William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet (1996)
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Grade: B+ // Worth a Ticket
(20th Century Fox)
Director: Baz Luhrmann. Screenplay: Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann. Director of Photography: Donald McAlpine. Producers: Gabriella Martinelli, Baz Luhrmann. Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, John Leguizamo, Harold Perrineau, Dash Mihok, Pete Postlethwaite, Miriam Margoyles.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, violence) Running Time: 121 minutes.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET is an exercise in such sheer audacity that you will probably want either to stand up and applaud director Baz Luhrmann or smack him in the head. I mean, using jump cuts, fast-motion, American accents and rock music, then calling his film _WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S_ ROMEO AND JULIET? Setting the story against 20th century gang violence, as though WEST SIDE STORY never had existed? You need two pairs of pants to hold cajones that big, but this is one of those rare cases where nothing succeeds like excess. Al Pacino tried to make Shakespeare "relevant" with a hyped-up lecture in LOOKING FOR RICHARD; Luhrmann's glorious and gaudy ROMEO AND JULIET does it right. It is a work full of energy, humor and surprisingly gentle romance.
The story, of course, is based around two warring clans, the Montagues and the Capulets, set in sunny, flashy, modern-day Verona Beach. The men loyal to Ted Montague (Brian Dennehy) include his son Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio), Romeo's cousin Benvolio (Dash Mihok) and Romeo's friend Mercutio (Harold Perrineau); the partisans of Fulgencio Capulet (Paul Sorvino) are led by his nephew Tybalt (John Leguizamo). In an act of daring and defiance, Romeo and his cohorts crash a party at the Capulet mansion, and there Romeo spies a vision in white named Juliet (Claire Danes). Unfortunately, Juliet is Capulet's daughter, a circumstance which forces the lovers to woo and wed in secret. Meanwhile, the war continues unabated, and a tragic death forces Romeo to flee from Verona and from a love destined to be written in the stars.
For half an hour or so, you might wonder whether Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce have decided to turn the love story into an afterthought. The film's first image is a television screen, featuring a news anchorwoman introducing the events; Luhrmann then bursts directly into the conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets with a face-off at a gas station. That face-off is staged with frenzied editing more akin to Robert Rodriguez than Franco Zeffirelli, and there is scarcely time for a breath before we barrel into the costume ball, where Mercutio (played with dazzle and fire by SMOKE's Harold Perrineau) prances in drag to disco. In between there is a broadly comic scene in which Juliet's mother (Diane Venora) is made by camera trickery to move like a darting insect as she dresses for the party. It is a visual blitzkrieg Luhrmann launches, played against a soundtrack which surges from the up-tempo rock of Garbage to Mozart to a ballad by Des'ree before DiCaprio and Danes ever share a scene.
Once they do meet, however, the wait seems quite worthwhile. The scene in which they first see each other, staring through a fish tank, is beautiful in its quiet observation, as is Juliet's dance with suitor Paris (CLUELESS's Paul Rudd) while she is unable to take her eyes off Romeo. Their connection registers immediately, one of the most effective and convincing portrayals of love at first sight I have seen in years, and Danes and DiCaprio share a sweet but powerful chemistry. They may be the best male and female actors of their generation, respectively, and they give themselves both to the characters and to the language so completely that they seem to be discovering the 400-year-old text for the first time.
Luhrmann directs their moments together as idyllic interludes in a world of chaos and violence, but he also gives them a fair amount of sexual double-entendre, and anyone with more than a nodding acquaintance with the Bard knows that Lurhmann didn't create those bawdy references himself to appeal to the teenagers in the audience. He is interested in those young viewers, however, and that is what makes his vision of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET so faithful even in its iconoclasm. Shakespeare was a writer for every social stratum of his time, and ROMEO AND JULIET is an action-filled teen romance which also retains the tragic force of the play. Through it all, Luhrmann also manages to make Shakespeare's words an integral part of his film. The rapid, colloquial deliver of those words occasionally overwhelms them, and Luhrmann doesn't always know when to turn down the adrenaline. What he has done is to take dynamic lead performances by Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio and guide them through a telling of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET which makes the poetry and thematic depth of the play resonate in 1996. Luhrmann took his own stab at looking for Shakespeare, and may end up showing him to an entirely new audience.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 star-cross'd lovers: 8.
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