The poster makes the violence even clearer. Source:http://www.geocities.com/ Hollywood/ Hills/4954/romeo.html

Luhrmann was a relatively new film director when he did this film, his second. His first was the lovely Strictly Ballroom, a low-budget Australian film with a Romeo and Juliet feel but with a happy ending. His follow up was the wildly successful and wildly over-rated Moulin Rouge.

On the plus side, Luhrmann introduced Shakespeare to an audience who might never have seen his works. And there's nothing wrong with experimenting. But is this an experiment that went amuck? Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers notes that "It's a good thing that Shakespeare gets his name in the title, or you might mistake the opening scenes for Quentin Tarantino's Romeo and Juliet. "

Richard Corliss, writing in Time magazine has this to say of the film: "Romeo and Juliet is, defiantly, a movie--an assault on Hollywood's conservative film language that might have come from a more playful Oliver Stone; call it Natural Born Lovers [a reference to Stone's Natural Born Killers ]. Director Baz Luhrmann envelops Romeo and his goodfellas in portentous slo-mo for the shoot-outs, giddy fast-mo for comedy scenes. The camera literally runs circles around the lovers. When Romeo sees Juliet, his eye explodes in fireworks. The sound track pulses with rap and rock and sound effects that you'd expect in a Hong Kong melodrama; they shoot forth thunder. The style is studiously kicky, less RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] than MTV.

"On its own terms (and for a thrifty $16 million or so), the ploy works: it's the societal psychosis from which the lovers flee and to which they ultimately succumb. …

"R and J's style also allows the actors to speak the dialogue (all from the play) without worrying about whether they sound like John Gielgud. ‘We tried to bring the language to the actors," he says, "and not have the actors try to satisfy some spurious notion of the correct Shakespearean pronunciation.' Danes and DiCaprio speak most eloquently with their faces (hers strong, his soft) and with the hurt and ardor that make this a Rebel Without a Cause for the '90s--1590s or 1990s. Sometimes it takes a radical like Luhrmann to get to the root of a natural-born screenwriter like Shakespeare."

I quoted Corliss at length because I think he made some valid points about the film, but also because he brings me very much to the next point I want to make.

But let me get back to what Roger Ebert had to say in his piece about Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

"It is intriguing that Zeffirelli in 1968 focused on love, while Baz Luhrman's popular version of 1996 focused on violence; something fundamental has changed in films about and for young people, and recent audiences seem shy of sex and love but eager for conflict and action. I wonder if a modern Friday night audience would snicker at the heart-baring sincerity of the lovers."

The Montague "gang" Source: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/4954/rj_cast.html

Ebert isn't the only one who sees the violence of the film as part of its fin de siecle feel. Kauffmann agrees: "Why did Luhrmann have to fiddle with the greatest young-love story in the language? Presumably he would reply that there was no point in fiddling with anything smaller. If you want pristine Romeo and Juliet, he says, it's still there, it will always be there. If you want to see and hear this play soaked in a 1990s sensibility, here's the film. The result is horrifying, but it's also unsettling in its ruthlessness."

And then there's this from Lyons: "Even on its chosen turf -- what might be called street Shakespeare -- this Romeo and Juliet was bested long ago by West Side Story (1961) and, more recently, by Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991). And by a sweet irony, the only intelligible and/or professional performances in the film are given by Pete Postlethwaite (as the friar) and Miriam Margulyes (as the nurse), both veterans of just the sort of classy British productions that it was the announced intention of the director to render obsolete. What Luhrmann has accomplished instead is to define Shakespeare down to the tastes of today's youth culture, a culture so corrosive that it dissolves anything it comes into contact with. How innocuous, by comparison, seems Franco Zeffirelli's mildly hippiefied Romeo and Juliet from 1968!"

And Zeffirelli himself had this to say about Luhrmann's version: "When you have the power of a character that surpasses contemporary dressing up and other references, I don't think you need to make that effort. Actually, it might misfire. The Luhrmann film didn't update the play, it just made a big joke out of it. But apparently the pseudo-culture of young people today wouldn't have digested the play unless you dressed it up that way, with all those fun and games." ("Shakespeare in the Cinema")

Perhaps what these critics are saying is not so much that the film is horrifying, but the society that creates it is horrifying. Have we as a culture become so much more violent, so much more shallow? Of course there is violence in the original version--Luhrmann didn't invent the feud, but here a family feud is linked to gang violence. In this version Mercutio is a drag queen. Where did that come from? There are some critics who find homosexual overtones between Mercutio and Romeo in the original text, especially in Tybalt's taunt to Mercutio that he "consorts" with Romeo. This is also a double-entendre. It can perhaps even been seen in the Zeffirelli film. If one reads the play that way, one can definitely read Zeffirelli's film that way.

One element that is definitely not in the original is Romeo's drug use. Some film critics say he's dropped LSD before the party, others think it's ecstasy. I would opt for ecstasy only because I think it's more common on the party scene nowadays. Now, according to a website on drugs, this is what I found about the drug, which Romeo has taken right before he meets Juliet: "Ecstasy is often called "the love pill" because it heightens perceptions of color and sound and supposedly amplifies sensations when one touches or caresses another, particularly during sex.

Right before they end. Source: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/ Hills/4954/romeo.html

"But ecstasy is a hallucinogen, a drug that acts on the mind to cause people to see or feel things that are not really there. Hallucinogens mix up pictures in the mind and can throw a person into a scary or sad experience from the past, where he gets stuck without even realizing it."

Now if it's true that Romeo has taken this drug, has Luhrmann just undercut the purity of the love between Romeo and Juliet? Could it be partially drug-induced on his part? Just an interesting thought. This is a thought that bothers me about the film. Romeo's behavior, of course, indicates that what he's experiencing with Juliet is real, not drug induced, but still, it's bothersome.

Of course, Romeo tripping adds to the "street cred" of the film. And according to Luhrmann, Shakespeare's language reflects the street.

"Setting the story in the contemporary world of urban gangs allowed us to put Shakespeare's inventive usage to work as a dexterous and ornate street rap. This game allowed us to justify all words even when the actual meaning was not immediately apparent. For example, in a contemporary film a character in a gang may say something is ‘Bad' when in fact the meaning is ‘Good.' In a similar fashion Tybalt says to Mercutio ‘thou consortest with Romeo' with ‘consortest' bearing a sexual inference. Therefore, we see that if the intention behind the word is clear then the meaning will be too.

Romeo and Juliet in the now-moved balcony scene. Source: http://i.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/ imgs/021210/174510__leo7_l.jpg

"Where we took significant liberty was in restructuring and cutting. We felt it was important to serve Shakespeare's ultimate goal of strong storytelling. He had to arrest the attention of a very noisy, disparate, savage yet honest audience not unlike at your local cinema. To facilitate this he used all the devices at his disposal, the clash of low brow comedy with high tragedy, the use of popular song (pop music) etc. Similarly, we developed a specific cinematic language for Romeo and Juliet that transformed all of these devices into cinematic equivalents in order to achieve the same goal with our noisy, disparate, savage yet honest audience." (Johnson, "Souping")

As Johnson notes, "Luhrmann has cut Shakespeare's text by almost half. He has preserved the Elizabethan English of what remains—although there is not a plummy English accent in the cast. Nurse (Miriam Margolyes) delivers her lines with a heavy Hispanic inflection that sounds entirely appropriate. And as young actors jive through Shakespeare's verse in American accents, it is not as incongruous as it seems. ‘In truth,' says Luhrmann, ‘the idea of a society where youth go around speaking in rhythm with metaphor and simile happens today in the streets of America'." ("Souping")

This is a favorite theme of Luhrmann's and he gets back to it whenever he can. When he was asked about the proper presentation of presentation of Shakespeare's verse in a film and should it be delivered differently on screen than on the stage, he answered: "One of the great things about Shakespeare's text is its musicality and rhythm. The fact is the actor learns so much about what they are doing and saying from the rhythm itself. I do believe that this rhythm should, where possible, be maintained. As far as the way in which it's delivered, again it is whatever works for a particular situation. There is no reason why an actor cannot deliver the line in a natural style while maintaining the underlying meter." ("Shakespeare in Cinema")

John Leguizamo's Tybalt was also fine. He showed the fire, the hot-headedness, perhaps with a little Latin stereotyping, but it worked. His speech sounded more musical than that of his peers in the film, but I think he also played the character more broadly.

Again and again during the director's symposium and the publicity for this film, Luhrmann repeated his ideas of Shakespeare as a writer:

Corliss, Richard, "Suddenly Shakespeare," Time, Nov 4, 1996 v148 n21 p88(3).

Ebert, Roger. "Romeo and Juliet (1968)" 3 April 2006 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000917/REVIEWS08/9170301/1023

Ecstasy: The Truth About the Enemy Behind the Mask. "Imaginary ‘Love Pill'," The Church of Scientology. http://www.notodrugs-yestolife.com/page06.htm

Kauffmann, Stanley, "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." (movie review), The New Republic, Dec 2, 1996 v215 n23 p40(2).

Lehman. Courtney. " Strictly Shakespeare? Dead Letters, Ghostly Fathers, and the Cultural Pathology of Authorship in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet." Shakespeare Quarterly 52.2 (2001) 189-221

Lyons, Donald, "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." (movie review), Commentary, Feb 1997 v103 n2 p57(2)

Johnson, Brian D. "Souping Up the Bard: Shakespeare in Hollywood 's Latest Hot Ticket." Maclean's 11 Nov. 1996: 74-75.

-----. "William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." (movie review), Maclean's Nov 11, 1996 v109 n46 p74(2).

Manley, Will, "Romeo and Juliet." (movie review), Booklist, April 1, 1997 v93 n15 p1271(1).

"Shakespeare In The Cinema: A Film Directors' Symposium." Cineaste, 12/15/98, Vol. 24 Issue 1, p48, 8p, 8bw