Right on the heels of learning Opera Orlando was doing Verdi's Macbeth I found out Orlando Ballet was performing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet this season. And in the spirit of my deep dive into four Macbeth films in the run-up to the opera, I watched two versions of Romeo and Juliet in anticipation of the ballet: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, and Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting.
First up, Romeo + Juliet (1996).
Top Level Reaction
Romeo + Juliet was a big hit, grossing 147 million dollars against a 14 million dollar budget. It received generally positive reviews and is fondly remembered by pretty much everyone who was a teenager in the 90s. I saw it in the theater but did not remember much about it.
So revisiting this 30 years later....
I don't think it's very good.
Now to be clear, I'm not making a grand statement that there's nothing to appreciate in it, or there's nothing compelling about it. I understand why people like it. It's about big, sincere emotions and its emotionality is completely earnest. It's also visually unique and interesting. I wouldn't even say I didn't like it and I certainly wouldn't call it a waste of time.
But I don't think it's good.
Before I get into the details, though, a brief cruise through the play.
The Play
Written in the 1590s and first published in 1597, Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. Shakespeare's main source was the 1562 narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke which, per Northrop Frye in On Shakespeare "supplied him not only with the main theme, but with Mercutio, a counterpart of Friar Laurence, and a garrulous nurse of Juliet." Frye goes on to say Brooke is "very far from being a major poet, but he had enough respect for his story to attract and hold the attention of Shakespeare, who seems, so far as we can tell, to have used almost no other source." Brooke's poem seems to be a verse translation of a French story which itself is translated from a short story by 16th Century Italian author Matteo Bandello.
As for the plot of the play... It's Romeo and Juliet, but I'll go ahead and do a recap anyway. I managed to find this really concise summary:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
in fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
from ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes,
a pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
whose misadventured piteous overthrows
doth with their death bury their parents' strife.
- Romeo and Juliet, Prologue
Oh and, uh, "spoiler warning."
After the above prologue, members of the rival families Montague and Capulet get into a brawl in the street. Prince Escalus arrives and declares if there are any more fights the heads of the families will by executed. Romeo, a Montague who is pining melodramatically over Rosaline, goes with his friends to crash a masquerade party at the Capulet house. At the party he sees and falls instantly in love with Juliet, the daughter of Old Capulet and Lady Capulet, and they have a nice moment together. He is seen by Juliet's cousin Tybalt who is talked out of attacking him by Old Capulet. After the party Romeo sneaks over the Capulet garden wall to Juliet's balcony and they declare their love.
Romeo and Juliet are married in secret by Friar Lawrence, who hopes that the union will help end the feud between the two families. Shortly afterward Tybalt finds Romeo and challenges him to a duel. Romeo refuses to fight but his friend Mercutio challenges Tybalt and while Romeo tries to break them up Tybalt stabs Mercutio and kills him. Romeo then kills Tybalt and flees. Prince Escalus banishes Romeo from Verona
Before Romeo leaves for Mantua he and Juliet spend a night together. After he goes, Juliet's parents come in and tell her they've arranged her marriage to Paris, a noble kinsmen of Escalus. Friar Lawrence tells Juliet to agree to the marriage, but then take a potion that will make her appear to be dead for 24 hours. Lawrence will write to Romeo and tell him the plan so he can be at the Capulet family tomb when she wakes up and they can run off to Mantua together.
Lawrence's messenger cannot deliver the message due to a plague in Mantua and Romeo only hears that Juliet is dead. He gets a vial of poison from an apothecary and then goes to Juliet's tomb to kill himself. At the tomb he encounters Paris who tries to apprehend him. They fight and Paris's page runs to get the authorities. Romeo kills Paris.
Romeo finds Juliet, seemingly dead, and drinks the poison, killing himself. Juliet then awakens and, after finding Romeo dead, stabs herself with his knife. Everyone shows up, finds out everything that has happened, and they decide to end the feud. The End.
A Comedy Gone Awry
Romeo and Juliet is a little bit unusual in its mechanics. I've seen the following sentiment in a couple of places but I think Peter Saccio in his Teaching Company course Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies sums it up really well:
It is key to the effect of Romeo and Juliet that it is a tragedy that could have been a comedy. It almost should have been a comedy. It’s about young lovers, like the lovers of A Midsummer Nights Dream or As You Like It who have obstacles in the form of parents who get in their way. ... It has a plot that moves by accidents and that’s characteristic of comedy. … The lovers are characteristic of comedy, the plot accidents are characteristic of comedy, the bourgeoisie setting is characteristic of comedy. This is not about kings and princes, it’s not even about lords. … And even the recognition, the anagnorisis is not particularly profound. Romeo’s great line when he discovers he has killed Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, is “O I am fortunes fool.” [He’s] simply the sport of chance…. “I am fortunes fool” is not a great insight….
I don’t mean that the play is trivial or superficial. I find it a deeply moving play but its excellence does not lie in subtle penetration into the qualities that make for success in nobility or even in Italian citizens. Its excellence lies in its expression of passion.
(Note: Anagnorisis is "a moment where a character makes a critical discovery")
A Villain-less Tragedy
Something else I think is interesting about this play is that, in contrast to pretty much all of Shakespeare's other tragedies, there's not really a villain.
Even Paris who sets the endgame in motion with his impending marriage to Juliet only does so unwittingly. He doesn't know she's already married. He's just some guy and seems like an alright dude. Paris drawing his sword on Romeo in Act 5 makes perfect sense given the information he has: Romeo, an enemy of his betrothed, who killed her beloved cousin and presumably caused her death by grief, has now defied his banishment in order to show up at her and Tybalt's tomb for...some reason. (He thinks it's "to do some villainous shame to the dead bodies.")
Tybalt is maybe the closest thing to a villainous character the play has, but really he's not any worse than, say, Mercutio. (He's a lot less fun and engaging than Mercutio, but that isn't a character flaw.) If you swapped the two men, you'd probably think Tybalt was quick tempered but not a bad guy. I think it's only because the play focuses so much on Romeo and Mercutio, the hero and the most charismatic character respectively, that Tybalt looks more like a villain. He's certainly an antagonist, but he isn's necessarily a force for evil and certainly isn't a Machiavellian schemer.
(This framing of Tybalt does, as with so much in Shakespeare, depend on the staging. Recall that, as I said in my exploration of Macbeth, that Shakespeare's text is very light on stage direction and general guidance one how a scene is supposed to play. I'll get to this later, but John Leguizamo's Tybalt in Romeo + Juliet is framed way more villainously than, say, Michael York's in Romeo and Juliet (1968).)
At the end of the day the Capulets and the Montagues aren't all that different than each other. In the very first scene, both were willing to escalate an insult into a street brawl in which both aging heads of household entered the fray. If there is a villain here, it's the tribalism that drives people to hate those they don't know for reasons they can't even articulate. I think it's not an accident that there's no reference anywhere as to why the two families hate each other. The monster has taken over. The "why" doesn't even matter anymore.
Courtly Love Versus Real Love
The play presents a contrast between Romeo Before Juliet and Romeo After Juliet.
In On Shakespeare Northrop Frye points out how Romeo's pining after Rosaline, a character we never meet, harkens back to the medieval idea of Courtly Love, where a suitor hangs back and sighs over an idealized woman while composing over the top poetry extolling the perfection that puts her above mere mortals. Think Don Quixote swooning over the potentially not even real Dulcinea del Tobaso. (Cervantes is poking fun at the Courtly Love glamorized in medieval epics; Don Quixote is so over the top and ridiculous about this that there's really no way to take it seriously anymore. Don Quixote is the Dewey Cox of Courtly Love stories.)
Romeo's speeches at the beginning echo Petrarchan sonnet. A representative example:
Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create;
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
- Act 1, scene 1
Marjorie Garber, also working with this Courtly Love idea, says in Shakespeare After All regarding that speech that "This is the language of Petrarchan formula, empty paradoxes and oxymoron - cold fire, sick health, stale poetic images that say nothing and mean nothing."
Another Before Juliet example:
She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste;
For beauty, starved with her severity,
Cuts beauty off from all posterity.
She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair,
To merit bliss by making me despair.
She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow
Do I live dead, that live to tell it now.
- Act 1, scene 1
Romeo's Petrarchan language here is eye-rollingly pretentious and also really stilted and awkward with all the rhymed couplets, a form that's extremely hard to maintain for any length of time without coming across as complete doggerel. The above speech is also really harshly iambic and end stopped which gives it a weird sing song rhythm that feels incredibly unnatural. It's what a melodramatic doofus thinks is deep poetry.
This all changes the second he sees Juliet. As Garber says: "When Romeo falls in love with Juliet, his language changes, and becomes sharply inventive, witty, and original." All of his previous maudlin verse has been performative, said not in aside but explicitly to another character, but his first lines at seeing Juliet are only for himself:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
- Act 1, scene 5
This is far better than anything he has said until now, and even though he's still using rhymed couplets the lines have been freed from the end stops and rigid iambicness which makes them feel way more fluid and natural. His actions, too, reject the Courtly Love conventions as his first instinct isn't to hang back and moon, but to approach her. Romeo has eschewed love from afar and rather than spouting conventional nonsense he and Juliet actually interact with their first interaction being a Shakespearean sonnet in dialog.
Romeo never goes back to his Petrarchan days and Mercutio makes fun of his earlier pretentiousness, name dropping Petrarch and mocking the overwrought mythology laden references that those types of poets use:
Now is he for the
numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura to his lady
was a kitchen wench (marry, she had a better love
to berhyme her), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy,
Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a gray
eye or so, but not to the purpose.
- Act 2, scene 4
It's also telling that the first time Mercutio talks to Romeo in his After Juliet period, he says
Now art thou sociable, now art thou
Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as
by nature.
- Act 2, scene 4
Romeo's earlier affectation is gone; he is himself again.
Courtly Love Versus Real Love, part 2 - Paris
Marjorie Garber points out that, like Romeo and Rosaline, Juliet also has a false romantic pairing in Paris that is reflected in the language. In Juliet's first scene, when Lady Capulet is trying to talk him up, Paris is described in more weird rhyming couplets:
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him only lacks a cover.
The fish lives in the sea, and ’tis much pride
For fair without the fair within to hide.
That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story.
So shall you share all that he doth possess
By having him, making yourself no less.
- Act 1, scene 3
Paris, through just the language here, becomes a representative of a rigid and unimaginative courtship and social order. Against that, Juliet has her first sonnet with Romeo. Poor Paris never stood a chance. (He and Juliet don't explicitly meet until Act 4, scene 1, after Romeo and Juliet are already married.)
Love at First Sight
One thing I think people have some issue with in the play, and understandably so, is it's short time span (as written). The entire story happens in less than a week with Romeo and Juliet's marriage and Romeo's banishment happening the day after the play starts. (Apparently Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet takes place over several months.)
It can be hard to accept the idea of Romeo and Juliet's love as this eternal and earth shaking True thing when they've spent less than two whole days together. Father Lawrence tells Romeo that he had chided him not for "loving" Rosaline, but for "doting" on her, drawing a distinction between infatuation and actual love. Looking at the plot cynically or, indeed, just "vaguely realistically," it's tempting to see Romeo and Juliet's romance as youthful infatuation and their rush to marry as the action of two stupid kids. (Juliet is explicit 13 in the play text; Romeo's age is not stated but he's assumed to be just a bit older.) To quote a joke I saw: "Romeo and Juliet is a 3 day love affair between a 17 and a 14 year old that ends in 6 deaths." I think there could be, and probably are, interesting productions that lean in to this cynical read.
I don't know how this all would have played to Shakespeare's audience, but given the specifics of the language I talked about earlier I think it's likely that Shakespeare intended Romeo and Juliet's love to be seen as the real thing.
[[Note from future me: in Shakespeare After All, Garber says that "It is important to acknowledge that love at first sight is a common phenomenon in the Shakespearean world, and not something to distrust." So there's that.]]
Admittedly, as a Death of the Author inclined person, I don't actually care that much about the author's intent, especially in an art form like Shakespearean drama that necessarily has adaptive choice built into it both from the lack of guidance in the play text and the cultural changes inevitable in 400 years of history.
My own inclination is to take productions at their word and not be too rigorously cynical if the productions themselves aren't. If a production treats and frames their love as true, I'll roll with it provided they don't stumble in trying to frame it as such. After all, we've had a century of film using shorthand to show Love for the Ages and we don't worry about it too much. Relationships progressing "way too fast" but meant to be real is basically a convention of the medium. There's only so many When Harry Met Sally's out there to serve as counterexamples.
The Film, Finally
Romeo + Juliet is a 1996 film directed by Baz Lurhmann, who co-wrote it with Craig Pearce and, um, William Shakespeare. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as Romeo and Juliet.
Lurhmann is best known for Moulin Rouge (2001), but also made The Great Gatsby (2013) and Elvis (2022). (Pearce co-wrote 5 of Lurhmann's 6 films.) I've only seen Moulin Rouge, which I liked, and can absolutely tell had the same director as R+J.
Romeo + Juliet, like Moulin Rouge, is what academic film theorists term "stylized as f*ck."
The Setting
This is a modernized version, ostensibly set during the 1990s in the fictional Los Angeles-ish city of Verona Beach. Romeo and his friends wear Hawaiian shirts and everyone uses guns rather than swords. Prince Escalus is Captain Prince, Paris is Dave Paris, son of the Mayor.
Both the Montagues and Capulets gave me shady semi-legitimate crime family vibes, but I don't think there's anything that explicitly states this.
The shots of Verona Beach, with police helicopters and gangs, definitely seem to be gesturing at the Los Angeles of the Rodney King riots, which in 2024 is a little bit odd. It doesn't really have any effect on the story and leaning into a visual lexicon of really charged racial subtext is a little fraught given that the Montagues are the whitest of the whites and this more violent Tybalt and his small crew are the only Hispanics in the film. I can't really put my finger on why it felt off, but it did.
Having all the weapons be guns makes for dramatic visuals, with the opening brawl now featuring full on explosions and bystanders running to avoid catching stray bullets, but it injects some suspension of disbelief issues when directly translating sword fights into gunfights. You can't fence with bullets or have skillful tete-a-tete while spitting dialog, and non-fatal clashes involve a lot of poor aim. The film has to contrive reasons these people aren't all dead in the first 10 seconds of any encounter. The whole thing is so stylized that this heightened suspension of disbelief during the fights didn't take me out too much, as nothing about this is very realistic, but your mileage may vary.
The Cinematography
This is definitely a Baz Luhrmann film. There's a lot of flash and bombast, with frenetic editing, smash cuts, whip zooms, and undercrank (i.e. the opposite of slow motion, used similarly to the speed ramping really common in, say, Zack Snyder films). Subtle and restrained, it is not.
It jumps right into it, too. After a TV news anchor gives the prologue the film has a very flashy opening, fast cutting between helicopter and street level shots of Verona Beach, intercut with flashes of text and newspaper headlines underneath a second reading of the prologue. There's also freeze frames when a new major character appears along with text showing their name and relations in a kind of dramatis personae list.
Throughout this opening and the fight that starts the action the speed of the edits is absolutely breakneck. Personally, I thought it was kind of disorienting and vaguely headache inducing, and it also amplified some issues with the dialog which I'll get to later.
It does slow down after this opening. The film announces its presence and aesthetic with authority and then, mercifully, gives the viewer a little break.
There is some really striking, unexpected, and effective imagery throughout, some standouts being the fish tank scene where Romeo and Juliet see each other for the first time, the balcony scene which takes place mostly in the pool they've accidentally fallen into, and the tomb set at the end.
I'm really ambivalent about all this stylism. It's definitely interesting, often fun, and it is definitely unique, but sometimes it feels like stylism for stylism's sake in a story that for the most part is a domestic drama. I suppose given that it's a domestic drama it makes sense to heighten the shit out of it, but everything at all times is just...the most. I found it occasionally exhausting.
I do think, though, that in the scenes of Romeo and Juliet together the lavish excess serves to heighten the sense of an epic and dramatic love.
The Acting
For me the elephant in the room for this film is that the acting is, charitably, "uneven." Most of the cast came across as uncomfortable with the Shakespearean text. There were lots of moments, especially in dialog scenes, where it felt like the actors didn't know what the words they were saying meant. In those moments the performances didn't feel integrated, they didn't feel natural, they didn't have the push pull of real conversation. It was: Say lines, wait for other person to say lines, say more lines. A couple of times I was thinking "Did they learn this phonetically?" I also think the acting was done no favors by the frenetic editing, which felt to me like it cut between lines too quickly and really sucked out any breathing room.
Overall, the film had kind of a community theater vibe and was sometimes very stilted. Often the lines felt like recitation with no subtext, like in any given speech the acting only operated on one level at a time.
There are some exceptions. Pete Postlethwaite (Father Lawrence) was genuinely great throughout and Harold Perrineau (Mercutio) gave a consistently good performance as did Vondie Curtis-Hall (Captain Prince) and Paul Sorvino (Capulet), both in very limited screen time.
Both DiCaprio and Danes, two people I do think are good actors, both had good moments and not so good moments. Generally their scenes together were fine to pretty good, which goes a long way in this story, but I think it's telling that their acting was by far the best in the scenes where there was no dialog. Like, really good nonverbal acting from both of them. I know that's kind of faint praise, that the acting in a Shakespeare story is the best when the people aren't saying the Shakespeare, but there it is. I suppose it's not that surprising. As I said, Danes and DiCaprio are both skilled actors but maybe inexperience with the Bard mixed with a director who isn't experienced with it either and also maybe was more interested in the cinematic spectacle all conspired to work against them.
Maybe this film would have been better served by ditching the language altogether and telling the story with modern vernacular, a la 10 Things I Hate About You (aka The Taming of the Shrew) or O (aka Othello).
In general, the performances in Romeo + Juliet are not subtle. Everyone has so many feelings all the time and often shouts about them. This is undoubtedly what the actors were directed to do and the melodrama (i use that as a neutral term) of the acting is reinforced by the cinematography and framing which does somewhat sand off some of the rough edges of the performances. The film sells the emotions even if it can't quite sell the dialog and its insane stylization means some of the stiltedness doesn't stick out as much as it would in a more realistic movie.
Sometimes this excess absolutely works and sometimes not so much, and sometimes even in the same scene. When Romeo chases down Tybalt and Tybalt has the gun in his face, Romeo putting it against his own head and screaming "Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him!" three times with rage and tears in his eyes has a batshit manic insanity to it which really works. All Tybalt would have to do is pull the trigger to get rid of this man he definitely wants to kill, but when confronted by this utter lunatic he understandably freezes up which allows Romeo to get the upper hand. The repetition of that line is not in the play text and I think it was a good addition in an intense moment.
But then after killing Tybalt, Romeo drops to his knees, raises his arms, and screams "I am fortunes fool!" to the heavens in the driving rain, punctuated by a crack of thunder. It was really cliche, and I almost laughed out loud, though I suppose was in keeping with the over-the-top spirit of the rest of the film. A similar thing happens later when Romeo gets the news from his servant that Juliet is dead, and he drops to his knees again and shouts "Juliet! Juliet! Juliet!" Like, yeah man, we know. (That's not in the play text, btw).
Adjustments for “Adaptation”
Romeo + Juliet, as with all productions, makes a bunch of changes to the play, some minor and some more significant. I'd say the biggest change to the broad plot is that Romeo does not meet Paris at Juliet's tomb; after Paris's encounter with Juliet right before she gets the sleeping potion in Act IV he vanishes from the film.
In general I would say that this isn't the most thought through adaptation and some of the choices in the film unwittingly introduce some odd dramatic dissonances, alter characters, and eliminate some of the interesting things I mentioned earlier.
Don't Trust Your Ears
Like in the "nave to chops" moment I mentioned in my look at Macbeth (2015), there were a few small moments in the film where what the characters are saying and what we are seeing don't quite match up.
When Tybalt spots Romeo in the Capulets raucous and insane house party, he says to Old Capulet "Dares that slave come hither to fleer and scorn at our solemnity?" "Solemnity" would not be on a list of 100 words I'd use to describe the party. To be fair this could be a way to indicate that Tybalt is a stick in the mud, though we have already seen him participating a bit in the festivities, by making out with Lady Capulet no less.
In the balcony scene Juliet says to Romeo "Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face; else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek." But she's saying this as they are 6 inches from each other in a pool lit by floodlights.
The last small example I want to point out is at the end Prince says "And I, for winking at your discords too, have lost a brace of kinsmen." In the play this is a reference to his dead relatives Mercutio and Paris, but in this version there's never been an indication to the audience that Mercutio is related to Prince and Paris isn't even dead.
None of these are big deals, or even small deals really, but i think they are indicators of a production that didn't think too hard about the meaning of the text when they designed the look of the film.
Language Shifts, Cuts, and Shuffles
Some of the adjustments to the language felta little haphazard. There are frequent spots where part of a character's line has been cut mid-line, which alters the flow and rhythm to make it less...verse-y. So rather than a speech being, say, four lines of iambic pentameter (i.e 10 syllables per line), it'll be a line of pentameter, then a 4 syllable fragment, then 2 lines of pentameter. These kinds of cuts sometimes put pauses in unnatural places in the line, though I guess it's not crazy noticeable unless you really have internalized the cadence of the pentameter. It's more another signal that the integrity of the language as written wasn't at the forefront of the adaptor's mind. ("Integrity" meaning the cohesiveness of the written line; that's not a moral judgment.)
There's one speech shuffle that I was really scratching my head over which was all the more noticeable because it was Romeo's first lines in the film:
Why, then...O brawling love, O loving hate!
O anything of nothing first create!
Heavy lightness, serious vanity.
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms.
This is taken from a later conversation with Benvolio when Romeo is bemoaning Rosaline and it doesn't really make sense as a standalone. The full line from the play is this:
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
- Act 1, scene 1
The point of the statement is completely contained in that last line that the film didn't include. In the play this comes after we know he's pining for unrequited love and after he notices there's been a fight he immediately ties said fight directly back to his own emotional drama. Romeo is appropriating the fight as a vector to express his sad-boy feelings; he's saying that all those verbless adjectives are of the same turmoil that he has inside. Without that concluding line, he's just listing things to no purpose. If he looked at the camera and said "Blue white shirts, feet with lost socks, a messy house" and then just stopped, the viewer would probably respond with "....what about them?"
This is said in voiceover and without any reaction from anyone else or a concluding sentiment from Romeo to let us know what he's even driving at, it's extremely unclear what the film is trying to convey with this line. Also, since it's the first thing we hear him say and it doesn't have the reference that he's sad because of his teen angst bullshit, it just seems like he's being philosophical. But, to what end? It isn't a complete thought and given that it comes right after the opening fight it seems here like he's contemplating the feud itself. Which he isn't. At this point In the play text Romeo is supposed to be a head-up-ass dipshit who thinks he's being deep. Here it just kind of sounds like the film thinks he actually is being deep, like they wanted a philosophical sounding romantic line to immediately characterize our hero without noticing that it's intended to be pretentious and self-obsessed drivel.
Also, as I mentioned in passing the opening prologue, the "Two houses both alike" thing happens twice. The television anchor says it, and then Father Lawrence in voiceover immediately says the first six lines again over the opening montage. It was super weird. I don't know what to make of it.
I guess it's just another thing that makes me think this adaptation wasn't thought about all that hard in a holistic sense.
Wherefore art thou (ignoring) Juliet?
The biggest thing that jumped out at me in the film was how much Juliet felt sidelined. Her part is really cut down, both in number of lines and her impact on the drama.
As written Juliet's part is pretty comparable in size to Romeo's and Marc Conner, in his Teaching Company course How to Read and Understand Shakespeare, argues that Romeo is not the tragic hero of the play; Juliet is. Once the spell of Rosaline is broken, Romeo is largely static where Juliet develops as a character going from an obedient child to a smart and determined adult more in control of herself than her new husband is. The contrast of their parallel final scenes with Friar Lawrence encapsulates this neatly. Romeo, facing banishment, is a sobbing, ranting wreck who throws himself on the ground while Lawrence calls him a madman and repeatedly tries to get him to listen. Juliet, having lost her cousin to death and her husband to exile, about to be forced into marriage, and prepared to kill herself if they can't come up with a plan, is articulate and grimly in control. Lawrence never has to tell her to calm herself and she ends the scene with "Tell me not of fear." And only a few days earlier she was a demure and obedient daughter.
Per Shakespeare's Words, Romeo has 617 lines against Juliet's 542. In Romeo + Juliet, she has 177. And it's not just that everyone's lines got chopped to get the runtime down, she feels absent in this, at least compared to other productions. There are full scenes of Juliet reacting to events or thinking through things that are almost completely cut.
The one that stuck out the most was Act 3 scene 2, where right after Tybalt is killed and Romeo is banished she has a rather long scene where she reacts to and process her cousin's death and has to work through being conflicted about Romeo's actions and what they might mean. In the film, after Tybalt dies this scene is completely skipped and we go right to seeing Romeo upset about being banished. Then Juliet's nurse enters and relays that Juliet is weeping and upset. Juliet has about 100 lines in that excised section, and only about 8 of them make it into the film, and they have been split apart and shuffled to later in the narrative.
Act 3 scene 1, where Mercutio and Tybalt die and Romeo is banished, is absolutely the pivotal turning point of the play, and one that has massive emotional ramifications for Juliet, one of our title characters. And we don't even get to see her react to it. The film chooses to bias towards Romeo here, giving him a big emotional reaction to his banishment, but only relaying her grief secondhand and briefly, at that. By the time you do see the very few of Juliet's lines that were retained, they come after the emotional drama has already crested; they're too late to have much weight as we already saw Romeo react to the same event. They're also split into two parts with Lady Capulet and Paris having a conversation between them so there's not the flow or feeling of a person working through a line of thought. They're just standalone statements and we already know she decided to call Romeo back to her, so what's the point? It's like the film treats her as if she's not even a real character and has no internal world when she's not with Romeo. I find this decision completely baffling.
Cutting her scene here also injects a little bit of confusion as after Nurse says how upset Juliet is, she gives Romeo a ring from Juliet. In the cut scene, Juliet tells the Nurse to give Romeo the ring and bid him come to her, but here since we didn't see that discussion, for a moment it almost seems like she's giving him his ring back as a rejection, especially since some of Nurse's lines here have also been cut.
The same thing happens again in Act 4 scene 3 where Juliet puts Friar Lawrence's plan in motion and works through her worry about how things could go wrong. Her 56 lines are cut to just 8 in the film. Father Lawrence tells her what to do and she pretty much just does it.
Marjorie Garber in Shakespeare After AlI talks about how in the play we watch Juliet grow up before our eyes. We see her agency and cleverness, sometimes in subtle ways like, how when she asks Nurse to find out who Romeo is, she asks about two other random people first so as not to tip Nurse off to why she's asking. We see her convincingly play at repentance and obsequiousness to her parents when she pretends to agree to marry Paris. The film skips even these small moments. We don't really see Juliet do...anything.
I guess the title Romeo + Juliet is accurate. This film is very much Romeo plus some Juliet rather than Romeo AND Juliet.
(And I understand this bias towards Romeo was potentially a marketing decision as DiCaprio, even pre-Titanic, was the main draw in this movie. But whatever the reasoning, this decision, in my opinion, makes the movie worse.)
Capulets and Montagues
This tilt toward Romeo also extends to the Montagues in general. The first point of view characters of the play are the Capulets Gregory and Sampson, who are looking to quarrel and trigger the opening fight with the biting of thumbs. In Romeo + Juliet their parts have been shifted to the Montague boys. Showing the Montagues first and focusing on them has the effect making them feel more like the protagonists than they do in the play, especially since they are immediately contrasted with this version's more aggressive Tybalt.
The Capulets do not come off well in this film. Old Capulet is a violent prick, and Paul Sorvino is pretty intimidating in the role. Capulet beats Juliet when she refuses to marry Pairs and it's clear that the entire family is afraid of him. He even cows Tybalt at the party with what's essentially a threat display.
Tybalt himself reads as kind of a psycho and Leguizamo plays him with a very threatening aura, despite not being a physically imposing man. After Romeo refuses his challenge to a duel, this Tybalt beats him mercilessly until Mercutio intervenes. This pretty much completely absolves Mercutio of any responsibility for the fight that triggers the tragedy and lays it all at the feet of Tybalt, who likely would have otherwise beaten Romeo to death. (In the play text Mercutio, who if you recall is not a Montague, is spoiling for a fight and starts the duel himself when Romeo doesn't take the bait.) In case it wasn't obvious enough, at the costume party Tybalt is dressed as the devil.
There's also a strange moment at the party where Tybalt is seen making out with Lady Capulet, who is his aunt. It doesn't have much of an effect on anything, but it's another sordid affair that really doesn't make the Capulets look good. I wonder if this was added to justify why Lady Capulet is so bloodthirsty later in demanding revenge for Tybalt's death? That doesn't really seem necessary, but if that's the reason, whatever, I guess.
All of this taken together makes the Capulets feel more like the villains in this film, rather than the approximately equivalent faction they feel like in the play. We see almost nothing of Old Montague and his wife, or of any of the Montagues other than Romeo and Benvolio after the opening so we're left with two nice Montagues (Romeo and Benvolio) and a bunch of not-so-nice Capulets.
This film doesn't really earn the "plague on both your houses" moment from Mercutio, but that's ok. The man was losing a lot of blood.
Rosaline and Romeo's Characterization
Romeo + Juliet jettisons the contrast between Before Juliet and After Juliet Romeo and the Rosaline stuff feels pretty sped through. (That's not necessarily criticism.)
A lot of the Before Juliet speeches have been fractured and cut down, with a lot of the more lamely pretentious lines being dropped, which flattens the sense that this is mythopoetic bullshit. In eliminating the Before and After distinction, the film risks making Juliet seem like another one of Romeo's infatuations. Dropping the Rosaline stuff isn't a big deal in principle, but I do think Romeo + Juliet is caught in a little bit of a no man's land with this, where they cut enough to erase the Before and After distinction, but not so much that the viewer doesn't even make the comparison.
Also, I think it's kind of amusing that when Romeo and Juliet meet, he's dressed as a knight and she an angel. It's really striking and cool looking, but on a literary snob level it's kind of ironic as the costumes unwittingly recreate the Courtly Love trope of a knight sighing over an unattainable woman he sees only as an angel over play text that is explicitly rejecting it.
I thought it was a little odd that that the film cut some of the striking lines Romeo says when he first sees Juliet. HIs lines are truncated from this:
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand
And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night
- Act 1, scene 5
To this:
Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight.
For I never saw true beauty till this night
It kind of surprised me, as they're cool lines and this film isn't exactly shy about dramatically expressing big romantic sentiments.
Balthasar, Paris, and Visual Weight
This is a very small thing but it stood out as dramatically careless. The play has an extremely minor character named Balthasar who is Romeo's servingman. He's name dropped once in Act 4 and then shows up for the first time in Act 5 to tell Romeo that Juliet has died. He is with Romeo briefly at the tomb and then helps explain what happened to everyone after Romeo and Juliet kill themselves. He only has like 30 lines and they're all exposition with some just being "No, my Lord" "Romeo" and "Full half an hour." He's a purely plot functional character.
Romeo + Juliet goes out of his way to include him twice earlier, to strange effect. He's present at Romeo and Juliet's wedding for some reason. By "some reason" I mean from a dramatic economy perspective. While in universe it might make sense that he was there as he's Romeo's servant, in the film... who the f*ck is that guy? I think it's the first time he's appeared and he's just this dude we've never seen before who shows up at this small intimate wedding ceremony where the only other people present are main characters.
He also shows up later when Father Lawrence is performing Juliet's funeral, dramatically bursting in, seeing her body, gasping, and then running out. This is not necessary at all. If, like in the play, some guy from Verona that Romeo clearly knows just showed up out of nowhere and gave Romeo the news, no one would even blink or wonder "Gee, I wonder how he found out?" The worst part of this is that aside from being unnecessary, the way the funeral scene is shot makes Father Lawrence look like a complete idiot. Lawrence looks right at Balthasar and makes no signal for him to calm the hell down and makes no move to stop the man who is obviously going to run to Romeo and screw up the entire plan.
And in this version he doesn't even come to the tomb with Romeo so despite having even less to do than in the play, he is given way more emphasis in this film. And for what? To plug a "plot hole" and introduce a way bigger problem? To distract the viewer in the joyous secret wedding scene? It's yet another collection of small decisions that might seem ok in isolation, but are really weird when the whole of the film is taken into account.
Paris's evaporation after his brief conversation with Juliet at Father Lawrence's is another bit of dramatic imbalance. Paris, played by Paul Rudd with a good natured charm (shocking, i know) is more present in this version. He isn't given any added dialog but has a lot more interaction with Juliet at the party and is given a lot of visual weight which makes his disappearance a little jarring. He seems like he's going to be more important than he ends up being. If they were going to cut out his death they probably should have given less attention to him earlier.
The Ending
Cutting Paris from the ending also results in some plot weirdness. When Romeo drives back to Verona Beach, he's being chased by police helicopters who know he's there for some reason? When he gets to the church where Juliet is buried, the police in the helicopters are pointing both spotlights and rifles at him, and he responds by shooting at them before grabbing Random Man on the church steps, using him as a human shield and shouting "Tempt not a desperate man!" The police then back off and he let's the hostage go and heads into the church to find Juliet.
This is extremely weird. "Tempt not a desperate man!" is, in the play, what he says to try and warn Paris away before they fight at the tomb. It makes sense in that context, though it doesn't actually back Paris off. I don't think the police would hear that line from a guy who was just shooting at them and taking hostages and go "Eh. He sounds serious. We should probably just let him do his thing in there." Even in a movie this strange and stylized, this feels like it breaks the rules of the film's reality and had me thinking about the filmmaking decisions during what should have been the start of the film's emotional climax.
The insertion of Random Meat Shield Guy is also strange. This scene happens on an abandoned street at night, so I guess this dude either works at the church or just has awful luck. And Romeo doesn't even lock the church doors behind him, so I guess Captain Prince just respects people's privacy. Or he's a vampire and can't go on sanctified ground. (Wouldn't that be a plot twist?)
I guess you need a reason that the authorities show up after the double suicide or else no one would know it even happened, and without Paris's page to call the cops, you have to contrive something. But this felt really inelegant.
Once Romeo was inside the tomb, though, I really liked the scene. The visuals are interesting and dramatic and I really like how in his grief Romeo doesn't see that Juliet is starting to stir. And the moment where she opens her eyes, smiles, and touches his face just as he drinks the poison is really great. I love the moment where they lock eyes one last time.
It was bold of the filmmakers to include quick flashbacks to the only three scenes they had together, which accidentally highlights how little these two people knew each other. I say that amusedly, It's a really strong and authentically affecting scene, even if you maybe shouldn't think about it too hard.
In a different movie those flashbacks could be an intentional wink about "Wow, these two are f*cking idiots" but that is not this movie. Romeo + Juliet is an extremely sincere film that absolutely believes in the grand purity of Romeo and Juliet's true love.
Gallimaufry of Observations
This isn't specific to this film, but the name "Romeo" means "pilgrim" in Italian, which gives Romeo and Juliet's first interaction where she calls him "pilgrim" a cute extra dimension.
This isn't particularly about the film either, but during Prince's speech at the end where he says "All are punished" (as in "pu-ni-shed") the DVD subtitles say "punish'd" (as in "pu-nisht") It's kind of a funny because the subtitle looks like an archaism that would be from Shakespeare, but it literally is not what is being said.
Romeo and his friends take a bunch of drugs before going into the Capulets party. It doesn't matter much but the movement of Romeo's line "Oh true apothecary, thy drugs are quick" from the end poison drinking scene to here is cute.
Juliet is explicitly 13 in the play but the film cut this line out. Danes herself was 16 during filming which is Juliet's age in the Brooke poem that was Shakespeare's source. Why Shakespeare reduced her age is unclear. Apparently even at 16 Juliet would have been a good bit younger than most married people in Shakespeare's time. Per Professor Saccio the average age would have been early 20s.
The moment where Mercutio is stabbed under Romeo's on was incredibly visually unclear. I thought it was kind of surprising given how important a moment it is.
Do this Romeo and Juliet have the worst peripheral vision in film protagonist history? It's possible.
Conclusion
Would I recommend Romeo + Juliet? Um….yes?
Maybe not if you’re a Shakespeare purist or snob. Harold Bloom probably f*cking hated this. (Though, maybe screw that guy?) This film exists in that place where if you desperately love it I totally get. If you desperately hate it I totally get that too.
As is probably apparent I think that in addition to not being super well acted, the movie is also kind of sloppy and lacks much of the depth and nuance of the source material. But it was fun and interesting and I certainly appreciate that it wasn't afraid to be earnest, emotional, and romantic. Maybe the combination of bombastic over the top cinematography with really uncomplicated passion is what makes it resonate with people?
Honestly I was expecting to feel more strongly about it (one way or the other) than I did but I do respect its ambition and think it is an interesting addition to the Shakespeare corpus.
Next up: the Orlando Ballet's 2024 production and then Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968).
I am fortune's fool
-m
Comments