isbe, played here by Sam Rockwell.There's not much romantic yearning in the romantic couples, who are relegated to the rambunctious farce normally associated with the rustics. After a few ill-judged displays of skin, they thud into a display of mud wrestling from which none emerge unscathed, especially Calista Flockhart's querulous Helena. Before "Ally McBeal" made her famous, Flockhart did some terrific work in a couple of films seen by few - "Telling Lies in America" and "Drunks" - but her luck runs out here. So does Michelle Pfeiffer's. She's a terrific-looking Titania, which means not just that she looks golden and dreamy, but is convincing as a fairy queen in a jangly snit. Still, she needs more coaching than she got to get her voice around the lines in anything like a musical fashion, which never happens here.Rupert Everett is one of the few who does speak Shakespeare's lines well. Again, training shows. But his Oberon has little screen time. Stanley Tucci gives us an interestingly earthy Puck, but is undone in the end by too much eyeballing and mugging. As for the music, Hoffman has augmented the usual Mendelssohn (the acting isn't anywhere near as feathery as Mendelssohn's writing) with such arias as Donizetti's "Una furtiva lagrime" and Bellini's "Casta diva," possibly to bolster his case for setting the play in fin-de-siecle Tuscany, which doesn't make its case nearly as convincingly here as it did in Kenneth Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing." At best, Hoffman has given us a serviceable "Midsummer Night's Dream," but not a magical one when nothing less than magical will do. ...
