"Dream" Teaming

'William Shakespeare's a Midsummer Night's Dream' -- Michelle Pfeiffer and Calista Flockhart prance through this oddball comedy

(Rated PG-13)

When a movie director makes a point of respectfully citing the author in the title of an adapted literary classic -- ''William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet,'' ''Bram Stoker's Dracula,'' ''Mary Shelley's Frankenstein'' -- you can be sure that director has a not-so-modest Artistic Vision that involves swallowing the author whole. Michael Hoffman's fanciful vision of a ''fat little Puck riding through the Tuscan countryside on the back of a turtle'' was his inspiration for ''William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.'' Apparently, such was the force of his fantasy that Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Christian Bale, Anna Friel, David Strathairn, and Sophie Marceau all signed on for another bash at the Bard.

The result is a ''Dream'' shimmering with stars (the celebrity kind as well as those in a gauzy, glitter-dusted production designed by Luciana Arrighi), and cluttered nearly unto claustrophobia with ''stuff'' and conflicting acting styles; this brush with Shakespeare is a strenuous comedy that stalls in the enchanted forest. Squabbling lovers rattle through the Italian landscape on newfangled ''Butch Cassidy'' bicycles. Helena (Flockhart) stomps around in an Ally McBealish snit of love for Demetrius (Bale). Oberon (Everett) and his prankster messenger Puck (Tucci) share arch jokes at fool mortals' expense. Fairy queen Titania (Pfeiffer) is absolutely ravishing -- especially when she is under a love spell, wooing the weaver-turned-spellbound ass Bottom (Kline) -- but she is as coolly removed from the goings-on as the moon. Throughout, chunks of Mendelssohn's famous ''Midsummer Night'' music clash with random hunks of famous Italian operas.

The Bard's sublime play, of course, can accommodate just about anything thrown at it. (Previous film adaptations include the classic 1935 Hollywood production, with James Cagney as Bottom, and the 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company's version starring -- who else -- Judi Dench.) But this ''Dream,'' so lushly designed, expensively cast, and permissively underdisciplined by the expert director of ''One Fine Day,'' ''Restoration,'' and ''Soapdish,'' fractures and dissolves before our eyes. C+ -- Lisa Schwarzbaum