ROMEO AND JULIET
A film review by Michael Dequina
Copyright 1996 Michael Dequina
William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (PG-13) ** (out of ****)
After watching the first hour of Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare-meets-the-20th-century take on the Bard's most celebrated romance, I was tempted to dismiss it as a complete disaster, one of the worst of the year. The main problem can be illustrated by the opening five minutes. Following a reading of the opening narration ("In fair Verona...") by a newscaster, we are treated to a quick-cut montage setting up the scene (Shakespeare meets MTV). We then have the opening Montague-Capulet confrontation, set at a gas station, with each new character introduced with a freeze frame and an on-screen ID (Shakespeare meets Trainspotting). Then bullets start to fly, and we see John Leguizamo (just awful as Juliet's cousin Tybalt) flying through the air in slow-mo with guns blazing (Shakespeare meets John Woo). In short, Luhrmann tries much to hard to push the '90s angle, so hard that the story is crushed by all the stylistic weight. And without the story to guide it, this first half decomposes into flamboyant, campy excess, complete with a drag musical number (Shakespeare meets To Wong Foo) at the costume ball where Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio, solid) and Juliet (an exceptional Claire Danes, the only one of the young Americans who makes the Elizabethan speech sound natural) meet, and a revamped, pool-drenched balcony scene between the two young lovers that is nothing short of a travesty--a shame since DiCaprio and Danes have such a charming rapport.
But about midway through the film, something odd happened. Luhrmann, it seems, decided to rein in a horse that was completely out of control, and lets Shakespeare's tale tell itself without shoving the contemporary setting down the audience's throat--the visual style isn't quite as chaotic, and gone is the painfully forced slapstick. Luhrmann and co-scripter Craig Pearce do take a few small yet pivotal deviations from the original text (most notably in the final scene), but they mostly work. The result is a '90s-accessible yet respectful adaptation of the final half, and it does manage to achieve a level of poignancy, though not as strong as Franco Zeffirelli's more traditional 1968 version. However, as well-done as the second half is, it can't erase that horrible opening hour. Moreover, it just shows how impressive and groundbreaking the film would have been if the entire picture had been like the second half--making William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet more disappointing.
Michael Dequina
mrbrown@ucla.edu / mrbrown@thepentagon.com
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