersonation of a high school male. Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt explains the limitations of the performance: the filmmakers, "or possibly Bynes's agent, refused to let the actress' long hair be cut, so she wears a ridiculous wig that would fool no one. Nor has makeup or the costume department come up with anything to make her into a credible male. And Fickman never lets her drop her femininity, so the whole cross-gender disguise gets lost." Although generally positive in her review of the film, San Francisco Chronicle writer Ruthe Stein acknowledges that the miscasting of James Kirk as Viola's twin brother Sebastian harms the cross-dressing illusion. And Varietfs harsher assessment is that "Bynes exaggerates the boyishness into a cartoon that's not only too broad for the camera, but too much for any high school prep jock to take seriously."
The film depends...