Page 89 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

78 / Shakespeare in the Movies

Bard created something of a Frankenstein's monster; what was
intended as a symbol of what we all should abhor was beloved by
everyone. That explains why Will provided a promise at the end of
Henry IV, Part II to bring Falstaff back in the next play; though this
promise would be broken, the full cast of lovably decadent tavern
louts returned in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which has never
been the subject of a major English-language film. What a shame
Welles did not have funds to keep his supporting cast on hand and
film that wonderfully bawdy comedy on the Spanish locations,
where he'd just completed what may well be the greatest single film
ever derived from Shakespeare—if far from a film that remains true
to Shakespeare's vision.

Neither Fish nor Fowl

A Variation on the Theme

There are two ways in which Shakespeare can successfully be
updated for our time. One is to go the route of West Side Story,
retaining plot and themes and eliminating poetic dialogue in favor of
modern street lingo. The other is to keep the poetry despite anachro-
nistic placement on modern mean streets. The audience adjusts to
this formal, unrealistic element as they do to song and dance in
West Side Story. The commercial success of 1995's Romeo and Juliet
stands as a case in point. Doomed to failure, though, is a mixing and
matching of modern speech with Shakespeare's poetry; just as the
audience adjusts to the one, they're forced to move back to the
other. Yet that neither-fish-nor-fowl middle ground was the route
taken in 1991's My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sandt, an eccen-
tric filmmaker known for offbeat hits (Drugstore Cowboy) and
embarrassing misses (the Psycho remake).
My Own Private Idaho is an odd combination of interesting ele-
ments that never jell into a cohesive whole. Borrowing from the
tetralogy (particularly Henry IV, Part I), Van Sandt presents Keanu
Reeves as his Prince Hal. The son of Portland's mayor, he opts for a
life on the streets in the company of an old Falstaffian dropout.
Though this plot has possibilities, Van Sandt too often lets the
Shakespearean parallels falter in favor of an intense, unpleasant
focus on the sordid sex lives of male prostitutes in the Pacific North-
west. Even admittedly gay critics and audiences were split as to the
results. The story line moves so far from the Bard's that when vari-