Have you seen the website called "Dr. Bukk" (www.drbukk.com)? Apparently costume designer Sandy Powell (ORLANDO) has, because everyone in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE sports teeth so bad that it appears none of them has ever been formally introduced to a toothbrush.

It must be quite a challenge to outfit people for a film covering a period in which even the Queen herself only bathed four times a year. Judi Dench (MRS. BROWN) takes a frightful turn in SHAKESPEARE as Queen Elizabeth; her little brown teeth look even dingier next to her shock of white makeup and bright red wig that doesn't go down long enough to hide the fact that she's bald underneath. Geoffrey Rush (SHINE) makes an equally scary appearance as Philip Henslowe, proprietor of The Rose theater. His muddied teeth and greasy hair are so pronounced that I could almost smell him from my seat in the audience.

Even Will Shakespeare himself (a very foxy Joseph Fiennes, most recently seen in ELIZABETH) seems a bit grubby here, with his ink-stained fingers and tousled hair. The result of all this grunge is that Gwyneth Paltrow, as Will's love interest, Viola De Lesseps, seems to radiate even more than usual. Paltrow stands out here; her classic, inviting beauty is perfectly complemented by Fiennes’s handsome features (he’s as good-looking as his brother Ralph, only without all that laconic posturing).

If I started off focusing on the appearance of the principal players in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, it shouldn't diminish the fact that the acting and the script are superb. The screenplay was co-written by Tom Stoppard and bears a similarity to his well-known play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" in that it uses Shakespeare's work as a springboard for a tangential story. In this case, that story revolves around the mysterious "dark lady" mentioned in several of Shakespeare's sonnets whose identity has baffled scholars for centuries. Stoppard and co-writer Marc Norman have seamlessly melded the hypothetical (the writing and staging of Shakespeare's great tragedy, "Romeo and Juliet") with the actual (the play itself) to pose that the dark lady was someone forbidden to the playwright who inspired his more somber work.

Paltrow's Viola is a headstrong young merchant's daughter, her monetary rank in society befitting a marriage to the well-pedigreed but broke aristocrat, Lord Wessex (Colin Firth). I don't need to tell you that Lord Wessex is a pig, but there, I just did. In one unforgettable scene, he quizzes Viola's father about his bride-to-be so brutally that you'd think he was buying a cow. He asks Sir Robert De Lesseps how his daughter is in bed (yuck!), and her father, eager to marry off his daughter into aristocracy, replies, "If you're of the mind to ride her, there are rubies in the saddle bag."

Times are tough. Naturally, Viola has no desire to marry such a boor; her interests lie with the young playwright Will Shakespeare, whose burgeoning career has been impeded by severe writer’s block. What makes their romance such a heady, swoony thing to watch on screen is that she falls in love with Will, sight unseen. She is utterly taken with his talents as a writer, and so she disguises herself as a boy (women were not allowed on stage) in order to be in his new play, "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter."

Before long, Will discovers her true identity (and eventually changes the name of his play, as you may have guessed). The two begin a passionate affair, made all the more so because of their opposite places in the social strata. Paltrow once again proves to be more than just an "it" girl; Shakespeare's sometimes complicated verse spills from her mouth as if she had stepped back in time. And at the hands of director John Madden (MRS. BROWN), Fiennes, who iambic pentameterizes his way through the film so naturally that he would make Olivier blush, has a compelling on-screen charisma, adding the perfect comedic touch to a role that others might have taken too seriously.