When William Shakespeare was writing his plays, his stage was an open-air platform with an audience comprised of the “cheap seats,” on the hay on the ground in front of (and below) the level of the stage, and the boxes that rose up, level by level, occupied by those with the money to avoid the rabble in the center. So his stage directions and structure all went toward creating a play that an audience in those environs would appreciate. He even finished his scenes with capping couplets, pairs of rhymed lines designed to alert the stage hands (bored to tears, no doubt, by the umpteenth performance of the same play) that it was almost time to get back to work and align the next scene. So the idea of taking these plays and putting them on film, a medium much more flexible in terms of setting but much more challenging in terms of maintaining an audience’s attention requires more than simply making a video recording of a play; it involves adding all of those other elements of film – editing, sound and the like – in order to produce an impactful film adaptation of a timeless play. The adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, is an example of an adaptation that preserves and amplifies the mores of the original play for a modern audience.
One of the limitations of the stage is that when there is combat between groups, that combat is difficult to portray in a vivid way. The opening of Luhrmann’s film dispenses with that entirely, as the announcement of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths gives way to a hail of gunfire, with the Montagues and Capulets (helpfully identified by signage on a pair of high-rises) in the middle of a pitched battle, complete with soldiers in helicopters firing down on them all (William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet). As one reviewer put it, this opening “reworks Shakespeare in a frenzy of jump cuts that makes most rock videos look like MTV on Midol” (Travers, web).
In the meantime, the two primary actors, Leonardo di Caprio and Claire Danes, had the youth and the talent to make the roles work in a modern setting. This is why this Romeo can sit in a modernized Verona Beach but still speak the Bard’s English and have it sound realistic. This Juliet is not a shrinking violet or a ditz, as she has been portrayed in other adaptations. All you need to see that this is a woman equal to (if not greater than) Romeo is to see the fire behind her eyes when Romeo wants more than a first kiss after they have that initial date.
A sign that any film has gripped the attention of the public is the ferocity of the reviews, whether to the good or to the bad. There were many reviewers who found the adaptation effective; one who dissented quite vigorously was Roger Ebert, who swore that this film would “dismay any lover of Shakespeare, andbore anyone lured into the theater by promise of gang wars, MTV-style” (Ebert, web). Ebert’s complaint is that the same hard-bore style with which the movie starts does not make it all the way through, but it’s hard to say that this sort of chaos would have held interest all the way through.
Filmmaking is a challenging enterprise even with a script that no one has seen before. Adapting Shakespeare is always going to irritate the purists, both in the sphere of drama and film. Those who can take the elements of music, setting, costume and the other sensory aspects of film and intertwine them with the soul of Shakespeare end up making new masterpieces.
Works Cited
Ebert, Roger. “Romeo + Juliet.” RogerEbert.com. 1 November 1996. Web. 2 March 2016.
Travers, Peter. “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.” Rolling Stone. 1 November 1996. Web.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Dir. Baz Luhrmann. Perf. Leonardo di Caprio, Claire
Danes, Pete Postlethwaite. Bazmark Films, 1996. Film.
