The Verona project, part XIX, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
When this film was new, it may have been the first I ever pronounced "more interesting than good," though pretty good; I'll stand by that assessment on second screening. It is quintessential Baz Luhrmann, which is to say its virtues and its faults, its audacity and its rashness, are sometimes indistinguishable.Who (how old), when, how long? Leonardo DiCaprio (21) and Claire Danes (16), 1996, 2hrs.
Baz's boldest move is to preserve (well, mostly) Shakespeare's language in a modern setting, with rival gangs--sort of West Side Story without music and dance, but also without the weak book. In that respect, it set the stage (as it were) for the more successful 2000 Hamlet of Michael Almereyda. Unfortunately, scarcely anyone here (Pete Postlethwaite as Friar Laurence is an unsurprising exception) seems comfortable with the Bard's words. Certainly not DiCaprio, and if your Romeo isn't comfortable w/ Shakespearean language, it doesn't much matter how good he looks (and he does). Danes, a year or so past her amazing performance in the short-lived My So-Called Life, is better than Leo, but inconsistent.
Still, given the low bar I've discovered these past two months, I can't but rate this one of the best--and certainly the ballsiest.
What sort of R&J? Cusp-of-21st-century. One strength of Danes--as it was in her TV series--is her ability to negotiate about a decade's worth of age and experience with a twitch of her face, and if her readings are not always perfect, her look is, her costumes accentuating her boyish slenderness (OK, flat-chestedness). One reading I haven't encountered before: in observing that Romeo's hated surname "is nor hand nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face," she gives a schoolgirl-suggestive spin to "nor any other part / Belonging to a man."
Seriocomic scale for first scene? 2, about as silly as can be.
"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? Yes.
Carrion flies? No.
Body count? 4: Mrs. Montague is visibly alive in the final scene, and in one of the oddest of many odd Luhrmann lurches from the text, Romeo arrives at the crypt pursued by police; instead of encountering and killing Paris, he meets a departing priest and takes him hostage briefly to secure his entrance, warning the cops to "tempt not a desperate man."
What (else) is missing? Oh, much, much--some whole scenes are lopped, but perhaps more disconcerting are some weird truncations of scenes, like leaping from the Nurse's arrival in II.iv almost directly to "If ye should lead her into a fool's paradise . . . " and so bypassing almost all of Mercutio's and Benvolio's teasing. Or having R&J in their wedding bed debate whether it's morning or night . . . without any mention of lark or nightingale.
What (else) is changed? Oh, much, much. Probably the most radical, of course, is that the blades of the play all become various handguns (bearing brand names like Sword and Rapier). Now this is obviously something Luhrmann felt necessary to bring the story into modern times, but it causes some serious problems. First, it's impossible to stage a one-on-one gun battle with the suspense and tension of a swordfight; there's no athletic lunging and parrying in a gunfight, and the first shot has a pretty good chance of ending it. So to avoid instantaneous mortality, we have comically bad shooting (which, to be fair, works pretty well in the opening [comic] scene); or inexplicable shifts to fisticuffs (Mercutio vs. Tybalt), ended with a slash of broken glass; or a high-speed car chase (Romeo vs. Tybalt) ending in a rollover and a race for the loose hand cannon. Worst, we have Juliet, with no happy dagger to provide with a sheath, simply blowing her brains out. Yes, a gun is phallic, too, but it's not penetrative, and in that scene, penetration is called for.
What (else) is odd? Oh, much. Very cool: Mercutio's first appearance--dressed, remember, for the masque--is in full-throttle drag, which sets up an unusual hint of homoerotic yearning toward Romeo, which makes a hell of a lot of sense if you think about it.
Pretty cool: the crucial letter from Friar L to Romeo is sent by a FedEx-type courier, whose notice of attempted delivery (R is a just a few steps away, fungoing rocks with a hunk of rotten wood) fails to stick to the door, and his return the next day is a moment too late, as R and Balthasar are peeling out toward Verona Beach and disaster.
Not nearly as cool or as effective as a similar device in the operatic version I saw: Juliet begins to wake before Romeo doses himself, but he's too self-centered and self-pitying to notice. She seems him drink, and berates him for not leaving her a drop, "haply yet some poison . . . " thus preceding his "Thus with a kiss I die." She, deprived of the dagger/sheath line, says no more.
Not cool at all, just ignorant: police Captain Prince, who has lost just Mercutio to the feud, Paris having been spared, nonetheless claims to have lost "a brace of kinsmen."
End-of-the-play exposition? No, just the Prince's scolding, the final lines of which (like the first lines of the Chorus in I.i) are spoken by a TV anchorwoman.
2 comments:
What I remember of this is one of the most effective romantic-bonding moments I've seen: R+J exchanging looks across a fishtank (if I even remember that part correctly), obviously sharing the impression that all about them are fools, and thus they are a pair. It was perfect. I don't know whether I've cared for anything else Luhrmann has ever done.
Through the fish tank, actually, and yes: that is without question the single most effective romantic moment of the film. Both those faces look right pretty through glass and water and framed by fishies.
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