Cinema
William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (12, selected cinemas)
Dazzled by detail
Mark Steyn
The only real objection I have to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is the title. It's no more William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet than it's William Shake- speare's West Side Story or William Shake- speare's Return to the Forbidden Planet. If anything, the model for billing ought to be United Artists' 1929 Taming of the Shrew with its famous credit, 'by William Shake- speare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor'. This Romeo and Juliet is by Baz Luhrmann, with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare. Luhrmann has pro- duced a splendid rock video, but the addi- tional dialogue is superfluous to requirements. Wittily designed by Catherine Martin, this latest R&J updates Verona to Verona Beach, an ' all-American urban wasteland patrolled by the younger Montagues and Capulets in pink hair, tattoos and heavy weaponry. This approach makes more sense than the more traditional form of irrelevant update — the way, say, Ian McK- ellen's Richard III just dumps the play on a 1930s set and then gets on with it. With Luhrmann, the stylisation of the gear, the neighbourhood, the mayhem, the patrolling police choppers does kind of complement the artificiality of the dialogue. Contrary to received opinion, it's not true that an elec- tronic culture must perforce be a drearily naturalistic one: a modern audience accepts, for example, Vivienne Westwood 'It looks like a Sun trap . fashions, the strangulated, constipated vow- els of male rockers, Michael Jackson wear- ing a surgical mask even when he isn't visiting his baby ... Luhrmann is the first to try to make the conventions of Shake- speare's . time work amid the even more bizarre conventions of our own.
I like the way, too, that, in contrast to McKellen and co., having decided on his locale, he's determined to make sure the script contains no anachronistic distrac- tions. Swords and rapiers are now makes of handgun, a not implausible conceit in an age when Reebok introduce a brand of running shoe called Incubus, and one which involves tampering with the text only to the extent of punching the capitals key: thus, Tut up your swords!' becomes 'Put up your Swords!', though Romeo for his part prefers a Rapier 9mm. Luhrmann has stumbled on something which seems to have passed most Shakespearean directors by: the drama may be universal, but the dialogue is wonderfully specific — in its references, its images, its jokes — and, in transposing it to Weimar Germany or Zog's Albania or whatever this week's directorial conceit is, you're bound to dilute the force of the language. With Luhrmann, from the opening prologue, read by a television news anchor, to about half an hour into the movie, you're dazzled by the attention to detail: he and his team ferociously drag every footling adjective into the 20th century. And then, slowly but remorselessly, the soda pop goes flat.
One reason is that, in Verona Beach, there seems to be not so much a long-run- ning feud as total round-the-clock chaos: in the midst of all the carnage, it's hard to believe anyone would care about two kids with the hots for each other. Then again, Luhrmann seems to have cast Leonard DiCaprio and Claire Danes as erotic objets rather than protagonists in the drama. DiCaprio plays Romeo and Danes plays Juliet — or maybe it's the other way round: for once, you see what Shakespeare means by that 'what's in a name?' routine; the Montague is indistinguishable from the Capulet. They've the same eyes, same nose, same lips, same smile, same inexpressive California monotone whatever they're say- ing — 'Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Would you like fries with that?' True, Romeo has bigger breasts, but other- wise they look less like star-crossed lovers than identical twins separated at birth.
Insofar as Luhrmann has a line on the play, that's it. It's made explicit in a cute moment at the Capulet ball — a disco, nat- urally — when DiCaprio and Danes gaze at each other through an aquarium and seem to be in love with their own reflections. But by now their vapid passion has been oblit- erated by the broader conflict — not Mon- tagues versus Capulets, but Shakespeare versus his new collaborators, Garbage and the Butthole Surfers and the various other musical ensembles on the soundtrack. One doesn't have to be an appelatorist — after all, a Butthole Surfer by any other name would smell — to feel that, on the whole, a little Garbage goes a long way, as does a little Butthole Surfing. That said, few direc- tors have as sure a feel for pop music as Luhrmann and he does these guys proud. What he doesn't seem to have a clue about is Shakespearean verse. His big idea is to get fellows like Mercutio (Harold Per- rineau) to speak the lines like rap lyrics, and thereby imbue them with streetwise attitude, if nothing else. Rap works fine for half-baked hoodlum exhibitionism, but Shakespeare deserves better than to be surfed as if he were a mere Butthole.
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