Page 67 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

56 / Shakespeare in the Movies

banger milieu: Verona Beach, Florida. (Despite the Miami look, the
film was shot in Mexico City, with additional work in Veracruz.)
Luhrmann took the gang interpretation suggested by Zeffirelli and—-
for better or worse—fully realized it.
Montagues and Capulets are competing mobs, shooting it out
with oversized automatic weapons (which they refer to as
"swords"), cruising in hot, customized cars while wearing designer
clothes. The action scenes were reminiscent of recent John Woo
and classic Sam Peckinpah; other sequences played like extended
MTV rock videos. Accoutrements included pearl-handled pistols,
black leather, silver-heeled boots, and a lingerie collection worthy
of Madonna. As Peter Travers commented in Rolling Stone, the
intention was to "make Romeo and Juliet accessible to the elusive
Gen-X audience without leaving the play bowdlerized and broken."
Hip-hop music played loudly and incessantly, and hot young stars
Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes enacted the leading roles.
Teenagers, to the surprise of some, turned out in droves and the
result was a box-office success.
Not everyone agreed that this was a marvelous idea. Luhrmann's
version isn't "just an abridgment," Richard Alleva noted in Com-
monweal. "It's a specimen of clip art. Luhrmann has extracted from
each scene those few lines that give enough information for the plot
to function, plus a few more too beautiful or too famous to be jetti-
soned. His is a real 'movie movie,' its dialogue just another compo-
nent of the soundtrack along with gunfire, screeching brakes, and
the slapping of surf onto the beach." Critics debated whether the
impressionable young audience witnessed an altered and diluted ver-
sion, thus being misinformed and ill served by the film, or whether
the essence of Shakespeare shone through, whatever the surface
enticements. Though this might not be the stuff a purist's dreams
are made of, it couldn't be denied that modern youth did turn out for
Shakespeare, no mean feat in itself.
Some of the modernizations work well. Having the chorus spoken
as a TV newscast at the beginning and end seems right. So, too, does
Friar Laurence's lost message (via a courier service) to Romeo in
Mantua (here a desert trailer park) that believably gets misdelivered.
The apothecary scene (cut from Zeffirelli and most versions) is effec-
tively restored as a drug deal. Other touches, though, are too much
of a stretch, even for those willing to accept anachronism. The police
chief's banishing Romeo for a street killing rather than sending him
to jail is patently absurd. Likewise, the image of Romeo returning,