Chapter 4. Alternate Reality: Recontextualizi=
ng Romeo & Juliet
Director Baz Luhrmann’= ;s Romeo + Juliet was aimed at the yo= uth culture of 1996. Based out of the carefully crafted script of Zeffirellis’s version, this film translated the story of the star-cro= ssed lovers into a modern setting without altering the text. Drawing from his experience as a music video director, Luhrmann’s film specifically targets the MTV generation through a number of cultural fascinations. We see souped up cars, contemporary music including hip-hop and rock, designer fashions mimicking that of various music celebrities, and a lead played by = teen heart throb Leonardo DiCaprio. Action in the film is taken to the extreme, = with gigantic modified guns replacing swards and mob violence in the place of fa= mily feuds.
“BAZ LURHMANN: I've tried to take the attitude if Shakespeare was here today mak= ing a movie there is no device that he would not grasp at to try and reveal and touch people with the story that he's telling. I mean, people might say why bother set it in modern images, and the answer to that is that we haven't d= one it just to be funky. Every choice that we've made, every image that we've u= sed is simply about making it clearer, making it easier to understand.”[1]
The point is to stay true t= o the author’s intent, not the details. Faith to the details alone does not mean faith to intent, because expressive talent is part of that intent.
=The updated setting of Luhrmann’s production is for the most part, brilliant. The film is se= t in Verona Beach, Florida (though actually filmed in Mexico City), and the feud= ing families are cast as rival gang members, as in Zeffirelli’s productio= n as well as in West Side Story. The Chorus is cleverly narrated on television by a newscaster, which seems very natural as we watch the image of the television on the screen. The balcony = kiss scene is relocated a swimming pool, the apothecary scene is modernized to a drug deal. Friar Laurence uses a courier service in his attempt to deliver = an explanatory message to Romeo.
Character updates are achie=
ved with
mixed results. The casting of the young people as MTV generation kids seems=
to
work well enough with the timeless story of love and violence. Pete
Postlewaite’s performance as Father instead of Friar Lawrence was an =
easy
change. Casting Miriam Margolis as a modern day Hispanic nurse,
Much less believable is the= police presence in the movie. After slaying Tybalt, it is difficult to accept that Luhrmann’s police chief would merely banish Romeo for the crime. In h= is commentary on the film, Luhrmann admits to having struggled with this chang= e, ultimately deciding that the new world created by film should allow for this change. The banished Romeo is sent to a desolate wasteland that does signal= a world outside of Verona Beach, but this does not prevent the audience from linking the film to contemporary reality. Language presents a problem for t= he production as well. Throughout the film unedited lines of Shakespearian ver= se are spoken in modern English. While some actors seem to pull this off, DiCa= prio and Danes seem to be speaking unnaturally, and the effect is often jarring.= [2]
According to Peter Travers = of the Rolling Stone, the film is intended to “make Romeo and Juliet accessi= ble to the elusive Gen-X audience without leaving the play bowdlerized and broken.” But other critic felt that the spirit of Shakespeare’s work was lost in this translation. As one Richard Alleva’s Commonweal article asserts, “It’s a specimen of clip art. Luhrmann has extricated 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 jettisoned. His is a real ‘movie movie,’ its dialogue just another comment of the soundtr= ack along with gunfire, screeching brakes, and the slapping of surf on the beach.” (56 S in the movies) While there is certainly debate over the films fidelity to its source, its success with the teen audiences at the box office is indisputable. It seems that teens found the film genuinely accessible, and if the film lost some of the spirit of Shakespeare in this endeavor, they either could not tell or did not care. While the film has it’s successes and failures, it can certainly be appreciated as ̶= 0;an important attempt to bring Shakespeare out of the elitist enclave of high culture, proving even in the MTV era of the oncoming millennium that the Bard’s vision rings true.” (57 s in the movies)
Since there are respectable= critics on both sides of the debate over fidelity, perhaps it is best to agree that there is disagreement over the issue, and focus now on the films more self-= evident appeal to teen audiences. The modernization necessary for this is not alway= s an easy task. Perhaps the most successful previous modernization attempt of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Jul= iet is the 1961 film, West Side Story, Nominated for eleven Academy Awards and awarded ten Oscars including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (George Chakaris), Best Supporting Actress (= Rita Moreno), and Best Direction (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). West Side Story pioneered the street gang adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but more than th= at took on the issues of racism, sexism, police brutality, and many other soci= al issues during a relatively conservative era.
Part of the success of West Side Story is that, in many w= ays, it is it’s own story. It uses the generational themes or Romeo and Ju= liet to help structure a commentary on 1960s society. This is a very important issue. While some adaptations sole aim is fidelity, others simply allude to= or borrow from Shakespeare in order to add to an idea or plot. Some aim to rev= ive Shakespeare while others seek to ridicule Shakespearian plots that seem to perpetuate social, racial, and gender inequality, violence, and excessive p= ower of the ruling classes. West Side story represents a genre in which “…the adaptors have a contradictory relationship with the plays, longing to borrow their dramatic power and mythic resonance yet rebelliously asserting their own freedom. This almost Oedipal relationship is important = for an understanding of the ways both the industry (popular cinema) and the independent auteur (art films) have recycled Shakespeare.”[3]
Taking this issue back to
Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet=
, we
see how some adaptations seem to straddle this line. Unlike West Side Story, Romeo + Juliet through it’s title purports to tell the ta=
le
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Ju=
liet.
One can look at this as giving proper credit where credit is due. After all,
given that the film retains the plays original narrative, it would be
outrageous for the film not to at least acknowledge the influence of
Shakespeare. West Side Story on=
the
other hand only seems to borrow the ideas of Shakespeare. Though at times t=
he
language seems to run in close parallel to Shakespeare, these tend to be br=
ief
moments that lead into creative departures. For further departures, take for
example theVampires and Were=
wolf
film, Underworld. This may seem like a silly example, but the creators of t=
his
film say they drew directly from Robert Wise and Jerome Robbin’=
;s
film adaptation of West Side Story<=
/i>,
which can be traced back from t=
he
original Broadway musical to The
Fantastics, the English translation of Edmond Rostand’s Les Romanesques, based upon William
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julie=
t,
based upon Ovid's Latin retelling in the Metamorphoses, going back to Greek Mythology with Pyramus and Thisbe and beyond. This
lineage is important to our discusion of Shakepeare, because it gives us the
perspective to consider that he too borrowed from other artists work, with
varying degrees of fidelity and credit. This reinforces my argument for the
investigation of continuity over fidelity.
Romeo and Juliet seem marri= ed to bad luck from the moment they meet each other. Coming from rival families, their love is doomed but they seem fated to love each other. Perhaps the mo= st successful modification in Luhrmann’s production is his use of the intimate perspective that film can heighten the tragedy of these idea of star-crossed lovers. Romeo does all he can to love his enemy for the sake of his love of Juliet, but bad luck returns in the fatal quarrel between his beloved Mercutio and Tybalt in which Mercution is slain. Through intimate camera work, we feel as if we are in the fight, and Mercutio death is very vivid. An interesting side note is that Mercutio is the one character who chooses not to blame fate and luck. Instead, his dying words are “a plague on both your houses” (III.i.), clearly indicating that he blam= es these characters, and not his fate of luck, for his untimely death. Romeo s= eems to have no choice but to avenge his friend. Yet he feels compelled to pray = for forgiveness after slaying Tybalt. His subsequent banishment is worse luck t= han death. And finally, even death comes unluckily upon these star-crossed love= rs themselves.
Baz Luhrman’s Romeo += Juliet takes bad luck further than Shakespeare through a focus on timing and with = the help of the more intimate physical perspective a lens can bring to a screen than a play can bring to a theatre audience. Romeo misses the delivery man = with Friar Lawrence’s letter that would have united him with Juliet only a moment too late. But it is the final scene in which bad luck becomes agoniz= ing. As in the original play, Juliet awakes only a moment after Romeo takes the poison. But in the film, the subtlest details under a zoom lens make the mo= ment longer. Traditionally, Juliet awakens after Romeo dies. But in this film, t= hese their final moments alive overlap. Juliet slowly opens her eyes and moves h= er hand at the precise moments when Romeo happens to look away. We see Juliet’s hand stirring as Romeo kisses her. We see her begin to smile, not realizing that Romeo is taking the poison. When Juliet finally touches Romeo, the shock causes him to swallow the poison he has only just put into= his mouth. The two have a one final moment of shared recognition at how close t= hey came to being together, and then Romeo dies. Everything is so close, yet th= ey still miss each other by the tiniest imaginable increment of time, realizing their bad luck a moment before death and yet a moment too late to stop it. =
By zooming right in on these perfectly timed actions glimpsed through specific camera angles, Luhrmann creates an excruciating audience experience in this scene. This creative departure is absolutely fantastic. But for some, the magic of this moment is immediately undone in the gory conclusion in which Juliet kills herself, not with a knife, but by blowing her brains out with Romeo’s gun. It is interesting that Luhrmann would make the choice to change one aspect of the scene in order to heighten the experience, and another to desensitize us through stereotypical gun violence. Since he is already departing from the original text, one must consider what other options were available.
West Side Story effectively plays with familiarity with the text. Maria hold= s a gun, threatening to shoot the gang members who had brought on Tony’s death. For a moment, it looks like she is going to turn the gun on herself = and we can almost imagine the impending moment when she commits suicide. But instead, she speaks the line” you killed him, not with guns, but with hate” and she hands the gun to the officer, and walks away heartbroke= n. This moment is even more powerful than if she had killed herself, because we see that emotionally she has been killed in ways worse than any gun could, = and at the same time, the message of the movie rings loud and clear: that reven= ge will destroy you unless you leave it to God. This is very much the Message = of Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus. In a Columbia University interview, Taymor explains how “I love the truth of the play, but I can’t stand the reality.” “I didn’t want to do the play unless I had that sliver of hope.”[4]
What is the point of making= a Shakespeare adaptation if not to push the envelope and take the text to new places? Especially now that there are so many films adaptations, it is far = more important to explore than to retell. Asking whether something is authentica= lly Shakespeare is not the same as asking if a Shakespearian film adaptation is successful. To be successful, a film must capture and sustain the imaginati= on. I also think that in order to justify itself, an film adaptation of a play = must use its many resources to go beyond theatrical versions.[5] If all we are seeing is a perfect reproduction of a theatrical version, then perhaps we would be better off just seeing a play.
[2] Shakespeare in the Movies, 57
[3] Shakespeare in the Movies, 296
[4] Titus Supplemental DVD
[5] “In a city of 400,000 people, that’s London, he [Shakespeare] h= ad to get an audience of 4000, mostly drunk, yelling, screaming ticket buyers = into the theatre every day. So Shakespeare firstly had to tell his story in such= an aggressive, sexy, noisy, rambunctious way, that he could shut them up and at the same time reach out and touch every kind of person from every kind of background…and you know, I truly wanted to learn from this guy that l= ived 400 years ago, and I instinctively felt that a funky Shakespeare would and could work. So my team and I did like a year of research discovering that m= ost of Shakespeare on film came from what you call a kind of 19th century versi= on, you know, and that is lots of round vowels and tights…we wanted to do= a sort of Elizabethan interpretation of Shakespeare…one of the great th= ings about them is that they would use any devise possible from the lowest bawdy comedy, you know like Something Abo= ut Marry, to the highest of tragedies, you know, a la Titanic. And it would all be in the one show, so if Shakespeare= was writing a screenplay it would be like something about marry set on the Tita= nic, that kind of thing. He did not differentiate. He would have low comedy, high drama, violence, action, popular song (you know, pop song, diddy didy diddy= ), virtually all of it all wrapped up in the one show, so there was no thematic style, it was just everything that grabbed them, no matter who they were. A= nd, you know, we wanted to convert that into a cinematic style. Because we want= to be dealing with a cinema language that is not going to be working this year= or even next year, but is actually about getting through what I call the gate = of the Millennium.”[5]
--Transposed from the Director’s Interview on the Suplementary Disc of Romeo + Juliet
Alternate Reality: Recontextualizing
Romeo & Juliet