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Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo
and Juliet - a Review.
Midway through this film is a pivotal event: the
death of Mercutio at the hands of Tybalt. It happens on a palm-fringed beach
front: Verona Beach. As Romeo and his Montague friends begin to react to what
has happened to Mercutio, the camera draws back for an extreme wide-view long
shot. In the foreground is the proscenium arch of what was once a grand theatre
on the beach front. The action is played out under and behind this proscenium,
so that, in long shot and wide-view, we get the curious effect of watching a
play from the upper circle in a theatre. We the viewers are turned into
observers, detached, God-like. In the background in the same scene a hurricane
is approaching: the sky is darkening, the palms are being whipped by the high
winds, the stallkeepers are hurrying to close up and flee; Romeo races to his
car to pursue and, soon, to kill Tybalt. The darkness rushes in to engulf them
as the storm breaks over them. Like the cloud-shadow in the funeral scene of Red River, there is a satisfying
symbolism: the death has a metaphysical and spiritual dimension, as well as
more immediate implications for plot and character relationships. Shakespeare
intends it to be pivotal: the downward trajectory of Romeo and Juliet's
fortunes begins here, sparked by an unlucky chance event. Baz Luhrman has since
revealed [in an interview with Kim Hill] that the scene was fortuitous: the
film's cast and crew, warned of its approach, shot the beach scene while the
hurricane was breaking around them. There is a serendipitous 'metatextual'
quality to this anecdote: Fate intervenes in the making of the story as it does
in the story itself.
This 'metatextuality' is clearly the overt
intention of the director. It is signalled explicitly in the way the film
begins: the first image is a television set in the centre of an empty screen.
As the channels change, we see the first credits: 'Twentieth Century Fox
presents' (click) 'A Bazmark production' (click); we see a news presenter
speaking the play's prologue in the measured, restrained tones of a 'breaking
news' item. On the studio screen behind her is a broken wedding ring, with 'I
love thee' inscribed. The whole screen then bursts with a montage of newspaper
headlines in the form of fragmentary quotations reprising the Prologue's text ('In fair Verona', Ancient
Grudge', 'New Mutiny'), with photographs and
news clippings from 'Verona Today': 'Montague: Capulet. The Feud
continues.' On the lines 'Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean,' we cut
to a speeding car on the freeway. From a close-up shot of 'Montague' tattooed
into the back of a close-shaved head, we are quickly immersed in some turf
warfare at a filling station between the 'Capulet Boys' and the 'Montague
Boys': Act I scene 1, with much of Shakespeare's dialogue intact, but the
action and style of editing soon tell us we are seeing a parody of two genres:
modern 'action' films and westerns.
Tybalt's entrance, for example, borrows from the
'spaghetti western' genre, the cliched
scene of the 'baddy' making his first appearance. Here, the four men
fighting suddenly freeze while we hear
the sound of a match striking. There is a close-up of the match as it falls to
the ground beside a black cat-spurred boot. The camera cranes up to meet the
dark cold eyes and feline smile of
Tybalt, cigarette between teeth and gun-hand outstretched, the epitome
of calm, menacing, cool control. Then follows the full panoply of effects from
a modern action movie: a rapid sequence of cuts, whip pans, tilts, extreme
close-ups, distortions, slam zooms, and crane shots. This escalating
confrontation is comically undercut by
the exaggeratedly machismo actions of the men, obviously scared but trying not
to show it. The occasional slow-motion shot makes their moves seem balletic (a
reference, perhaps, to West Side Story ?
) as well as exaggerating the suspense in key moments. The fight itself is
impossible: a pastiche of all the devices of acting and editing we expect from
such scenes: the echoing ricochet bullet, the instant over-the-shoulder
shooting, the commando roll, the innocent bystanders who get in the way but
narrowly escape to safety, the slam-zoom extreme close-ups, the slow tracking
of an opponent viewed through the cross-bars of the telescopic sight. So rapid
is the cutting that we soon recognise the parodic quality of the whole scene.
In
moments, a crashing orchestral chord accompanies a wide-angle view of the whole
area igniting in flames (Another reference, this time to Hitchcock's The Birds ?) The camera cranes further
up to a aerial-view wide-shot of the city, an enormous statue of Christ flanked
by two towering glass office blocks, one surmounted with the name CAPULET, the
other, MONTAGUE. This is a key image: the corporation buildings with the statue
of Christ squarely between them are a potent symbol of the forces which
motivate, dominate and divide the people in the story.
This is
an opening, in its own way, quite as arresting and as involving as, for example,
Olivier's to Henry V, or Branagh's to
Much Ado about Nothing. Baz Luhrman
signals his intentions immediately: this is going to be no Zeffirilli or Cukor
production; if anything, it is a deconstruction of those earlier films. Doublet
and hose are now jeans and Hawaiian beach shirts; the streets of Verona are the
beach frontage of what could be Baywatch;
swords are handguns. Although a television news presenter has replaced the
Chorus, both have the same function: to create a distance between the viewer
and the events viewed. The television
set, the newsreader, the newsroom's screen graphics and the fast-paced editing
of the fight sequence become a Brechtian alienation device, signalling that we
are watching a form of documentary reportage: the world as seen and reinvented
by television, with sound-byte dialogue, live interviews, strapped captions,
hand-held cameras, the reporter on the scene, and the like. The film ends with
'Captain Prince, Chief of Police', speaking to
Montague and Capulet. In his final words, 'all are punished', he
pronounces 'punished' in the Elizabethan manner, in three syllables, with the
stress on the '-ed', and then repeats it, vehemently. This offers yet another
reference: to Zefferilli's Prince Escalus who pronounced and repeated the line
in precisely the same way. The image pixelates into a television picture, and,
as the camera pulls back, we see again the anchorwoman in her studio. She
speaks to camera the final lines, which in the play are spoken by Prince
Escalus. This is the 'wrap' for the item, the image fades, and the television
recedes into the distance. By thus framing the story, our detachment is
preserved. We end as we began: watching the television news.
The
opening sequence also invites us to read the film in the idiom of contemporary
television drama, Verona Beach 90210 or
Montague Place, as it were. This is
most obvious when the action freezes for a strap-caption introducing characters: 'The Montague Boys', 'Benvolio,
Romeo's friend', 'Tybalt, Prince of Cats. A Capulet', and so on. Further, we
register that the story is present-day and urban, the rival houses are now
competing corporations, while the dominant statue of an ineffectual Christ is a
frequently-repeated reminder of the power religion still has in the lives of
these characters.
Another significant point: the Chorus's
reference to the suicide-death of Romeo and Juliet, in the line 'A pair of star-crossed lovers take their
life', has been retained. Both Shakespeare and Luhrman seem to have
sacrificed what could have been an important source of suspense in the story:
will Romeo and Juliet survive? With a story this well-known, that would be
pointless, anyway. Much of the pathos in the play, and the carefully-contrived
ironies which permeate it, derive from our foreknowledge of how the story will
end. We can maintain a degree of detachment from the lives of the protagonists,
as we will do at the death of Mercutio, and as we have become inured to when
watching the six o'clock news.
The title prompts an obvious question - whose,
other than Shakespeare's, version of the story did Baz Luhrman imagine we might
think this film would be? Perhaps Mr Luhrman is biting his thumb at the
'auteur' school of film criticism, wanting to deprecate the tendency to suggest
that the director of a film is equivalent to the author of a book. The title is there, perhaps, to remind
us that this is the play as written by Shakespeare; some text has been cut, but, (unlike Zefferilli, for example)
nothing has been added. This is probably necessary considering the production
design of the film, which plainly shows that this is a director's vision very
far removed from any notion of 'traditional' Shakespeare.
Contemporary Mexico City plays the part of a
downtown L.A-style cityscape, a run-down, half-derelict urban setting, in which
the Capulet mansion, opulent and ostentatious, is closely guarded and separate
from the city it is part of. This is a detritus-filled, nigh-apocalyptic
reinvention of Verona, one where prostitutes and their customers roam the beach
front with a graffiti-covered wasteland behind them (Romeo, we notice, has done
some 'tagging' of his name around here). This Verona has been transplanted
firmly into a Latin American milieu. Such a setting is a product of the imagination
of the film's scriptwriters, just as was the Verona Shakespeare imagined for
his play. It is not important, ultimately, whether the setting conforms to
anyone's sense of geographical 'truth'; what matters is that this imaginary
locale should contain all the necessary elements of verisimilitude for the
story and its characters. And it does: we have seen this sort of blasted urban
landscape in countless films and television dramas with angst-filled American
teenagers as the main characters.
The setting, though familiar and believable, is
not by any means realistic. That is inhibited by the art direction, which is
gaudy to the point of becoming high camp. There is a blatant revelling in
kitsch, tawdry, and vulgarity. The colours are vivid and intense, with a
predominance of primaries favoured. The Verona Beach and Capulet Ball settings
are both a cheerful exercise in gimmicky tastelessness. At the ball, the
choreography and costumes suggest Busby Berkeley directing The Rocky Horror Show, while in Juliet's bedroom and the Capulet
tomb there are so many statues of Mary and Christ, bleeding hearts, angels,
cherubs, and crosses that we expect to see Pierre et Gilles credited as
artistic consultants. It is, nevertheless, an acceptable visual translation of
the play's extravagant, contrived and ostentatious verbal imagery, much of
which, perhaps inevitably, has been cut for the screenplay. Thus, what might
easily seem a gimmicky and meretricious Felliniesque extravagance (the Capulet
ball and the tomb scene are perhaps the most extreme) becomes instead a
convincing and coherent reworking of the play's lavish textual idiom into
something rich and strange: a feast for the eyes, if not now for the ears.
Why? Because a great irony this film produces is
that what finally seems most awkward and out-of-place is Shakespeare's text
spoken by such obviously 1990s characters. This same problem occurred in Gus
Van Sant's film My Own Private Idaho, though
the solution there, to mix modern and Shakespearean dialogue, created a odd
linguistic hybrid which satisfied
no-one. Here, when Juliet asks her famous question 'Wherefore art thou Romeo?',
it seems almost appropriate to give her a translation such as 'Why are you
called Romeo?', and thus sidestep the perennial misunderstanding this line
creates [she's not asking 'where are you?' but 'why do you have that name?'].
But, of course, the line is so well-known that it has to stay. It is a measure
of the actors' skills that they can suggest some contemporary implications
through the way they point their lines. For example, when Clare Danes says of
Romeo's name:
It is nor hand nor foot,
Nor arm nor face, nor
any other part
Belonging to a man. [II,
2, 40 - 42]
her pause after 'face', her knowing grin and
slight stress on 'other' lends this line a newer, coarser, interpretation.
Clare Danes' Juliet is no naive schoolgirl: she is sophisticated and sexually
aware. An accomplished and talented actress, she moves convincingly from
portraying an infatuated ingenue to a determined, self-reliant and
resourceful young woman.
Though the dialogue is cut by almost a third,
its essence has been faithfully adhered to. Notwithstanding anything said
above, the greatest pleasure of this film, is hearing the text spoken
intelligently and articulately by most of the cast, in particular by Peter
Postlethwaite as Friar Laurence and by Mirian Margolyes, who plays the Nurse as
Dame Flora Robson did in the 1954 film: as an intelligent, competent family
retainer, not a bawdy Mistress Quickly. Harold Perrineau as Mercutio handles
the complex rhythms, musicality, extended metaphors and sophisticated wordplay
of his speeches ('Queen Mab', especially) as well as any RSC actor might. The
'Capulet boys' achieve a definite hispanic lilt in their speech rhythms, which
fits well to their overall characterisations.
As
Romeo, Leonardo DiCaprio's American accent grates at first, but the virtuosity
of his acting soon commands our full admiration. When we first meet him, he is
unmistakably James Dean, a 'rebel
without a cause', brooding, melancholy, alienated from his parents, lonely and
nursing an unrequited love. Naturally, he scribbles poetry in his notebook. By
the end, associations with Kurt Cobain are implied, also. His Romeo is, by
turns, impetuous, clumsy, naively romantic and fiercely, almost manically,
vengeful. DiCaprio's face contorts with gargoyle-like hatred when pursuing
Tybalt. In a long-held close-up on his face immediately after he has killed
him, we seem to read the realisation surfacing that this act will have
consequences far beyond the present moment. We hardly need to hear his
self-pitying cry, 'I am fortune's fool!': his face has already told us. His is
intelligent acting which illuminates the text and does not simply illustrate
it. His beanpole body, angular and gaunt, is a good complement to Clare Danes'
androgynous features. In their scenes together, usually in two-shot framing and
long takes, they create a believable and sweetly naïve pair of lovers, while
retaining sufficient fragility to make the ending the more pathetic.
There is wit and sly creativity in the way
Luhrman has found textual justifications for most of his updatings. When
Abraham sneers at the Capulets: 'Draw, if you be men', the camera zooms up to
the barrel of Benvolio's revolver: the engraved gun type reads 'Sword 9mm,
Series S.' (Others have the brand names 'Longsword', 'Dagger' or 'Rapier' as
the text dictates). Queen Mab, the fairies' midwife, is reinvented as an tab of
LSD Mercutio gives Romeo before they go to the Capulet ball. When Benvolio
tells Ted Montague that Romeo, lovesick for Rosaline, has been walking
'underneath the Grove of Sycamore', this verbal scene-setting creates the
ornate proscenium of a demolished, once-splendid theatre, the 'Sycamore Grove,'
on Verona Beach. Enacting scenes on what would have been the stage of this
theatre is a witty comment on the transformation we are witnessing in turning a
play for the theatre into a film for a cinema. Are we also being told that
theatre itself is now near-extinct? Clever, too, are the references to earlier
films: Romeo, in bed with Juliet, plays
at creating a tent with the sheet, enclosing them both. This recalls the scene
in Zefferilli's film where Mercutio played with the Nurse's voluminous
headdress in a similar way.
The costumes make some telling points, too.
Romeo's words when he hears Juliet at her window, 'Speak again, bright angel'
(2, 2, 26), have obviously prompted her angel-wings costume at the ball; and
perhaps Juliet's line 'Give this ring to my true knight'(3, 3, 142), suggested
Romeo's King Arthur-style chain-mail and armour. They wear these costumes when
they first meet: she is his angel, he her knight. On Juliet's second visit to
Friar Lawrence, after Romeo has been banished, she wears the demure skirt,
blouse and beret, of her school uniform, the image of a pious Catholic
schoolgirl attending confession. This fools Paris completely when he encounters
her there. Other costumes are also ironically appropriate and amusing: At the
ball, Juliet's parents seem to be enacting a parody of Antony and Cleopatra,
Shakespeare's other play about doomed lovers. Paris, Timely's Bachelor of the Year (John Kennedy Jun.?),
the man who aspires too high for Juliet, is aptly ridiculous as a NASA
astronaut.
These costume-choices work well as an element in
the film's design, because they illuminate an important element of the character who wears the clothes. The set
design, however, is even more complex in its details. Again, Luhrman fills the
screen with references: you could even make quite a game of 'Spot the
Shakespeare allusions'. Look carefully at the Verona Beach set, and read the
names of the shops and stalls there: sight gags abound. Among others, there are
'Mistress Quickly's', 'Jack Cade's', 'Rosencrantzy's Burgers', 'The Pound of
Flesh', and 'The Midnight Hags'. A fly-poster on a street advertises a
performance of 'The Merchant of Verona Beach'; Romeo and Benvolio play pool in
'The Globe Theatre'; Friar Lawrence pours a shot of 'Prospero's Whisky' which,
says its label, is 'such stuff as dreams are made on'; and he sends his
ill-fated letter to Romeo in Mantua (by 'Post Haste Post') on a form with space
for the 'local habitation and name' of the recipient. If you're quick enough,
you might spot at the centrepiece of Juliet's bedhead the carved face of a
famous Elizabethan playwright........
All this busy self-referential visual humour is,
it seems, intended as a substitute for the low comedy involving Peter, the
musicians, and the household servants, almost all of which has been cut from
the film. But, too, it becomes a visual equivalent for the quips, puns and
nimble wordplay which are an important element of Romeo's, Benvolio's and
Mercutio's camaraderie, but which would be largely lost on a modern audience.
The visual humour operates also on a intellectual level, much as the wordplay
and punning would have done for the wits and sophisticates of Shakespeare's
audience. Significantly, most of these sight gags appear in the early part of
the film only: after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, the humour wanes as the
mood turns dark. Again, this is entirely appropriate to the spirit of the
original play.
The particular achievement of this film lies in
the dazzling realisation of a relatively simple insight by the director.
Shakespeare wrote an exciting, moving, lyrical, energetic, sexy, passionate
play about youth: what is the best possible way to recreate that in visual
terms which a modern, mostly young, audience will respond to and identify with?
First, forget about being reverent because it's Shakespeare. Instead, pillage
all the resources of contemporary and past film-making styles; borrow and copy
costume and designs from high and low culture; from classical and contemporary
music; use the tawdry and trashy as much as the refined and sophisticated.
Instead of pretending there is no tradition of play performance and film making
preceding this production, ransack the tradition to create a film which fully
captures the tragedy, the comedy, the passion and the energy of the story. As Luhrman himself says in a foreword to the
screenplay: 'We have not shied away
from clashing low comedy with high tragedy, which is the style of the play, for
it's the low comedy that allows you to embrace the very high emotions of the
tragedy.'[Luhrman & Pearce, p.v, (1997)]
If Shakespeare could do so, I suspect he would agree with that, too.
RJG 7/97
Richard Gyde
BIBLIOGRAPHY
TEXTS:
Shakespeare,
William: Romeo and Juliet Ed. T.J.B. Spencer. Penguin, 1967
Shakespeare,
William: Romeo and Juliet Ed. J.H.Walter. Heinemann, London, 1967
Shakespeare, William: The Complete Works. Eds: S. Wells and G. Taylor. Oxford, 1988
SCREENPLAY:
Pearce, Craig and Luhrman, Baz : William
Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.
Hodder, 1997
JOURNAL
ARTICLE:
Arroyo, Jose. 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.' Sight
and Sound 3. [March 1997.] pp 6 - 9.
RADIO
INTERVIEW:
Baz Luhrman with Kim Hill, Nine to
Noon, 4 Feb, 1997. Radio New Zealand (Replay Radio)
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How to cite this article:
Gyde, Richard. Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - a Review. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000. (date when you accessed the information) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/essays/RJG.html >.
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