Page 69 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

58 / Shakespeare in the Movies

Juliet in an apparent state of death and reaches for his poison; ordi-
narily, Juliet wakes moments after he dies. Here, though, we notice
Claire Dane's Juliet beginning to wake before Romeo takes the
poison. The timing is simply devastating; every time her hands
move or her eyes flicker open, Romeo happens to be glancing in the
opposite direction. Such impact is impossible onstage, where sudden
editing to extreme close-ups does not exist. Never before has a
Romeo and Juliet film elicited such audience involvement; it is
almost impossible not to scream out for her to move more quickly
and for him to go slow. When Romeo turns his back and takes the
poison, she sits up, smiling, reaching to him, unaware of what he's
done. Romeo turns, in the process of dying, and comes to grips with
how very much alive she is, how terribly close they came to defying
all odds against them.
How sad, then, that Luhrmann immediately undercuts the
remarkable beauty of what he's achieved. In the film's most sordid
image, Juliet blows her brains out with a pistol, which is pho-
tographed from a bizarre angle to heighten the revolting grotesquerie.
The director has moved, in a moment, from perfect cinematic
tragedy to the garish-kitsch excesses of modern melodrama. Such
extremes characterize the ultimate effect of his film. No wonder
Variety's Todd McCarthy wrote: "As irritating and glib as some of it
may be, there is indisputably a strong vision here that has been
worked out in considerable detail."

Variations on a Theme

Shakespeare's genius, even at this early point in his career, allowed
him to transform (however unconsciously) a unique pair of young
lovers into universal symbols; the Bard elevated two Italian teens
(their actual existence dubious at best) into archetypes whose prob-
lem is understood even by the multitude that has never read or seen
the play. In America, the famed feud between the Hatfields and the
McCoys led to the legend that a boy and girl from the fighting fam-
ilies fell in love but were destroyed by the hostility; certainly the
1949 film Roseanna McCoy with Joan Evans and Farley Granger
romanticized the real-life hillbillies into charming, well-scrubbed
youths worthy of Shakespeare.
To this day, any tale of teen romance, menaced by a hostile world,
is referred to as a variation on Romeo and Juliet; James Dean's cou-
plings with Julie Harris (East of Eden) and Natalie Wood (Rebel