The best thing about 10 Things I Hate About You is that it never once apologizes for being a Shakespeare adaptation. Gil Junger’s 1999 teen romantic comedy takes The Taming of the Shrew and drops it into Padua High School in the Seattle area, and the transplant holds. It runs 97 minutes, it stars Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger in the roles that made both of them, and it grossed $53.5 million worldwide. It is not a great film. It is a very good one, and its best parts are better than that.
Trailer, via Oscars.
Walter Stratford’s Dating Rule
The mechanic is clean and a little cruel. Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) arrives as a new student and falls for Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik). He cannot have her, because her father Walter (Larry Miller), an obstetrician and single parent, has forbidden Bianca to date until her older sister Kat dates first.
Walter knows exactly what he is doing. Kat (Stiles) is a senior, asocial and proudly feminist, and her father assumes no one will take her out. The rule is not a rule. It is a lock.
So Cameron picks the one person who might open it: Patrick Verona (Ledger), an Australian bad boy with a reputation. Michael Eckman (David Krumholtz) convinces Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan) to pay Patrick to ask Kat out. Patrick agrees. Kat turns him down flat the first few times.
That is the whole engine, and it is enough. The film does not need a bigger one.
A Cast That Did Not Need to Be Famous
Junger wanted lesser-known actors, and the movie is better for it. Stiles joined after several actors declined the part. Ledger was cast three and a half weeks before principal photography started. Shooting ran from June to August 1998 in Tacoma and Seattle.
The result is a cast with nothing to protect. Ledger plays Patrick with a stillness that reads as danger and, later, as patience. He does not push. He waits. Stiles gets the harder job, because Kat has to be sharp enough to keep people away and open enough that we want her to stop.
Gordon-Levitt is the film’s secret weapon. He had been reluctant to do a high school film, and he auditioned for both Cameron and Michael. He ended up as Cameron, and he plays the role without the smirking that would have ruined it.
The Party and the Kiss Patrick Refuses
The script by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, finished in November 1997, keeps finding ways to make its leads honest. Michael and Cameron pump Bianca for information about Kat’s likes and dislikes, and Patrick uses it. He starts to win her.
Then the party. Kat sees Bianca with Joey, gets drunk, and opens up to Patrick about wanting to start a band. She tries to kiss him. He pulls away. She leaves, furious and embarrassed.
That refusal is the movie’s best decision. Patrick is being paid, and he knows it. The film lets him be decent before it lets him be in love.
Meanwhile Bianca finally sees Joey for what he is: shallow, self-absorbed, an aspiring model who intends to sleep with her. She asks Cameron to drive her home. He calls her selfish and tells her his feelings are real. She kisses him.
Joey then pays Patrick more money to take Kat to the prom so he can take Bianca. The scheme is ugly, and the film knows it.
Letters to Cleo on the Rooftop
The music does a lot of quiet work here. Letters to Cleo — singer Kay Hanley, guitarists Greg McKenna and Michael Eisenstein, bassist Scott Riebling, drummer Jason Sutter — appear as themselves at Club Skunk, playing “Come On” and “Co-Pilot.” They return on the school’s rooftop during the closing credits for a cover of Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me.”
It is a small thing. It is also the moment the film stops being a Shakespeare riff and becomes a document of 1999.
The tagline, “How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways,” is doing the same job. It is a wink, and the film earns it.
What Holds Up and What Does Not
Here is where 10 Things I Hate About You sits, ranked by what actually matters:
- Stiles and Ledger, together and apart. The film lives or dies on whether you believe Kat would ever soften, and you do.
- The screenplay by Lutz and Smith, which is sharper than the premise deserves.
- Gordon-Levitt, who makes a standard nice-guy role into something with edges.
- Larry Miller as Walter, an overprotective father played without mockery.
- Allison Janney as Ms. Perky, the guidance counselor who writes erotic literature, a joke the film does not push hard enough.
- The Joey Donner subplot, which is the weakest thread and the one that dates fastest.
The film’s real limitation is that it is a Taming of the Shrew adaptation that wants credit for being one without wrestling with what the source actually argues. Kat is not tamed, exactly. She is revealed. The film is careful about that. But it is careful in a way that avoids the argument rather than settling it.
That is a real cost. It is also why the movie still plays.
Why 1999 Still Belongs to Kat
10 Things I Hate About You was released in the United States on 31 March 1999 by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. It drew generally positive reviews, with praise for the screenplay and for Stiles, Ledger and Gordon-Levitt. It became the breakthrough role for all three.
That reputation is deserved, and it is also slightly inflated. The film is not a landmark of the genre. It is a well-built, well-acted, 97-minute comedy that understood something most teen films of its era did not: that the interesting character is the one who does not want to be liked.
Stiles plays Kat that way. Ledger plays Patrick that way. The movie around them is conventional, and occasionally it is better than conventional. That is a real achievement, and it is not a small one.
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