ROMEO AND JULIET
A film review by Ivana Redwine
Copyright 1996 Ivana Redwine
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Sorvino, Diane Venora. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Screenplay: Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann. Producers: Gabriella Martinelli, Baz Luhrmann. MPAA Rating PG-13 (Adult Themes, Violence). Running Time 121 Minutes.
Visually dense with a well-integrated musical score that runs the gamut from rock to classical, Baz Luhrmann's film WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET took me for a thrilling ride on an operatic tidal wave of emotion. I was almost overwhelmed by the sheer force of this powerful film, which I found to be a brilliantly innovative work of sheer cinematic artistry. It is a film that demands a lot from its audience and elicits a strong reaction of love or hate or a combination of the two.
Although Luhrmann has generally preserved Shakespeare's language, it is bold imagery and music that drive the film more than the words spoken by the actors. Also, the setting is changed from 14th-century Verona, Italy, to a fictional composite 20th-century city named Verona Beach, a creation that is a surreal nightmare wrought wholly from Luhrmann's imagination. To my mind, this film is as much Luhrmann's creation as it is the Bard's. I realize that Shakespeare's works are revered texts and to play fast and loose with them is risky business. Shakespeare purists may disagree, but what matters is that Luhrmann pulls his interpretation off brilliantly. However, Luhrmann has changed enough here that I would not blame anyone for seeing this film as a work separate from Shakespeare, yet closely related to it. While the film has been released with the title WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET, presumably for purposes of name recognition, titles like VERONA BEACH or BAZ LUHRMANN'S ROMEO AND JULIET would be more fitting.
Framed by the matrix of this film's unique vision, the essential plot elements of Shakespeare's tale remain basically intact. Two of the leading families of Verona Beach, the Montagues and the Capulets, are bitter enemies. Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Montague, crashes a costume party at the Capulet mansion where he falls in love with Juliet (Claire Danes), unaware that she is the host's daughter. Soon after Romeo and Juliet are secretly married, Romeo's friend Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) is killed by Juliet's cousin. Enraged by the death of his friend, Romeo kills Tybalt (John Leguizamo). As a result, Romeo is banished from Verona Beach. Juliet's parents have not been told that she has married Romeo, and they put her under tremendous pressure to marry Paris. (In the film Paris is cleverly introduced via a magazine cover as bachelor of the year.) Desperately trying to avoid this union, Juliet takes a potion that mimics death with a deep sleep, and Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) sends Romeo a message about Juliet's ruse. (The film wittily has the message sent by a courier service named "Post Haste.") Leaving exile without receiving the Post Haste dispatch, Romeo goes to the church where the unconscious Juliet lies in a casket. Then mistakenly thinking her dead, he takes poison in despair. Juliet awakens just as the poison starts to take effect on Romeo. She takes Romeo's gun (not a dagger as in the original Shakespeare) and commits suicide. Luhrmann's change of weapon makes it a bloodier and more viscerally violent end. The image of the blood-spattered bodies of the lovers nestled together as the film nears its end is a particularly gruesome sight.
Baz Luhrmann is a daring filmmaker with an eclectic style, which makes for some vividly creative and memorable scenes. Verona Beach is a place so fantastic that it could exist only in a parallel universe; yet it is beset with many of the same problems that plague modern life, including urban violence and a media that blitzes the senses with a barrage of information. Our first hint of this parallel world comes when the film begins with a television screen that frames a newscaster who delivers the prologue in the same calm tone in which we are accustomed to hearing the news of the tragedies of modern life.
There is a witty scene set in a gas station where insults are traded between the "Montague boys" and some of the younger members of the Capulet clan; here there are echoes of WEST SIDE STORY along with the film language of contemporary action movies. In my opinion, this scene would be merely derivative in the hands of a less competent director; instead, it turns into a scintillating synthesis.
The intensity and virtuosity of the costume ball sequence set at the Capulet mansion is a tour de force. Romeo enters the party while under the influence of a pill given to him earlier by Mercutio, and the kaleidoscopic array of vivid imagery and daring camera work reflects Romeo's altered state of consciousness. Soon he is overwhelmed by both the party and the effects of the drug and makes an exit to the men's room. Trying to sober himself up, he places his face in a basin of water. He comes up for air, starts examining fish in an aquarium, and sees Juliet through the aquarium's glass. Romeo and Juliet seem to fall in love while watching the fish and each other, and this moment in the film struck me as both lyrically beautiful and hauntingly strange. The sequence is reminiscent of Federico Fellini and Ken Russell, while remaining something that is distinctively Luhrmann's own.
The film's treatment of the famous balcony scene departs radically from the traditional by having the young lovers fall into an adjacent swimming pool and deliver much of their dialog while treading water. This is daring, but I am not sure it entirely worked; I missed some of the power of the more traditional interpretations of the scene. Still, I thought it was a fresh and engaging scene with a charm all its own.
Three main motifs run through the film like a series of interrelated fugues--water, guns, and religious iconography--creating a complicated visual tapestry. These motifs can be interpreted on any number of levels: Jungian, Freudian, personal. While there seems no simple way to interpret them, I thought that the motifs added a touch to the film that was both surreal and at the same time intensely real; they seemed to belong to the world between wakefulness and sleep. However, I concede that this often had the effect of making the film harder to follow. In addition, sometimes these motifs were deliberately provocative, making the film more unsettling. In particular, I found that guns--sleekly designed and seductively photographed--seemed almost omnipresent, but they also fit the artistic vision of the film and were integral to the nightmarish violence that permeated Verona Beach. In addition, some viewers might find Luhrmann's freewheeling approach to religious imagery irreverent. However, in general I thought the use of these three motifs made the film more dynamic, so I gave the film artistic license on the parts that disturbed me.
There was one thing that Luhrmann did that seemed to me to be a touch of sheer genius. When the "star-crossed" lovers are alone on the screen, the bombardment of music and surreal imagery seems to fade away: it is as if the truth of their young love gives them a temporary refuge from the horror of Verona Beach.
The performances in the film are surprisingly good, although they are not the kind of great performances given in film adaptations of Shakespeare featuring actors such as Ian McKellen, Kenneth Branagh, or Laurence Olivier. There is less emphasis on Shakespeare's language in this film, so if the performances cannot match the perfection of trained Shakespearean actors, it is not as much of a distraction as one might think. Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio still manage to shine; the innocence and exuberance of their actual youth makes them magic on the screen.
Two of the supporting performances are particularly good. Harold Perrineau's Mercutio is charismatic throughout the film, and at times he is superb. Perrineau manages to steal the show as a dazzling drag diva in the costume ball scene. John Leguizamo gives a powerful performance as Tybalt; he projects some of the malignant malevolence of pure hate into the role.
The intensity level of this film is overwhelming at times, and that is what struck me as both the film's strength and its weakness. This is a highly stylized film, and I found that style sometimes interfered with substance. There were times in the film when I yearned for greater focus on the poetic power of the Bard's words. This is not a perfect film, but it is a brave and often brilliant one. A deliberately daring and disturbing interpretation of Shakespeare's work, I must admit that it is not for everyone. But I think it is easily one of the best and most important films of this year. This is a film that will be watched, studied, and its merits debated for years to come.
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