Television sitcom director Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You is a very loosely adapted version of Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew, set among high-schoolers in a beautiful, upper-middle-class Seattle neighborhood. The Bard could hardly complain of this sort of literary mining; he himself knew a good plot when he borrowed or embellished one. Where Shakespeare inevitably turned an old sow’s ear of a tale into a theatrical gold purse, however, Junger rarely rises to the demands or possibilities of his illustrious source. 10 Things is not without an occasional good laugh, but it never transcends the director’s confined, sitcom-segmented understanding of comic development and his frequent pandering to a very low estimation of what sophomoric really means.
Julia Stiles does a nice job with the pivotal role of Katerina, the independent and serious senior student whose sights are set on an Ivy League college and not on the local Lotharios. Without making Kate a bitter recluse or knee-jerk shrew, Stiles interestingly etches a young woman who matured early and finds the popular culture and mores of her peers lacking; she reads, she thinks, and, most of all, she waits — knowing that her real life is about to begin.
Because Kate has never expressed interest in dating, her father, who is paranoid about his daughters’ virginity, decides that her eager younger sister Bianca (Heather Ledger) cannot date until Kate does. Neither her father nor Kate bargain on her crossing paths with a modern-day Petruchio (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who is equally independent and something of a wild man. The two proud, fierce spirits clash, and thereby hangs the tale.
Seattle may be a long way from Padua, but the current American teen lingo of 10 Things I Hate About You is even further from Shakespeare’s tongue. Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith’s script occasionally employs a line or two from the original, and the contrast never fails to startle.
Like, you know, there’s the rub.
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