For this Valentine’s Day review, let’s have a look at an adaptation of one of the most enduring love stories of the last 400-odd years…as presented in the most 90s way you could possibly imagine!
Yep, it’s Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet—as rather directly presenting the text of William Shakespeare himself. Honestly, it’s not inherently a bad idea—consider how many variations there have been on the scripts of one of the most famous bards of all times both on stage and other mediums. How many now go for what’s perhaps a much more sympathetic Shylock in Merchant of Venice? How many now take a twist on Othello, a play experimented with more than ever it feels in our modern time?
And fundamentally, isn’t the most important part of presenting any play being the actual performance and emotion—in many ways, as long as it gets those right, surely a wildly presented adaptation is preferable to the very questionable way many a school will insist on just having students read the words themselves divorced of that context?
And so, does Baz get it right? Er…kinda?!
Honestly, it’s the opening scene of the film that’ll either have you rolling your eyes at something ridiculous, or grinning at just how extravagant it gets, or more than likely, a bit of both! We have a combination of the most nineties haircuts and fashion you can imagine, before the actors start opening their mouths to deliver the actual original Elizabethan lines themselves! Some of them seem to just be shouting them with a rather questionable level of understanding, but we also have those that roll with it so enjoyably, like Vondie Curtis-Hall as the ‘Prince’, or Peter Posthelwaite as the ‘priest’ (as if by coincidence, these include actual stage actors). Even John Leguizamo is actually having some fun as the Tybalt, of these Capulets now reimagined as a gangster cartel.
So for better or worse, in the spirit and word of the play, it’s fairly loyal for Hollywood—right down to keeping our two titular lovers marrying literally the day after they meet. We have baby-faced DiCaprio and Claire Danes as our star-crossed lovers—and that moment where they meet through an aquarium before kissing their way halfway across a mansion ball is both ridiculous, but also still entertainingly directed. Perhaps on screen they come off more than ever as overly impressionable hormonal teenagers—but then, isn’t that what some argue Shakespeare was getting across in the original?
Perhaps that’s what still gets this movie referenced even as silly it as seems to some—as uneven performance-wise as it is, it’s done with enough suitably theatrical presentation that it works in its own way. We have a glimpse of the exuberant costumed musical numbers that Baz would embrace full-bore a few years later in Moulin Rouge—and would you know, Harold Perrineau sure does steal a lot of the screen time as drag queen Mercutio, considered a dark horse even on the play’s original release!
Or in other words—it’s certainly not boring at the least, and from literal drug trips to all the gratuitous Catholic imagery shoved into the camera there’s generally something to look at. At the end of the day, there’s also a reason why this particular story has endured, with the themes of headlong romance—even if misguided—overcoming buried hatreds being one replicated over the centuries. Just as MacBeth still resonates for its story of ambition bringing ruin, or Midsummer Night’s Dream about…how, er, one can still enjoy certain essences in a forest.
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